7 ms·

Ask HN: Side projects making less than $2k MRR, what's your project?

95 points by rozenmd 4y ago

While a thread of 2k+ MRR is going, I thought it'd be cool to hear from folks who aren't quite at 2k yet.

NiagaraThistle 4y ago
Eurotripr.com - a constant work in progress. The goal is as if NomadList and Indiehackers had a baby and that baby wanted to help others travel affordably around Europe.
- pupppet 4y ago
  This is pretty cool! How much manual work is involved keeping the data up to date?
  - xcubic 4y ago
    I was also wondering about this. Or is there some automation in place...
lockdown22 4y ago
MesoSim: https://portal.deltaray.io https://portal.deltaray.io Options Backtesting Service focusing on income and hedging trading strategies. Still under heavy development but have a handful of users who find it useful.
koch 4y ago
https://markwhen.com https://markwhen.com Timelines in markdown (gantt, calendar, map, other views) It's open source (https://github.com/mark-when/markwhen https://github.com/mark-when/markwhen) and there are some paid options for storing markwhen documents in the cloud. Straddling paid SAAS and open source is a bit tricky and I still haven't figured it out completely yet. I have some sponsors as well as some paid saas clients but it's not quite paying the bills yet... I like working on it though, hopefully I can find the right balance or a different revenue model that works better. My other problem is not only am I not good at marketing, I don't like doing it. But I also know it's the other half of the equation.
- freeqaz 4y ago
  If you write about what it is that you're doing and keep a blog, that has been a very effective way for me to "market" the work that I'm doing without it sound scummy af. (I don't like feeling like a greasy used car salesman, and writing about developing stuff feels much more natural to me.)
- replwoacause 4y ago
  This looks really cool
- abdullahkhalids 4y ago
  Despite clicking around quite a bit, I can't figure out what the paid options are, and their pricing. So, yeah, you gotta up those marketing skills.
jaredwiener 4y ago
https://www.forth.news https://www.forth.news The vast majority of Americans get at least some of their news from social media, even though they don't trust it. Forth is a news feed for news; not quite social media. Everything comes from vetted journalists who adhere to our editorial policy, so you can trust what you read. No spam, no misinfo, no hate speech. Have a little over 60 journalists in all sorts of beats/locations, and growing.
danjoredd 4y ago
Making an open source CMD epub reader in Rust. I don't want to share the code as I feel a bit self conscious about where it is ATM, but when its done I really hope it will be a solid reader for people using the terminal. Its non-profit because I just want to make a neat tool
jeffstephens 4y ago
https://gotem.live https://gotem.live A party game my friend and I built over peak COVID, still play with family & friends frequently. People stumble across it on the Apple TV App Store and occasionally purchase some content which is great!
xnx 4y ago
The cynic in me always suspects these questions are fishing attempts to see what ideas can be cloned to steal some of the revenue.
- theduder99 4y ago
  Maybe I'm more cynical than you because I think lots of hn posts are fishing attempts :)
  - gremlinsinc 4y ago
    I assume they all are, but thankfully for the fisher(people), most hn users with products have large enough egos to not care about new competition, and thankfully for them most people fishing for ideas will probably have 10 new ones by next week and never implement any of them.. (I sure have done that a lot myself, haha).
- wnolens 4y ago
  My sense is the expected value is positive (new paying users > revenue stolen)
- Takennickname 4y ago
  Well then, you're quite an optimist if it takes the cynic in you to suspect that.
- jstarfish 4y ago
  It's even better when it gets into specifics. "Wanted: a feasible business idea not quite lucrative enough for the proprietor to be able to afford to take legal action."
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  They might be, but there is so much data on profitable ideas out there it wont make any difference. For example on indiehackers, various businesses for sale sites, and reddit/HN threads.
- is_true 4y ago
hankchinaski 4y ago
https://golang.cafe https://golang.cafe $1,000/month from various ads (sponsorships, display ads, YouTube Adsense) It’s in cruising mode never really invested any significant time on it apart from spare hours on weekend. Entirely written in Go and open source
reidjs 4y ago
An independent video game themed around van life https://www.vanlifegame.com/ https://www.vanlifegame.com/
dave333 4y ago
String of free sudoku sites supported by Adsense. https://samurai-sudoku.com https://samurai-sudoku.com https://fiendishsudoku.com https://fiendishsudoku.com https://extremesudoku.info https://extremesudoku.info https://www.extremesudoku.info/printables/sudoku-printables.html https://www.extremesudoku.info/printables/sudoku-printables.... https://sudokuhints.com https://sudokuhints.com https://easysudoku.org https://easysudoku.org https://sudukopuzzles.org https://sudukopuzzles.org https://sudokuprintables.org https://sudokuprintables.org
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  Why so many domains?
  - dave333 4y ago
