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Ask HN: What are your profitable side projects?
- pigpen34 10y agoCronAlarm - https://www.cronalarm.com https://www.cronalarm.com A platform for monitoring cron jobs and scheduled tasks. Nobody here is getting rich from it, but it is profitable and brings in some extra cash which is nice.
- throwaway989111 10y agoDo you find it hard to get users at the 50 USD level? Im about to launch a REST api monitoring service as a solo dev and wondering about pricing and user aquisition strategy. Thanks!
- kyriakos 10y agoI think you should price your service based on your estimated cost +a percentage of profit rather than artificially setting a price.
- danpat 10y agoThis approach, while good for setting a lower bounds for what's sustainable, is rarely how you should first price things. I run a small side business. My initial customers I priced like this. After the first year, I realized I was leaving a lot of money on the table - my business was niche and not commoditized, and my customers were willing to pay quite a lot more for the service. I grandfathered in the first year customers and re-structured my pricing to be more "value based" - how much were my customers actually willing to pay for the service, i.e. how much was it worth to them. It took a little while to figure out good price points, and there was a short period of time when I'm sure I lost some customers because prices were too high, but in general, my margins are significantly higher by charging customers based on their percieved value, as opposed to just covering my costs with a fixed margin. The customers don't even mind, because in their minds, the price is good value. It's important to do this not just for its money-making potential - it creates a better impression of "value" for your product, and people value things that they pay more money for. Underpricing can cheapen people's perspective of your product, and de-value your time. Minimum margins are for commodity businesses - where there are lots of competitors and customers can switch easily. For anything else, you can earn more money by considering "value pricing" based on talking to your customers and finding out their pricing tolerance.
- kyriakos 10y agoThanks this is a great explanation. You actually convinced me.
- stevekemp 10y agoThe same result here, I doubled my prices from £0.50 to £1.00 after users told me they would have paid more. That is hardly a huge increase, and I could probably go higher, but it was a good moment for me.
- colinbartlett 10y agoLooks great. I've used a similar service for a while called Dead Man's Snitch https://deadmanssnitch.com https://deadmanssnitch.com. Your product name is arguably more straight forward.
- pigpen34 10y agoThanks! I built this for myself a while back, before I knew any alternatives existed. When I found out about dead mans snitch I figured I might as well build out CronAlarm for others to use as well. Especially since I thought mine was better ;-)
- bartoszhernas 10y agohttps://freeyourmusic.com https://freeyourmusic.com Moving music between different streaming services. Eg. Spotify to Apple Music. Profits from it have let me invested and co-founded another startup I am building that is 100x more complicated: https://ahoy.io https://ahoy.io It's nice because I do not have to worry about salary, as I can live comfortably from the revenue from STAMP.
- bartoszhernas 10y agoYou can read a lot of stories on IndieHackers, eg. my interview: https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/stamp https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/stamp
- spookyuser 10y agoDefinitely going to use freeyourmusic the next time I need to switch. The last time I was in this situation I found a sketchy python script that transferred only bits of my library.
- sunilkumarc 10y ago+1. I'm also interested in learning how people have earned from their side projects.
- yroc92 10y agoVisit https://www.indiehackers.com https://www.indiehackers.com
- sunilkumarc 10y agoLooks interesting. Thanks for the link! :)
- lettergram 10y agoEasy A - https://easy-a.net/ https://easy-a.net/ The website provides a semester simulator that can (accurately) predict student grades, workload, etc for a given course / semester. It also provides a breakdown of the grade distributions, work load (in hours), difficulty, etc. For every course, professor, and combination there, for universities on the site. Profitable is relative, I spent around 100 hours tossing the website together and make maybe $100+ a month with a freemium model. I have roughly 2500 active users (not all paying), with zero put into advertising. There is probably potential to grow this, but thus far prying money from students is painful.
- ethanpil 10y agoInteresting, how was this data made available to you?
