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Ask HN: Inspirational money making web apps made by hackers.
Please post money making web apps that you know of, like 37signals stack, dabble etc. That
1. were made by single hackers (or verry small teams)
2. make money
If possible add a short description.
- sahillavingia 16y agoFreckle - http://letsfreckle.com/ http://letsfreckle.com/ - made by a very small team, very usability oriented. Came into a tough space, and is now making a ton of money.
- clyfe 16y agoOh, I knew this one, I couldn't find it anymore. It's made by some Ruby star guy and Amy Hoy designer.
- jharrison 16y agoTechnically he's a javascript "star guy". Thomas Fuchs, creator of the script.aculo.us library and core contributor to the Prototype library. Both libraries have been a big part of Rails development for years although many people are now moving to jQuery.
- ahoyhere 16y agoYeah, that's true -- I (Amy Hoy) actually have more Ruby fame than Thomas does. But he's more hardcore in reality. :)
- ahoyhere 16y agoHi there. Amy here. FYI, while yes, I'm the designer/interaction designer/ux/whatever person, I'd like to add that I do the project lead stuff. The idea was mine; the market research mine; the positioning, differentiation, the determination of our initial feature set, and pricing all mine. I find and hire the freelancers. I meet with the productivity coach. I come up with advertising/promo opportunities. Etc. This is not me being all "I DID ALL THE WORK WOOHOO!" -- far from it. I'd just like to note that there is far more that needs to be done for a successful app than just code + design. I think people don't realize that, when they see 1 or 2 creators listed by narrow roles, for a successful product.
- modoc 16y agohttp://10MinuteMail.com http://10MinuteMail.com was written by me as a learning exercise. It's profitable and low maintenance.
- mdolon 16y agoOut of curiosity, when did you launch the site? Did you do any marketing or was it natural growth? I ask because the temporary inbox market seems pretty saturated already.
- modoc 16y agoI launched it in November of 2006. The temp inbox market had several players in it already, and if I'd actually looked around at all I wouldn't have built it:) But it was just something to learn Seam and scratch my own itch, so I didn't even check to see if there was already a product in the space, much less several. I didn't do any marketing, just mentioned it to a couple of friends. Apparently those friends know some crazy people because in ~24 hours it was on the front page of Digg, Slashdot, and Yahoo Tech. Since that initial spike of traffic, and the settle-out afterward, it's been growing slowly but steadily ever since.
- HardyLeung 16y ago10minutemail.com is cool. Thank you. But recently it has not been working for me. Are websites catching on and blacklisting 10minutemail domains? Anyway to counter that?
- modoc 16y agoBy not working you mean sites won't let you register with e-mail addresses ending in lhsdv.com? Or that they do, but there's some issue with 10MinuteMail.com itself that doesn't show you the e-mail? If it's the former, then not much I can do, other than rotating domains every few months, which I do. If it's the latter, email me with an example and I'll try to fix it. devon@digitalsanctuary.com
- base 16y agohttp://vendder.com http://vendder.com - made by 2 people with ruby and sinatra. just started but already have some paying users.
- zemariamm 16y agonice!! thumbs up for vendder !
- acangiano 16y agoFor a second I thought I was visiting http://shopify.com http://shopify.com. I think it's a little too close to your competitor look wise.
- base 16y agoIt's true, there some similarities, mainly the color and wording, but in this e-commerce shopping cart business to describe the product we always need the words "shopping cart", "create online store", "sell online"... (at least in english)
- mitjak 16y agoBut hopefully not the same colour scheme and general site layout ?!
- tmatos 16y agoHonestly speaking, we've put most of our effort on the back-end development. Our landing page is just Wordpress with a modified custom theme. A designer colleague gave us a help on the branding but the same way many banks / big corps use blue in their logo, green is very standard here. If you think you could do better we're happy to be helped ;) cause every Photoshop crop we do take us half of the day.