    One for samurai puzzles and the others show different difficulty levels and different sets of puzzles. Extremesudoku.info shows the most difficult puzzles we have come up with. Easysudoku.org is the opposite. Sudokuhints.com and fiendishsudoku.com both show a range of difficulty but the puzzles are completely different. Sudokuhints.com was actually the first site and fiendishsudoku.com came up as a redesign. Sudokuprintables.org and sudukopuzzles.org are both designed to allow printing of 2, 4, or 6 puzzles per page and have different sets of puzzles.
    - quickthrower2 4y ago
      Thanks! What I mean is why not one domain to host all of this? Must get expensive and more admin to have so many.
      - wgj 4y ago
        All those domains can still be pointed at the same deployment. The only extra cost is registrar and DNS, which is not much. Usually the reason for this kind of setup is better SEO.
Dachande663 4y ago
https://bulkbuffer.com https://bulkbuffer.com CSV upload to Buffer. Run it for many years, sent tens of millions of updates, only ever had a donation button that brings in enough to pay for the digital ocean box.
claudiulodro 4y ago
My side project is mainly just complaining about working for "the man" while not doing much about it. It's a crowded space, but it definitely makes less than $2k/mo!
- adrianmonk 4y ago
  Money isn't everything. It's good to pick something you can be passionate about.
  - akudha 4y ago
    He did. He is passionate about complaining :P
- gremlinsinc 4y ago
  We should team up, this is my side project, although it's also drooling over new ai developments.
  - is_true 4y ago
    generative-compl.ai/ning
- mv4 4y ago
  Are you interested in a co-founder?
japhib 4y ago
Couple of mobile strategy games: https://pollywog.games/ https://pollywog.games/ Card Crusade - a roguelike deckbuilder (similar to Slay the Spire) Barnard's Star - multiplayer tactical strategy game (like XCOM or Into the Breach) Both games are on iOS and Android. Makes just over $100 per month. It's a ton of work. Doing it wayyy more for the enjoyment/satisfaction of the project than the money.
- danivaz 4y ago
  The art on the games look great! Are these games made with unity?
  - japhib 4y ago
    Thanks, although I didn’t do any of the art :P and yes, both Unity!
danmaz74 4y ago
https://chess.braimax.com https://chess.braimax.com Puzzle rush integrated with spaced repetitions to improve tactically at chess. I hacked a solution for myself during covid to combine those two, and achieved very good results reaching 2000 on lichess (from around 1800), which was my goal then. In a recent break between jobs I decided to create an integrated, easy to use solution, and I've got lots of ideas about how to improve it - if it gets traction :)
rozenmd 4y ago
Personally, I've been working on OnlineOrNot (https://onlineornot.com/ https://onlineornot.com/) for over two years - it's a set of uptime monitoring tools, with a hosted status page. There's an open source CLI (https://github.com/onlineornot/onlineornot https://github.com/onlineornot/onlineornot), and a public API under active development.
- yellowapple 4y ago
  Very nice! Took all of a minute to setup basic status checking for my personal web and mail servers. I'll definitely be recommending it to folks.
  - rozenmd 4y ago
    Thanks!
WolfOliver 4y ago
MonsterWriter: The most enjoyable desktop app for writing a thesis or paper
kiruio 4y ago
I got bunch of those projects: To test social media preview: https://ogtester.com/ https://ogtester.com/ To add location to images: https://geotagseo.com/ https://geotagseo.com/ To use dictation for learning (German): https://www.flashdictation.com/ https://www.flashdictation.com/ To decide the meal: https://whatdinner.com/ https://whatdinner.com/ (WIP) To get distracted: https://mathlegame.com/ https://mathlegame.com/ https://learnle.net/ https://learnle.net/ To use Stable diffusing in Notion: https://slashdreamer.coom https://slashdreamer.coom To experiment with Stable diffusing https://articletoimage.ai/ https://articletoimage.ai/ (WIP) I did to solve a problem I had.
- _xivi 4y ago
  You got a very nice collection. Combined, do they bring more than 2K/month?
- DonsDiscountGas 4y ago
  One of your URLs has a typo (https://slashdreamer.com https://slashdreamer.com not .coom)
bitsinthesky 4y ago
Practice studying language vocab by converting random words in your browser to their foreign equivalent https://github.com/jsvan/-glish/blob/main/README.md https://github.com/jsvan/-glish/blob/main/README.md
vivekseth 4y ago
https://masala-joy.vercel.app/ https://masala-joy.vercel.app/ I scraped ~100k recipes from across the internet, and made this site to focus on south asian recipes (~2k). I will soon add features to better sort and filter these recipes by various diets, ingredients, and regions in South Asia. I just launched a few days ago, and no revenue yet.
- scary-size 4y ago
  Have fun going down the rabbit whole of parsing structured data from ingredient phrases. Had a fun few weeks with that!
  - vivekseth 4y ago
    Yeah it has not been trivial so far! Let me know if you have any tips you can share
    - scary-size 4y ago