- lettergram 10y agoSent in a FOIA request for course(s) and grade distributions. Users can also add data about themselves to improve prediction accuracy: https://easy-a.net/foia https://easy-a.net/foia http://austingwalters.com/foia-requesting-100-universities/ http://austingwalters.com/foia-requesting-100-universities/
- K_REY_C 10y agoHow interesting. I taught a course on your site and the distribution mirrors my experience (as it should ). Congrats on releasing.
- jshawl 10y agohttps://updog.co https://updog.co host a website from your Dropbox or google drive account. Add password protection, render markdown, and more to come!
- jasonswett 10y agoSorry, I don't understand. What's UpDog?
- barleymash 10y agoGotcha! Hahah..... crap. Nothin... How are you doin?
- accordionclown 10y agoi had a glitch when i tried it (it was my mistake) and they helped me sort it out. very worthwhile and friendly.
- colinbartlett 10y agoStatusGator: https://statusgator.com https://statusgator.com Monitors status pages of cloud services with optional notifications and creates a unified status page of your service dependencies. I wrote a blog post recently about how profitable (barely) it is: https://blog.statusgator.com/anatomy-of-a-profitable-side-project/ https://blog.statusgator.com/anatomy-of-a-profitable-side-pr...
- vonklaus 10y agoI just posted a thread asking about design considerations for something like this. There are a lot of monitoring sites but they are typically for internal consumption. I am really interested in real-time, or timely monitoring of external services. I'll check the service out, but curious if any of it is open source, and hos you verify a site is up/down?
- colinbartlett 10y agoIt's not open source, but that's something I've considered. And StatusGator doesn't verify that a service is up or down, it just reports what a service reports. Most status pages have several components which are either up, down, or warn, and StatusGator aggregates that same data from all the various sources. If any component is down, that service is listed as down, etc.
- AlikhanPeleg 10y agohttps://www.browseemall.com https://www.browseemall.com a cross browser testing application for everybody who does not want to use a cloud based one. Makes a good amount of cash per year, and is my excuse to experiment with cross platform .net / mono desktop applications.
- jasonswett 10y agoAngular on Rails: https://www.angularonrails.com/ https://www.angularonrails.com/ I teach Rails developers how to create Angular + Rails applications. The site has existed since 2014 as an unmonetized blog. In June 2016 I started writing the book, and to date it has made a little over $5,000.
- anthonygore 10y agoVery cool. How are you driving traffic? I imagine search engine traffic would be fairly low for this kind of niche.
- rlv-dan 10y agoDesktop utilities: http://www.rlvision.com http://www.rlvision.com I've been making freeware and shareware for a long time. Some are shareware and still make some (not much) money. Edit: You might be interested in this retrospective I wrote about my personal favorite utilities: http://www.rlvision.com/blog/16-years-with-flash-renamer-a-development-retrospective/ http://www.rlvision.com/blog/16-years-with-flash-renamer-a-d...
- Cyph0n 10y agoI recall using Flash Renamer back in the day. Amazing tool! It's great to finally meet the author haha
- rlv-dan 10y agoThanks :-)
- angry-hacker 10y agoThank you for the tool. Remember using it on Windows when I was young. Is it still possible to make money with shareware?
- rlv-dan 10y agoEveryone today keeps talking about apps and webapps. But there is still a small market for desktop applications. Probably mostly older computer persons who are used to this way of working.
- pixelfeeder 10y agohttp://logodust.com http://logodust.com - Free open source library of logo designs, money is made through custom logo designs. Very profitable
- csallen 10y agoIndieHackers.com will break $3-4k in monthly revenue this month or next, mostly from advertising. It costs me <$200/mo to run. It features all sorts of interviews with developers running profitable side projects themselves, so check it out if you're looking for ideas or inspiration!
- Emc2fma 10y agoHow did you market this to get that many visitors?
- kowdermeister 10y agoHacker News probably did the majority of the seeding.
- cdiamand 10y agoI actually launched my side project on indiehackers - http://www.oppsdaily.com http://www.oppsdaily.com - a newsletter filled with software opportunities. I posted some of the traffic stats here http://www.oppsdaily.com/blog http://www.oppsdaily.com/blog
- Arcsech 10y agoThis looks really cool. I signed up.