- dclaysmith 16y agoLooks great! Good luck.
- IgorPartola 16y agohttp://www.pingbrigade.com/ http://www.pingbrigade.com/. Not exactly profitable yet, but brining in some revenue.
- bap 16y agoThis is pretty spiff. Revenue just from that little 123Systems Ad or are you planning some greater service rollout? It seems like you could ad maybe 3 Square Button ads in various places and still be unobtrusive about it.. Don't get me wrong I don't sell online advertising or anything but your site design would make it really easy to add more inventory and have them still not be distracting.
- IgorPartola 16y agoThanks. The ads rotate, I have three affiliate links atm. I am currently working on providing an API for this to see how much interest there will be in it. On top of the API I plan on building a monitoring solution which could be monetized. To an extent so could the API (say you get 100 free test an hour and have to pay to get 1000 or some such). In the mean time I may add more ads but I would hate to detract from the experience for the small userbase.
- al_james 16y agoThats pretty awesome. Cute logo as well. It would be great to add some more locations around the world. If you add monitoring and alerts I would probably pay. Not that much as its already a corwded space, but I think a cheap alternative could get traction. I wonder if its possible to have a business model of only charging when it alerts you to a site being down? E.g. we just alerted you to a site being down. Donate and we will do it again! Dont donate and I will delay my alerts by 1 hour next time!
- IgorPartola 16y agoThanks for the response. Yes, monitoring is in the works. That is certainly an interesting business model, thanks for suggesting it.
- user24 16y agohttp://www.bingocardcreator.com http://www.bingocardcreator.com - made by HNer patio11, here's his (amazingly interesting and useful) blog: http://www.kalzumeus.com/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/
- patio11 16y agoI'll elaborate to answer what I think are the questions behind the question, since I answered them a hundred times in the last three days at the Business of Software conference and one more time won't kill me: a) It makes bingo cards for elementary schoolteachers, which is one very specific problem a large group of people know they have, is close to trivial technically to solve, and for which almost all solutions suck. This makes it very achievable for one guy to tackle as a hobby project. (It eventually got to the point where full-time employment was my poor paying quirky hobby project.) b) The business, as distinct from the application, works because over the course of four years I became very good at organic SEO and metrics-based optimization. These are broadly applicable skills in software (and marketing generally). Surprisingly few people can do them well. c) No, I do not see myself being the bingo guy for forever. If you wanted to address a similarly small niche yourself, I would say it is a wonderful learning opportunity and has been lifechanging for me. I wouldn't recommend starting with bingo cards for elementary schoolteachers, because if you are capable of beating me at it your skillset is worth a heck of a lot more money than can ever be extracted from that market for that problem, but virtually any developer can find something similar and learn enough to make it work. The amount you learn from having your own experimental laboratory is better than grad school, and you get paid to study. I wouldn't particularly recommend that route if you take money from investors. Two models, vastly different lifestyles, pick your favorite.
- tworats 16y agohttp://xpenser.com/ http://xpenser.com/ - Time and Expense tracking via voice/email/sms/IM/twitter/iPhone/Android/... Made by a small team, doing well.
- moshezadka 16y agoLet me start by saying I love xpenser. But note the following: """ Why is Xpenser free? How do you plan to make money? We'll be introducing premium accounts that'll carry a monthly fee in the near future. The goal is to keep the base product free and charge for longer data retention and other services. """ It's not yet making money, which would disqualify it from the criteria for this Ask HN
- tworats 16y agoThanks for the love :-) Xpenser for Business is the commercial version of the product for businesses, and it's bringing in a good bit of revenue. At the moment it's by request/invite only, but will be generally available soon. Anyone interested in an invite can send an email to feedback@xpenser.com . Users sign up for the free product, like it (or love it it :-) ), and ask to use it in their company. The free product is acting as a very good way of bringing users to our commercial product, so it's remained free.