      I settled on a regex based approach with lots of data clean-up and normalisation up front. Example of my site [4] Some other approaches I spent a lot of time on: * Extracting Structured Data From Recipes Using Conditional Random Fields [1] * Chef Watson [2] * Ingredient Parser - Model Guide [3] [1] https://archive.nytimes.com/open.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/09/extracting-structured-data-from-recipes-using-conditional-random-fields/?_r=0 https://archive.nytimes.com/open.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/0... [2] https://blog.kitchenpc.com/2011/07/06/chef-watson/ https://blog.kitchenpc.com/2011/07/06/chef-watson/ [3] https://ingredient-parser.readthedocs.io/en/latest/guide/index.html https://ingredient-parser.readthedocs.io/en/latest/guide/ind... [4] https://pretty-recip.es/recipe?recipe-url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.seriouseats.com%2Fchard-pancetta-pecorino-quiche-recipe https://pretty-recip.es/recipe?recipe-url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww....
    - DonsDiscountGas 4y ago
      Maybe GPT-4 or some other LLM? Maybe too expensive but I would think they'd be able to accomplish the technical task.
sporkl 4y ago
My main side project is Pivotuner[0], a MIDI effect plugin for adaptive pure intonation It enables some pretty cool things like fairly straightforward microtonal modulation! Right now I'm working on a paper to submit to a computer music conference about it. Happy to send the draft if anyone's interested (email on website in bio). I released it last December. I've had a couple sales, not many, but still enough to cover the cost of Apple developer membership, so at least I'm sort of in the positive! Should also mention that I've gotten feedback on it from some pretty major artists, including Grammy nominees and winners like Jacob Collier! which is very very exciting Happy to answer any questions! [0]: https://www.dmitrivolkov.com/projects/pivotuner/ https://www.dmitrivolkov.com/projects/pivotuner/
freeone3000 4y ago
https://waifu.amorai.ca https://waifu.amorai.ca A desktop version of the “companion” apps floating around the space. Features emoting, expressions, eye contact, low latency voice synthesis, and a two way conversational model.
rompic 4y ago
I run a website to create sociograms online: https://cliq.at https://cliq.at Its predecessor was basically hacked together for a company retreat while stranded at schiphol airport for a whole day. It has quite some usage, but basically only covers its hosting costs.
joelrunyon 4y ago
This site https://startablog.com https://startablog.com fluctuates - we have spurts of way more than 2k/month and some way less. I think it averages out to <2k/month though.
- l2silver 4y ago
  Critical error on site...
achempion 4y ago
I run two projects, both with zero income. The first one is Fluent[0], to learn vocabulary by placing words on a canvas. Third iteration over the last several years. Second is blogging platform nofuss[1], where you do all the publishing through the email. [0]: https://fluent.im/ https://fluent.im/ [1]: https://nofuss.io/ https://nofuss.io/
pranitbauva1997 4y ago
Working on sending and processing of webhooks to be reliable and easy, have a look at https://nirah.app https://nirah.app
thepaulmcbride 4y ago
WeCode NI (https://wecodeni.com https://wecodeni.com) a job board for developer in Northern Ireland. It has paid me several thousand pounds over the last few years. This past few months have been quiet. I’d be interested in a partner to help grow it and replicate for other cities.
maxwelldone 4y ago
https://theshowgrid.com https://theshowgrid.com A static site to see IMDb ratings of all episodes of a TV show in a nice table. (ratings updated everyday) A weekend project I built to scratch my own itch. Going on cruise mode for a while now.
- momofuku 4y ago
  I work in robotics, so I always find clean front-end implementations pretty neat. Can you tell me how you got this to work? How do you host all of it? What is the back end you use? I apologize if this seems too basic, but I'd appreciate any details you have for me. My goal for this summer is to work a bit on front end tech, so that I can present better visualizations, and build simple CRUD apps to showcase my data. Thanks!
  - maxwelldone 4y ago
    Thank you! The way it works is very simple. I'm copying from a comment I made earlier: Everyday IMDb publishes bare bones datasets at https://www.imdb.com/interfaces/ https://www.imdb.com/interfaces/. I've a bash script to download them, format and load into MySQL from which I export two types of json files: 1) A file with all the TV shows names, id, ratings etc (shows.json) - this is what's used for search. It weighs < 700KB compressed (I could certainly optimize this file but I've stashed it for later). 2) A file for every tv show with all the ratings and votes for its episodes. Based on your search, the specific file will be fetched to display the ratings. (This one file per show could also be optimized but looks premature at this stage.) Strictly speaking, a database is also not necessary but it serves 2 purposes: 1) I could easily query to satisfy some curious show related questions. 2) The datasets include a ton of stale data (like shows w/o episodes and vice versa), so I find it easier to cleanup through SQL. The above architecture allows me to host the site as a static site. When I launched, I had a typical node backend that connected to a db to run searches etc. But thought it was way too much infrastructure for a simple site! Glad to hear you have a concrete goal. Front-end is actually easy to pick up if you don't get carried away by the latest thing on the block. IMO, it's pretty mature nowadays and I prefer the tools available now over the ones I had when I started way back. If you've no front-end experience, just pick framework like Vue or React and start building stuff. If you've the time, I'd even advice you to start with vanilla JS, HTML & CSS (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/ https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/ should be your bible). It will not only set you up with a solid foundation but let you appreciate the conveniences & conventions when you pick up a framework. There's tons of tutorials available for pretty much anything web related. Good luck!