- cdiamand 10y agoWow, thanks so much! I hope you find it useful. :D
- vyrotek 10y agoThis may be the first time I've deliberately signed up for a newsletter. Great idea.
- tamkeenlms 10y agoI love the idea so much. Good luck :)
- mjfern 10y agoContentGems at http://contentgems.com http://contentgems.com. CG automatically powers social media, websites and customer newsletters with engaging curated content. It's a serious, profitable side project and we're approaching our fifth year.
- goodmachine 10y agoCongrats on this, nicely done. By coincidence, also exactly what I was looking for: will be signing up for a paid account shortly. If you don't mind sharing, what's your MRR?
- bornon5 10y agoContinuo - http://continuoapp.com http://continuoapp.com It's a numbers-free habit tracker for iOS, for people who want to self-track but don't want to deal with remembering and inputting precise values all the time. I'm not buying helicopters off of it, but it brings in $400-$600/month, plus I occasionally get to hear nice little self-improvement stories from my customers.
- AlexMuir 10y agoHow a Car Works: http://www.howacarworks.com http://www.howacarworks.com Revenue from Adsense and iOS app salse. Profits around $2,000 per month. I'm now working on a video series about how cars work which I hope will be a good seller.
- amelius 10y agoLooks nice, except that there are no videos (?) which makes it more difficult to understand, e.g. to tell in what direction gears move, etc.
- izietto 10y agoI love it, good job! But it seems to me that there aren't any hints about the difference between diesel and gasoline engines
- uhtred 10y agoNice site. But I don't see any advertising?
- sgslo 10y agoI've published many courses on Udemy.com (http://udemy.com/user/sgslo http://udemy.com/user/sgslo). Creating the courses is fun, and exchanging correspondence with students is fantastic - they tend to be super motivated and have many ideas for different apps that they want to build.
- mmesh 10y agoWhat are you doing to market your courses? Given Udemy's generous split when you drive outside traffic to your courses, it seems like that's super important to make money on the platform.
- dpeper 10y agohttp://www.ipv6buddy.com/ http://www.ipv6buddy.com/ A keypad for IPv6 addresses :-)
- candiodari 10y agoDid you actually have this made ? How do you produce devices like this ?
- kek918 10y agoWow. I thought it was a joke but reading the docs and even your workarounds for keyboard layout issues for Mac/Linux/Windows does make it seem real, or else why put in so much effort. The website girls are hilarious in a ridiculous kind of way. Very original project :) How can you even afford manufacturing? I'm guessing the market for these little utility-keyboards aren't really big. And most factories require a certain minimum order quantity. This'll be a fun gift for our network engineer next christmas :)
- dividuum 10y agohttps://info-beamer.com/ https://info-beamer.com/ - Digital signage for the Raspberry Pi. Powered by Lua/OpenGl/OpenMax, so it doesn't depend on a sluggish browser. It started as a for-fun project for a hacker conference and since then I turned it into a profitable business.
- hahamrfunnyguy 10y agoCool project. The digital signage market is huge. What's your yearly revenue?
- dividuum 10y agoAlmost enough to make a living so I can basically work on it full-time. I guess there's lots of unused potential if I find the right marketing partner. That's the goal for this year.
- pryelluw 10y agoI sell something similar for brick & mortar shops. Sells itself and has option to provide add-ons such as maintenance and graphic design (for ads). Mind if we exchange numbera through email? Im looking to adjust pricing but have nothing to compare to.
- iotsky 10y agohttps://iotsky.io https://iotsky.io - an educational site for experimenting with IoTs Free right now, but hopefully will make a decent amount after our beta.
- aabajian 10y agoCronote Reminders: https://www.cronote.com https://www.cronote.com Schedule email, text message and push-notification reminders.
- pryelluw 10y agoI was afraid of posting this because it will seem like an advert. But its not. However, I do apologize if it violates an unwritten HN rule. I help developers market themselves effectively. Its not a huge product, but has a fair amount of demand. Feels good to help people move forward in their carreers. Even helped one land a job that got him a visa. Not crazy profitable, though. I charge less than $500 for something that can easily go for ten times more. But money is not everything and it brings me joy to see people move up in life. Currently only work with 2 people per month due tk time constraints. So it does less than $1k a month. Pays for hobbies. Its a side project that was born out of people on twitter wanting to hire my shop (Yelluw) do it for them. But didnt make sense for them to hire a whole shop to do something so small.