- moshezadka 16y agoCool, I'm very happy that you guys are making money! (For what it's worth, my love is not abstract -- I actually learned something about my spending habits in the mere two weeks of using Xpenser that helped my peace of mind. It's something that makes my life demonstrably better!)
- acangiano 16y agohttp://anynewbooks.com http://anynewbooks.com is made by me and it's already bringing in some revenue. Not serious money yet (hundreds not thousands of dollars), mind you, but it has been profitable from day one and growing relatively fast.
- run4yourlives 16y agoI've been using this since you mentioned it a couple of weeks ago on HN. I like it. Can I offer a couple of suggestions? 1. The first thing I go looking for is a synopsis. Amazon isn't always good at this, you should try to incorporate this somehow. (I realize the difficulty with email) 2. On your "staff pick" could you do a bit of a review? 3. Canada. Give me some Canada options eh! (I know, I know, bigger market etc etc) Keep up the nice work... I will buy books from this.
- acangiano 16y agoThanks for being an anynewbooker, and for the feedback. > The first thing I go looking for is a synopsis. Amazon isn't always good at this, you should try to incorporate this somehow. Unfortunately, I tried this one week and it didn't work. The emails ended up being very long, the click through fell down, and I received a few emails of complaints from people who liked the more compact email without descriptions, because they didn't feel obligated to read the whole thing. It's possible that I may make this an option in the future, but at the moment I'm dealing with other items on the todo list. > On your "staff pick" could you do a bit of a review? This is a very valid suggestion and it will probably be implemented soon enough. I think even a one liner saying why it's our pick would help. > Canada. Give me some Canada options eh! (I know, I know, bigger market etc etc) I added this feature this week: http://blog.anynewbooks.com/2010/10/new-feature-for-international-readers.html http://blog.anynewbooks.com/2010/10/new-feature-for-internat... BTW, I'm in Canada myself. :) > Keep up the nice work... I will buy books from this. Thank you.
- sgt 16y agoThis is pretty cool. I'll check it out!
- 16y ago
- tumblen 16y agoI made http://nicetranslator.com http://nicetranslator.com in Nov. 2008. Probably 2 weeks of work all said but by far my biggest success in terms of sheer numbers. It makes money to help pay bills now via AdSense and is totally hands off. Actually, given our analytics, I think that it's really underperforming monetarily. My partner and I have largely moved onto other things, but if anyone out there loves to do that kind of stuff, maybe we can work something out?
- kranner 16y agoWow. That works really well - hilarious results for a few lines from 'The Wire' translated to Hindi. Possible bug: The 'link' button shows a nice popup but did not generate either of the two promised permalinks in 15 seconds, at which point I left.
- revorad 16y agoWowwwwww! Hats off to you sir. I cannot believe how good the translation is. Do you mind talking about how you are doing the translation?
- arn 16y agohttp://appshopper.com http://appshopper.com - I contracted out the design, some of the backend code. I coded the rest and tied it together. Since then, have hired a programmer to handle maintenance, new features. pays his salary + makes a profit.
- tocomment 16y agoCool. How does it work? How does it make money?
- arn 16y agoads + affiliate referrals.
- bignoggins 16y agoI love appshopper b/c iTunes is blocked at work so I can't check my app rankings without it =) I'd love to see rankings for other countries besides the US.
- wensing 16y agohttp://www.stormpulse.com http://www.stormpulse.com - made by 2 people. Tracks and maps the weather.
- japherwocky 16y agohttp://simplemailer.pearachute.com/ http://simplemailer.pearachute.com/ - latest incarnation of a mailing list engine that has had subscribers since 2006. Pays for it's server! (I feel like we just got Mechanical Turked to an SEO farm, but hey- $GOOG juice!)