asdfzalsd 4y ago
tinderglowup.com - an AI product to generate you with abs
kachurovskiy 4y ago
Electronic lead screw for metal lathe - https://kachurovskiy.com/ https://kachurovskiy.com/ - started about a week ago and sold 4 kits so far. Unit cost today is 61€ so margin is rather slim too.
- Ancapistani 4y ago
  This is actually really cool. Have you thought about contacting littlemachineshop.com to see if they'd be interested in carrying it? I've used them in the past to put together similar upgrades for my lathe.
  - kachurovskiy 4y ago
    That's a great idea, I will get in touch with them once I wrangle my unit price and figure out how to scale the manufacturing :)
mNovak 4y ago
https://www.bytebucket.co/ https://www.bytebucket.co/ Made as a hobby during the pandemic -- it scrapes eBay listings for laptops, and provides a parametric search (RAM, SSD etc) inspired by the likes of Digikey and Mouser, and sorts on total value. I like to buy used electronics, but this kind of search is still shockingly bad on typical marketplaces (Amazon etc) An example search to get you started: https://www.bytebucket.co/?mincpu=800&minram=12&minssd=500#t https://www.bytebucket.co/?mincpu=800&minram=12&minssd=500#t pretty quickly finds for example an 11th gen Intel, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD laptop for ~$200. That sounds like a pretty good deal to me. The really good deals get swiped up within a day or two though.
- bberenberg 4y ago
  Really cool. Any plans to add GPU analysis support? I am looking for a cheapo "gaming" laptop to play iRacing, and your tool would be helpful in that. Btw, I think you have a bug with power usage: https://www.bytebucket.co/?mincpu=800&minpower=15#t https://www.bytebucket.co/?mincpu=800&minpower=15#t this should show a number of results
dxxvi 4y ago
What's the definition of a side project? If it's not "something that you like to do", then doing a 2nd job will earn you much more than $2k/month (I think at least $10k/month).
arkenflame 4y ago
An audio adventure game on mobile: https://roadtripadventures.msol.io https://roadtripadventures.msol.io A humorous book of quotes with profanity added: https://whatacools.com/serenity/ https://whatacools.com/serenity/ An app to use your e-reader as a typewriter: https://solarwriter.msol.io/ https://solarwriter.msol.io/ (actually, this one is free)
Wronnay 4y ago
I also have multiple: https://alphalerts.com https://alphalerts.com Alphalerts helps investors find new investment opportunities by offering stock, options and crypto alerts. https://chapati.systems/autoupdate/ https://chapati.systems/autoupdate/ Autoupdate automates the update process of various software like Python, Gitea, Zitadel, Drone, Kanboard, Caddy, Podman and System.
- akudha 4y ago
  Do you pay for financial data? I remember searching for financial data APIs for commercial use few years ago, they were quite expensive. Don’t know if it has changed
  - Wronnay 4y ago
    I don't want to go into detail of all my APIs as most APIs are very expensive for commercial use and I see getting a really cheap one as a business secret. I also created multiple libraries for fetching business data from official government sources (e.g.the SEC) I try to get most of the data directly from the source and plan to launch a different product which will resell it.
polalavik 4y ago
https://SignalProcessingJobs.com https://SignalProcessingJobs.com - a niche job board for signal processing engineers, but trying to drive traffic with content, tutorials, and videos. Looking to grow both the content and the job board aspect of it.
gcheong 4y ago
I just released an iOS app a few days ago so it hasn’t been a month yet but so far it’s made a grand total of $0.00 :). https://apps.apple.com/us/app/stretch-timer-dx/id6447534919 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/stretch-timer-dx/id6447534919
flopriore 4y ago
Foldie to transfer files between Android and MacOS: https://github.com/FLopriore/foldie https://github.com/FLopriore/foldie It's a small project in Flutter I showed on HN few days ago. It's basically an alternative to Android File Transfer, but with a better UI and without the limitation of 1.5 GB files because it uses adb under the hood. MRR: €0 and it will always be this amount of money :)
AlexITC 4y ago
My most successful side-project so far is a small service for launching preview environment (https://codepreview.io https://codepreview.io). I have a couple of customers involved, receiving great feedback so far, unfortunately, it doesn't generate enough revenue yet and it is progressing very slowly (chicken-egg problem). I believe we can scale the number of customers but it is hard to find the right balance between doing sales and feature improvements. For obvious reasons, I prioritize consulting hours that pay our bills.
gendestus 4y ago