- selectnull 10y agoCan you provide more information? How exactly do you help developers?
- pryelluw 10y agoWell, turns out the average dev doesnt really know much about marketing. Some are even against learning it. I simply work with them to establish an online presence, a core brand (based on their skills and goals), a content strategy (what to write about in order to get the markets attention), visual branding (logo and website design), and time based plans to help them take action. Its like a sort of marketing makeover. But without any BS because I hate mind games.
- selectnull 10y agoCool. Thanks.
- pryelluw 10y agoYou are welcome. :)
- andai 10y ago
- braythwayt 10y agoMy books on LeanPub: https://leanpub.com/u/raganwald https://leanpub.com/u/raganwald I had been approached many times by tech publishers to write books from scratch, but I never found the process and economics attractive. Then I spotted LeanPub--quite possibly on HN--and I thought, "Hmmm, there is nearly zero barrier to entry." They accepted Markdown, and I already had my entire blog in Markdown on GitHub. So I published a collection of essays (https://leanpub.com/shippingsoftware https://leanpub.com/shippingsoftware), and launched it with a "Show HN" style post, making the book free. LeanPub allows people to pay more if they want, and an amazing number of people paid more, I made $2,000 in one day just from being on the front page of HN. I've written a few other books since then, but I firmly believe that writing is a side project, not my profession, so I make a lot less than other authors who really put their backs into it. But I'm happy, and my readers are happy, and I get a little money every month from people I like. --- A few observations that may be valuable for other side-projects, whether media or software: Some of my biggest wins were the books I didn't write. LeanPub has a feature where you can cobble together a book title and a cover image, and it creates a landing page that collects emails from interested readers. Several times, I have created landing pages for books I was interested in writing and when I promoted the landing pages... Crickets. I didn't write those books. Another thing that worked for me is that when I decided to write the original JavaScript Allongé (https://leanpub.com/javascriptallongesix https://leanpub.com/javascriptallongesix), I was going to write my first long-form book from scratch. My previous books were collections of essays with additional linking and filler material. I resolved to write a trial book first, so I wrote CoffeeScript Ristretto. I had a rough idea that the market for a CoffeeScript book was about 10% of the market for a JavaScript book, so I didn't have big expectations for revenue, but I figured I could gain experience writing the book and a lot of valuable feedback. The secret was, when I then published JavaScript Allongé, it was basically the same book, just in JavaScript. The big differences had to do with the differences between CoffeeScript and javaScript, obviously, but most of the chapters were identical. I found this process was a really big win, when JavaScript Allongé first hit, it was already refined by all the feedback I got from CoffeeScript Ristretto. If I was doing a software side project, I might take the same approach: Start in a smaller market where I can refine the software and business, then repurpose into the target market. JM2C, YMMCV, &c.
- 10y ago
- ezekg 10y agoKeygen - https://keygen.sh https://keygen.sh Keygen provides a hosted SaaS product and app licensing API. Support for self-hosting Keygen is planned. Currently in closed beta, but have a few contracts lined up already so it should be profitable from day 1 after launch. I have a couple other side projects that are barely profitable, but none of them seem to have the kind of market Keygen has.
- snappyTertle 10y agohttp://speedeoapp.com/ http://speedeoapp.com/ - Speed up almost any video on the web using a custom player. This was made to scratch my own itch of wanting to watch videos at faster speeds. At first I had ads, but that wasn't making much. When I made it not free, it started pulling in about $500 a month.
- xcubic 10y agoYou should make an android version too!
- peterisza 10y agohttp://t-filter.engineerjs.com http://t-filter.engineerjs.com - online FIR design app There used to be an advertisement at the bottom and sometimes I get donations.
- jonathanbull 10y agoEmailOctopus: https://emailoctopus.com https://emailoctopus.com Cheap email marketing via Amazon SES.