- chrisrhee 16y agohttp://lighthouseapp.com http://lighthouseapp.com — Bug tracking app created by 2 people. Used by businesses big and small, as well as some popular open-source projects (like Ruby on Rails) http://tenderapp.com http://tenderapp.com — Customer support app created by 2 people (out of necessity when Lighthouse started getting big). Both apps are by ENTP. We have 2 programmers & 3 designers now and are working on redesigns for both Lighthouse & Tender. We actually just released a sneak peak yesterday: http://hoth.entp.com/2010/10/5/sneak-peek-tender-admin-2-0 http://hoth.entp.com/2010/10/5/sneak-peek-tender-admin-2-0
- ian_h 16y agohttp://www.eventhq.co.uk http://www.eventhq.co.uk; online event registration/management for the UK/European market. Built by 1 person and bootstrapped through contract work. Still relatively small beer but seeing faster growth now
- lefstathiou 16y agowww.scriblink.com - made by me and partner in 2006. currently the number one online whiteboard. makes several thousand a month.
- ritonlajoie 16y agoclicky http://www.scriblink.com http://www.scriblink.com
- sgt 16y agoHow about a money-making spell checker?
- jfno67 16y agohttp://www.seeyourhotel.com http://www.seeyourhotel.com - Hotel locator with Google Maps. We (2 guys) did it in 2006 and added some features here and there. It's still making money, but we haven't added to it for more than a year.
- damoncali 16y agohttp://trackjumper.com http://trackjumper.com - A simple bug tracker for freelancers and small software teams. I started last summer, and it's been growing ever since.
- swombat 16y agohttp://www.github.com http://www.github.com seems wildly profitable and was created by a team of 3 hackers, afaik.
- podman 16y agoI've made three: http://www.boostcam.com http://www.boostcam.com - Built it in a weekend a couple of years ago. costs next to nothing to run and makes money on adsense. http://www.sproutvideo.com http://www.sproutvideo.com - SaaS video hosting platform that I built with a partner (I coded everything and he's the business man) in a couple of weeks. We've got a lot of paying customers already. http://www.physicalfix.com http://www.physicalfix.com - Fitness web app that I've been building with another partner (Again, I'm the coder and he's the talent) for a couple of years and just launched. Taking a little time to get tracking but doesn't cost much to run and has a few paying customers already. None of them make me enough money to work on them full-time yet but it's a nice supplement to my day job salary.
- mrlebowski 16y agoWow! Do you do all the maintenance of these sites yourself?
- podman 16y agoYes. Fortunately, I haven't touched boostcam.com in over a year and both SproutVideo and PhysicalFix only launched in the past few months but have both been pretty stable.I mostly spend my time building new features or dealing with customer support. Customer support is the largest time sink and something I wish I could delegate away.
- SteveMorin 16y agoThis is a nice set of site congratz
- JangoSteve 16y ago(Again, I'm the coder and he's the talent) Funny, I would have considered you the talent ;-)
- ammarkalim 16y agoWhat kind of video player are you using in the video hosting platform? I want to sell finance courses as screencasts but i am having huge problem with video hosting platform. All the html5 players i have seen are crap. Vimeo is good but it does not support commercial hosting.On the other hand Viddler is AMAZING. Their video player is amazing and the streaming is quite good as well but i am ready ready to pay $100 per month in the start. The only option i have is screencast.com. What do you recommend?
- drusenko 16y agohttp://www.weebly.com http://www.weebly.com - made by a small team, 2 1/2 hackers if you count myself as 1/2 time :) we're very profitable.
- rokhayakebe 16y agoAre you telling me there are only 3 people at Weebly? Now that is very very impressive.
- drusenko 16y agoNot quite. Chris (cofounder) works 100% on infrastructure, Dan (cofounder) works on finances and product. We have a full-time designer, a full-time analytics person, and a full-time "head of customer satisfaction". Customer support for 5 million users also takes a bit of time, and we have several part-time support staff that help people with any issues they run in to. Having said that, both of our full-time developers are amazing and get things done at a pretty incredible pace.
- rokhayakebe 16y agoThat is still well below what I would think.