During the LLM insanity of the last few weeks, I used GPT-4 to design a website that synthesizes unbiased news articles out of biased sources and it's producing some great output. Since it's more of a research project, I have zero intent to monetize it so it's definitely less than $2k/month: https://spinreactor.ai https://spinreactor.ai
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  I love it, but I fear this is temporary. Like the early days of the internet when you could open up port 80 on your home machine and connect via unencrypted http. In other words getting unbiased information from LLMs will be a challenge and LLM biases will become political, but right now, for a minute, we can have nice things.
kebsup 4y ago
My motion tracked gifs tool https://gifmemes.io https://gifmemes.io makes about 250 USD/month steadily for the last year.
frant1c 4y ago
CTF-like puzzles for hackers https://hacker.gifts/ https://hacker.gifts/
mcapodici 4y ago
Building a SaaS and web app starter kit https://github.com/mcapodici/firestarter https://github.com/mcapodici/firestarter using NextJS, Firebase and Tailwind Working on a ChatGPT tutorial now for it: https://docs.firestarterapp.com/tutorials/chatbot-1/ https://docs.firestarterapp.com/tutorials/chatbot-1/ This is all free/open source and will remain so, but in the future I might also offer paid courses/enhanced features.
dang 4y ago
Related ongoing thread: Ask HN: Side project of more than $2k monthly revenue? what's your project? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35567822 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35567822 - April 2023 (424 comments)
perlwle 4y ago
As a huge fan of podcasts, I am building a podcast information database that includes metadata on shows and episodes. 2 millions shows, 70 million episodes collected so far. Now, I just need to find the perfect audience for it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- akudha 4y ago
  This is a crowded space, no? Here is one idea - if you can list the advertisers for podcasts/episodes, that might interest new podcasters/other advertisers. Kind of a search engine to search podcasts by advertisers (or vice versa)
perilunar 4y ago
https://www.timepasses.net/ https://www.timepasses.net/ a timeline of your life, human history, and the universe https://sunclock.net/ https://sunclock.net/ a 24hr clock that shows sunrise, sunset, twilight times, and the position of the sun and moon https://bigclock.app/ https://bigclock.app/ it's just a clock, but BIG They're not monetised apart from a buy me a coffee button.
- shaunpud 4y ago
  How many coffees have you received?
  - perilunar 4y ago
    Not very many. Around 30.
iamflimflam1 4y ago
I run a YouTube channel - it ranges between $100-$300 a month ad revenue and $100-$400 sponsorship (depending on how productive I am). The main issue with it is time - there’s no way I would go full time YouTubing with the current numbers so the day job has to take priority. https://www.youtube.com/atomic14 https://www.youtube.com/atomic14
notpushkin 4y ago
https://lunni.dev/ https://lunni.dev/ Lunni is a dashboard for Docker Swarm. It helps you if you already use docker-compose to develop an app locally, and just want to deploy it with as little effort as possible. It also has a bunch of apps available for one-click install in the built-in Marketplace, like Vaultwarden, Chatwoot, or PocketBase. I'm trying to get myself to start writing to potential customers, but haven't succeeded just yet. (If you're interested in a demo, let's chat! https://cal.com/notpushkin/lunni https://cal.com/notpushkin/lunni) As such, MRR right now is still exactly $0.
ezero 4y ago
I'm working on https://base.report https://base.report, a web app to help retail investors and (primarily swing) traders to research the stock market effectively. As someone who got interested in the stock market a few years ago, I didn't find anything that suited my needs in terms of features and design. So I developed a solution tailored to my requirements and eventually opened it up for others as well. The key features include a stock screener with technical indicators like 50-day range, and a report view for each stock including charts and key financials. I still use the app almost daily to aid my own stock market research. We currently have a few dozen active users.
- woleium 4y ago
  looks great, but your site doesn't show pricing?
  - ezero 4y ago
    Thanks! Here’s the direct link to the pricing page: https://base.report/pricing https://base.report/pricing There should be a link to it in the footer as well. On the desktop, there should also be a link in the navbar.
    - DanielRaid 4y ago
      Great product, adding it to my investment research tools.
webjac 4y ago
One I just launched, for fun and maybe profit? https://thefuck.cards https://thefuck.cards Go make one for a friend (or enemy)
dearroy 4y ago
https://earlybird.im https://earlybird.im Helping startup people in early stage to validate ideas before investing too much time and money in product development, just crossed $500MRR after launching it 3.5 months.
tmaly 4y ago
I made a udemy course for teaching kids ages 5 to 8 how to code a project in Scratch Jr. I made $12 on it in 2022 with no promotion. Not sure how people are finding it as it is on the 4th page in the search for phrase: Coding for kids https://www.udemy.com/course/scratchjr-coding-for-kids/ https://www.udemy.com/course/scratchjr-coding-for-kids/