- mkozakov 10y agoI play in an indie rock band (http://www.goodkidofficial.com http://www.goodkidofficial.com). We make ~$1000 a month from Spotify, shows and merch sales.
- DeonPenny 10y agoNuBank: https://www.Nubank.io https://www.Nubank.io We allow you to do small/startup business banking all through our application rather than through your bank. We gained a few clients, but I am hoping once we release our own bank account and card products it will help us expand into a bigger project.
- johnduhart 10y agoCheck your SSL config, I'm getting a common name mismatch when I browse your site.
- DeonPenny 10y agosorry force of habit it should have been http://www.nubank.io http://www.nubank.io
- simon_weber 10y agoI started two projects last year and now make ~$100/month in profit. Costs are almost nothing. https://autoplaylists.simon.codes https://autoplaylists.simon.codes: iTunes-style smart playlists for Google Music. https://gchat.simon.codes https://gchat.simon.codes: autoreplies for Google Chat/Hangouts. Particularly useful for people with multiple accounts that forward email. https://simon.codes/2017/01/09/side-project-income-2016-0-to-100.html https://simon.codes/2017/01/09/side-project-income-2016-0-to... has more details on why I chose these and how I got started.
- gediminas_ 10y agoHow do you combat code stealing and submitting an extension as their own if that has happened before?
- simon_weber 10y agoTo be honest, I just don't worry about it. I haven't had any problems yet! In the case I run into problems, I'd consider changing the license.
- poloniculmov 10y agoThanks for your awesome work on the Google Music Api library.
- SimonPStevens 10y agoDepends what you mean by profitable. http://sites.creou.com http://sites.creou.com It took about 4-6 weeks to build (fairly significant hours during that time). It currently only has 1 paying customer, but they pay about 10% more than it costs to host, so it technicaly makes profit month to month, but is unlikely to ever make back the costs I sunk into it. (Main problem is that although it was intended to be able to be used to build lots of sites, I think in the end it was too closely tied to what the first customer wanted, so although they love it, I've never been able to sell it to anyone else, I've more or less given up on it now)
- pryelluw 10y agoI sell something similar but charge at least a hundred times more per project / site. You should really promote this as the "local" (country based) solution and raise prices. For £75 you will only get annoying cheapskates.
- SimonPStevens 10y agoThat's interesting because in the end I gave up because I felt like the space was too over crowded with lower cost alternatives already. I had managed to get a few potential clients but ultimately they all decided to go with other companies that would offer them a fully custom site for a fixed price of anything between £1000 and £4000. We had limits on how much we would customize the sites because of how the engine was built, all the sites it produces essentially follow the same template. And £75 per month passes £1000 after only a year. It seemed that we couldn't compete on price, because cheaper design shops could throw together a template and charge £100-£200 total + only bare minimum £5 budget hosting per month. And we also couldn't compete on customisation or service because for only a few thousand you can get a reasonable quality fully custom site. I'd be interested to chat more if you were willing. (email in my profile).
- pryelluw 10y agoSure thing. Mine is in my profile in case you need to whitelist it to avoid hitting the spam filter.
- 4thethrillofit 10y agoI built https://boombox.io https://boombox.io for fun back in late 2015. It's profitable in the sense that it makes more money than it costs, but not for the opportunity cost of my time (if I used those hours working for clients). The alpha only took a few weeks, but making it production ready took much much longer. I did learn a lot building it, but for it to support me financially, I need to do a ton of sales & marketing.
- shinamee 10y agoDesign case-studies https://www.explanatic.com/ https://www.explanatic.com/ Not profitable now but hoping it will it sometime next year.
- foobiekr 10y agoPeople with side projects, how are you managing liability? Browsing the projects on indiehacker, most of them are off-to-the-side (they consume data and work with it and mostly that data is low valye) or development related (things that are embedded or make pages but don't run in production). But a handful of them actually must have credentials for other service to work or run in a trusted contest - in other words, they are used in ways that expose the customer to security issues on the part of the operator of the side project. What happens if you get pwned and cost your much larger customers serious money?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- momentmaker 10y agohttps://ipanoramaprints.com/ https://ipanoramaprints.com/ - prints panorama photos. It started with just targeting iPhone users but we accept any kind of panorama photos. Profit is good enough to cover my monthly meal expenses.