- acangiano 16y agoWeebly has the best WYSIWYG website designer I've ever seen. The output it produces is beautiful as well.
- hasenj 16y agoHow do you make money from it? it's free and no ads
- JangoSteve 16y agohttp://www.ratemystudentrental.com http://www.ratemystudentrental.com - student rental housing ratings and reviews; sells private-label housing portal version to colleges and universities. http://www.leadnuke.com http://www.leadnuke.com - B2B sales lead generation by monitoring online conversations. Both built by me. Both make money. Not yet enough to support me full-time. Still consulting to bootstrap.
- paulsingh 16y agohttp://notarycrm.com http://notarycrm.com - simple CRM for notaries (and an online directory for SEO-goodness) http://www.mailfinch.com http://www.mailfinch.com - on demand direct mail Built by me and profitable.
- eduardo_f 16y agohttp://improffice.com http://improffice.com - online email transfer / email migration for Gmail/Google Apps. I built the prototype myself, then my current partner came onboard when the app started making money. He dramatically improved the code and I'm mostly working on the business stuff now.
- norbu09 16y agohttp://iWantMyName.com http://iWantMyName.com - built by 2 1/2 guys over the last two years out of frustration with the domain registrar business practices. we are not hugely profitable yet but we can live off it and work on our own project which is rewarding enough for the moment.
- treitnauer 16y agoJust would like to add that we're completely self-funded and proud of it... :)
- hasenj 16y agoreally nice :) I think I'll use it to register my next website ;)
- wushupork 16y agohttp://shelfluv.com http://shelfluv.com - Single hacker. just launched about a week ago but making some Amazon affiliate revenue from all the coverage it's getting.
- dholowiski 16y agoThis is possibly the most inspiring post on the internet. Thanks.
- kranner 16y agohttp://codeboff.in http://codeboff.in is done by me. It's a screening platform for hiring programmers. I switched on billing just this morning so it hasn't actually made anything yet.
- garazy 16y agohttp://builtwith.com http://builtwith.com - made for fun not to make money but now its profitable by a team of 1 :) I think the idea is to not start with the thought "I want to make a web app that makes money" but "I want to make a useful web app that solves a problem" - the money will eventually come if you crack that nut!
- niyazpk 16y agohttp://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/ http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/ - by HNer paraschopra is arguably the best A/B split testing tool available. It was developed without any outside funding, by an extremely small team (1-3), and it is making decent amounts of money AFAIK.
- paraschopra 16y agoThanks for posting this Niyaz. Yep, it is a specific niche tool developed by me (but have tiny part-time team now) and is making decent money, which I expect to grow.
- dangrossman 16y agohttp://www.w3counter.com http://www.w3counter.com - developed and operated by myself, profitable since 2006 - real-time web stats, which I've been offering since before Google Analytics and such existed, tracking all activity on over 50k websites http://www.w3roi.com http://www.w3roi.com - developed and operated by myself, profitable since 2009 - real-time conversion tracking for online advertising
- nandemo 16y agoNico Nico Douga is a sort of youtube where users can write comments on the videos (like subtitles). The first version of was supposedly written by a couple of guys. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nico_Nico_Douga http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nico_Nico_Douga I have no idea why no one has made an English clone yet. Apart from messy copyright problems and hosting costs (which all youtube clones have anyway), it's practically a guaranteed success.
- theycallmemorty 16y agohttp://www.cupcalculator.com http://www.cupcalculator.com - Slightly profitable. Its essentially a static page with some adwords but the ad revenue has more than covered the cost of the domain name and hosting.
- udfalkso 16y agoI made http://isitnormal.com http://isitnormal.com, which is almost paying the rent now.
- cheald 16y agohttp://mmo-mumble.com http://mmo-mumble.com is my one-man hobby project, and is solidly profitable. The app is really the control panel/management interface/widgets, but obviously the service encompasses more than that.