95 points by rozenmd 4y ago

While a thread of 2k+ MRR is going, I thought it'd be cool to hear from folks who aren't quite at 2k yet.

Eurotripr.com - a constant work in progress. The goal is as if NomadList and Indiehackers had a baby and that baby wanted to help others travel affordably around Europe.

pupppet 4y ago
This is pretty cool! How much manual work is involved keeping the data up to date?
- xcubic 4y ago
  I was also wondering about this. Or is there some automation in place...

lockdown22 4y ago

MesoSim: https://portal.deltaray.io https://portal.deltaray.io Options Backtesting Service focusing on income and hedging trading strategies. Still under heavy development but have a handful of users who find it useful.

koch 4y ago

https://markwhen.com https://markwhen.com Timelines in markdown (gantt, calendar, map, other views) It's open source (https://github.com/mark-when/markwhen https://github.com/mark-when/markwhen) and there are some paid options for storing markwhen documents in the cloud. Straddling paid SAAS and open source is a bit tricky and I still haven't figured it out completely yet. I have some sponsors as well as some paid saas clients but it's not quite paying the bills yet... I like working on it though, hopefully I can find the right balance or a different revenue model that works better. My other problem is not only am I not good at marketing, I don't like doing it. But I also know it's the other half of the equation.

freeqaz 4y ago
If you write about what it is that you're doing and keep a blog, that has been a very effective way for me to "market" the work that I'm doing without it sound scummy af. (I don't like feeling like a greasy used car salesman, and writing about developing stuff feels much more natural to me.)
replwoacause 4y ago
This looks really cool
abdullahkhalids 4y ago
Despite clicking around quite a bit, I can't figure out what the paid options are, and their pricing. So, yeah, you gotta up those marketing skills.

jaredwiener 4y ago

https://www.forth.news https://www.forth.news The vast majority of Americans get at least some of their news from social media, even though they don't trust it. Forth is a news feed for news; not quite social media. Everything comes from vetted journalists who adhere to our editorial policy, so you can trust what you read. No spam, no misinfo, no hate speech. Have a little over 60 journalists in all sorts of beats/locations, and growing.

danjoredd 4y ago

Making an open source CMD epub reader in Rust. I don't want to share the code as I feel a bit self conscious about where it is ATM, but when its done I really hope it will be a solid reader for people using the terminal. Its non-profit because I just want to make a neat tool

jeffstephens 4y ago

https://gotem.live https://gotem.live A party game my friend and I built over peak COVID, still play with family & friends frequently. People stumble across it on the Apple TV App Store and occasionally purchase some content which is great!

xnx 4y ago

The cynic in me always suspects these questions are fishing attempts to see what ideas can be cloned to steal some of the revenue.

theduder99 4y ago
Maybe I'm more cynical than you because I think lots of hn posts are fishing attempts :)
- gremlinsinc 4y ago
  I assume they all are, but thankfully for the fisher(people), most hn users with products have large enough egos to not care about new competition, and thankfully for them most people fishing for ideas will probably have 10 new ones by next week and never implement any of them.. (I sure have done that a lot myself, haha).
wnolens 4y ago
My sense is the expected value is positive (new paying users > revenue stolen)
Takennickname 4y ago
Well then, you're quite an optimist if it takes the cynic in you to suspect that.
jstarfish 4y ago
It's even better when it gets into specifics. "Wanted: a feasible business idea not quite lucrative enough for the proprietor to be able to afford to take legal action."
quickthrower2 4y ago
They might be, but there is so much data on profitable ideas out there it wont make any difference. For example on indiehackers, various businesses for sale sites, and reddit/HN threads.
is_true 4y ago

hankchinaski 4y ago

https://golang.cafe https://golang.cafe $1,000/month from various ads (sponsorships, display ads, YouTube Adsense) It’s in cruising mode never really invested any significant time on it apart from spare hours on weekend. Entirely written in Go and open source

reidjs 4y ago

An independent video game themed around van life https://www.vanlifegame.com/ https://www.vanlifegame.com/

dave333 4y ago

String of free sudoku sites supported by Adsense. https://samurai-sudoku.com https://samurai-sudoku.com https://fiendishsudoku.com https://fiendishsudoku.com https://extremesudoku.info https://extremesudoku.info https://www.extremesudoku.info/printables/sudoku-printables.html https://www.extremesudoku.info/printables/sudoku-printables.... https://sudokuhints.com https://sudokuhints.com https://easysudoku.org https://easysudoku.org https://sudukopuzzles.org https://sudukopuzzles.org https://sudokuprintables.org https://sudokuprintables.org

quickthrower2 4y ago
Why so many domains?
- dave333 4y ago
  One for samurai puzzles and the others show different difficulty levels and different sets of puzzles. Extremesudoku.info shows the most difficult puzzles we have come up with. Easysudoku.org is the opposite. Sudokuhints.com and fiendishsudoku.com both show a range of difficulty but the puzzles are completely different. Sudokuhints.com was actually the first site and fiendishsudoku.com came up as a redesign. Sudokuprintables.org and sudukopuzzles.org are both designed to allow printing of 2, 4, or 6 puzzles per page and have different sets of puzzles.
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    Thanks! What I mean is why not one domain to host all of this? Must get expensive and more admin to have so many.
    - wgj 4y ago
      All those domains can still be pointed at the same deployment. The only extra cost is registrar and DNS, which is not much. Usually the reason for this kind of setup is better SEO.