- matttheatheist 10y agoI built a device that turns your Android phone into an FM Radio www.enrad.io
- drcharris 10y agoI built and run https://todoport.com https://todoport.com to allow people to move their tasks between task managers. Doesn't make a lot but running costs are tiny. I spend way too much time on it though, so I wouldn't exactly call it profitable if you count my time - the term I use is 'hobby business'.
- jazoom 10y agoI've spent a couple of years making https://pricehipster.com https://pricehipster.com It's a very fast product search engine and price comparison website. Search speeds won't be great outside Australia (Australian stores). I am currently making preparations to expand to other countries later this year. It has only become (slightly) profitable just recently.
- TJohnson93 10y agoI am actually working on a similar project (purely to see how it works etc.) Did you end up just scraping the websites for prices or did you end up finding API or APIs to do this?
- jazoom 10y agoDifferent methods for different stores. Began by scraping until I had an established website.
- sova 10y agoYo! Beautiful site Sir. Well done. May its success grow and grow for ya!
- jazoom 10y agoThank you for the encouragement
- traviswingo 10y agohttps://postcardbot.co https://postcardbot.co I launched this as a Show HN because I thought it would be fun to build, and it just exploded :). It's profitable, and only a side project. I'll never make it a full-time thing, but the daily users make it a real joy to maintain.
- arisAlexis 10y agohttp://www.betlines.ninja http://www.betlines.ninja is a soccer odds comparison site which makes me a small profit on the side. I have a freemium Mashape API too. I have been gathering data for personal use for many years which I may sell on big data marketplaces when they open up (like datapie). Not getting rich by this though :)
- ruairidhwm 10y agoBrandFox (https://brandfox.io https://brandfox.io) - we let Instagram users sell photos to brands/startups/agencies who are looking for more authentic content than stock images (which tend to suck and/or be expensive). Also going to start letting brands bid on influencers to mention their product/do a review etc :)
- nnn1234 10y agoAbsolutely love indiehackers. Not a straight answer to your question I know, want to shameless plug the Platform I am helping build, it's for people with side projects and cognitive surplus as clay shirky puts it to get max value out of their time. Launching Feb 8th. Check out www.crowdraising.co
- thekonqueror 10y agoscreenshotapp.net - Scheduled screenshots of any URL with change detection and email alerts.
- voipspear 10y agoVoIP Spear: https://voipspear.com https://voipspear.com VoIP Spear monitors your Internet connection 24x7 for voic quality issues affecting your phone calls. I have about 850 active users though not all are paying users. I created the site because I work in the VoIP industry and its crazy expensive to do continuous VoIP monitoring. There was no low cost, easy to use option so I decided to do it myself.
- bharani_m 10y agoDoes anyone have any experience running a donation based or a pay-what-you-want side-project? Was it profitable? I am asking because I am working on a small side-project called Email This (https://www.emailthis.me https://www.emailthis.me). I plan to let it run for free, but if someone is interested they can support the app with a donation.
- backmail 10y agohttps://backmail.io https://backmail.io - Automated Gmail backups in the cloud It is still in beta, and i havent even launched it in HN yet. I have a couple of my friends, who are paying to use this service.
- jcahill84 10y agoSchezzle: https://schezzle.com https://schezzle.com. Ramen profitable, but profitable nonetheless.
- chad_strategic 10y agoI don't make as much money as I would like, I think it's partly because I need some help on the growth hacking side. (I'm looking for some one that might be interested in growth hacking) But I created http://Bestoftheinternets.com/Deals http://Bestoftheinternets.com/Deals which using the amazon API looks for significant price changes in products to help consumers find deals on amazon products. Revenue slowly coming along, but for me as a programmer I got a reason to teach myself some server side nodejs. Eventually I would like to roll it over to angular 2 so I can get some angular 2 experience and hopefully make some money!