Dachande663 4y ago

https://bulkbuffer.com https://bulkbuffer.com CSV upload to Buffer. Run it for many years, sent tens of millions of updates, only ever had a donation button that brings in enough to pay for the digital ocean box.

claudiulodro 4y ago

My side project is mainly just complaining about working for "the man" while not doing much about it. It's a crowded space, but it definitely makes less than $2k/mo!

adrianmonk 4y ago
Money isn't everything. It's good to pick something you can be passionate about.
- akudha 4y ago
  He did. He is passionate about complaining :P
gremlinsinc 4y ago
We should team up, this is my side project, although it's also drooling over new ai developments.
- is_true 4y ago
  generative-compl.ai/ning
mv4 4y ago
Are you interested in a co-founder?

japhib 4y ago

Couple of mobile strategy games: https://pollywog.games/ https://pollywog.games/ Card Crusade - a roguelike deckbuilder (similar to Slay the Spire) Barnard's Star - multiplayer tactical strategy game (like XCOM or Into the Breach) Both games are on iOS and Android. Makes just over $100 per month. It's a ton of work. Doing it wayyy more for the enjoyment/satisfaction of the project than the money.

danivaz 4y ago
The art on the games look great! Are these games made with unity?
- japhib 4y ago
  Thanks, although I didn’t do any of the art :P and yes, both Unity!

danmaz74 4y ago

https://chess.braimax.com https://chess.braimax.com Puzzle rush integrated with spaced repetitions to improve tactically at chess. I hacked a solution for myself during covid to combine those two, and achieved very good results reaching 2000 on lichess (from around 1800), which was my goal then. In a recent break between jobs I decided to create an integrated, easy to use solution, and I've got lots of ideas about how to improve it - if it gets traction :)

rozenmd 4y ago

Personally, I've been working on OnlineOrNot (https://onlineornot.com/ https://onlineornot.com/) for over two years - it's a set of uptime monitoring tools, with a hosted status page. There's an open source CLI (https://github.com/onlineornot/onlineornot https://github.com/onlineornot/onlineornot), and a public API under active development.

yellowapple 4y ago
Very nice! Took all of a minute to setup basic status checking for my personal web and mail servers. I'll definitely be recommending it to folks.
- rozenmd 4y ago
  Thanks!

WolfOliver 4y ago

MonsterWriter: The most enjoyable desktop app for writing a thesis or paper

kiruio 4y ago

I got bunch of those projects: To test social media preview: https://ogtester.com/ https://ogtester.com/ To add location to images: https://geotagseo.com/ https://geotagseo.com/ To use dictation for learning (German): https://www.flashdictation.com/ https://www.flashdictation.com/ To decide the meal: https://whatdinner.com/ https://whatdinner.com/ (WIP) To get distracted: https://mathlegame.com/ https://mathlegame.com/ https://learnle.net/ https://learnle.net/ To use Stable diffusing in Notion: https://slashdreamer.coom https://slashdreamer.coom To experiment with Stable diffusing https://articletoimage.ai/ https://articletoimage.ai/ (WIP) I did to solve a problem I had.

_xivi 4y ago
You got a very nice collection. Combined, do they bring more than 2K/month?
DonsDiscountGas 4y ago
One of your URLs has a typo (https://slashdreamer.com https://slashdreamer.com not .coom)

bitsinthesky 4y ago

Practice studying language vocab by converting random words in your browser to their foreign equivalent https://github.com/jsvan/-glish/blob/main/README.md https://github.com/jsvan/-glish/blob/main/README.md

vivekseth 4y ago

https://masala-joy.vercel.app/ https://masala-joy.vercel.app/ I scraped ~100k recipes from across the internet, and made this site to focus on south asian recipes (~2k). I will soon add features to better sort and filter these recipes by various diets, ingredients, and regions in South Asia. I just launched a few days ago, and no revenue yet.

scary-size 4y ago
Have fun going down the rabbit whole of parsing structured data from ingredient phrases. Had a fun few weeks with that!
- vivekseth 4y ago
  Yeah it has not been trivial so far! Let me know if you have any tips you can share
  - scary-size 4y ago
    I settled on a regex based approach with lots of data clean-up and normalisation up front. Example of my site [4] Some other approaches I spent a lot of time on: * Extracting Structured Data From Recipes Using Conditional Random Fields [1] * Chef Watson [2] * Ingredient Parser - Model Guide [3] [1] https://archive.nytimes.com/open.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/09/extracting-structured-data-from-recipes-using-conditional-random-fields/?_r=0 https://archive.nytimes.com/open.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/0... [2] https://blog.kitchenpc.com/2011/07/06/chef-watson/ https://blog.kitchenpc.com/2011/07/06/chef-watson/ [3] https://ingredient-parser.readthedocs.io/en/latest/guide/index.html https://ingredient-parser.readthedocs.io/en/latest/guide/ind... [4] https://pretty-recip.es/recipe?recipe-url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.seriouseats.com%2Fchard-pancetta-pecorino-quiche-recipe https://pretty-recip.es/recipe?recipe-url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww....
  - DonsDiscountGas 4y ago
    Maybe GPT-4 or some other LLM? Maybe too expensive but I would think they'd be able to accomplish the technical task.

sporkl 4y ago

My main side project is Pivotuner[0], a MIDI effect plugin for adaptive pure intonation It enables some pretty cool things like fairly straightforward microtonal modulation! Right now I'm working on a paper to submit to a computer music conference about it. Happy to send the draft if anyone's interested (email on website in bio). I released it last December. I've had a couple sales, not many, but still enough to cover the cost of Apple developer membership, so at least I'm sort of in the positive! Should also mention that I've gotten feedback on it from some pretty major artists, including Grammy nominees and winners like Jacob Collier! which is very very exciting Happy to answer any questions! [0]: https://www.dmitrivolkov.com/projects/pivotuner/ https://www.dmitrivolkov.com/projects/pivotuner/

freeone3000 4y ago

https://waifu.amorai.ca https://waifu.amorai.ca A desktop version of the “companion” apps floating around the space. Features emoting, expressions, eye contact, low latency voice synthesis, and a two way conversational model.

rompic 4y ago

I run a website to create sociograms online: https://cliq.at https://cliq.at Its predecessor was basically hacked together for a company retreat while stranded at schiphol airport for a whole day. It has quite some usage, but basically only covers its hosting costs.

joelrunyon 4y ago

This site https://startablog.com https://startablog.com fluctuates - we have spurts of way more than 2k/month and some way less. I think it averages out to <2k/month though.

l2silver 4y ago
Critical error on site...

achempion 4y ago

I run two projects, both with zero income. The first one is Fluent[0], to learn vocabulary by placing words on a canvas. Third iteration over the last several years. Second is blogging platform nofuss[1], where you do all the publishing through the email. [0]: https://fluent.im/ https://fluent.im/ [1]: https://nofuss.io/ https://nofuss.io/

pranitbauva1997 4y ago

Working on sending and processing of webhooks to be reliable and easy, have a look at https://nirah.app https://nirah.app

thepaulmcbride 4y ago

WeCode NI (https://wecodeni.com https://wecodeni.com) a job board for developer in Northern Ireland. It has paid me several thousand pounds over the last few years. This past few months have been quiet. I’d be interested in a partner to help grow it and replicate for other cities.

maxwelldone 4y ago

https://theshowgrid.com https://theshowgrid.com A static site to see IMDb ratings of all episodes of a TV show in a nice table. (ratings updated everyday) A weekend project I built to scratch my own itch. Going on cruise mode for a while now.

momofuku 4y ago
I work in robotics, so I always find clean front-end implementations pretty neat. Can you tell me how you got this to work? How do you host all of it? What is the back end you use? I apologize if this seems too basic, but I'd appreciate any details you have for me. My goal for this summer is to work a bit on front end tech, so that I can present better visualizations, and build simple CRUD apps to showcase my data. Thanks!
- maxwelldone 4y ago
  Thank you! The way it works is very simple. I'm copying from a comment I made earlier: Everyday IMDb publishes bare bones datasets at https://www.imdb.com/interfaces/ https://www.imdb.com/interfaces/. I've a bash script to download them, format and load into MySQL from which I export two types of json files: 1) A file with all the TV shows names, id, ratings etc (shows.json) - this is what's used for search. It weighs < 700KB compressed (I could certainly optimize this file but I've stashed it for later). 2) A file for every tv show with all the ratings and votes for its episodes. Based on your search, the specific file will be fetched to display the ratings. (This one file per show could also be optimized but looks premature at this stage.) Strictly speaking, a database is also not necessary but it serves 2 purposes: 1) I could easily query to satisfy some curious show related questions. 2) The datasets include a ton of stale data (like shows w/o episodes and vice versa), so I find it easier to cleanup through SQL. The above architecture allows me to host the site as a static site. When I launched, I had a typical node backend that connected to a db to run searches etc. But thought it was way too much infrastructure for a simple site! Glad to hear you have a concrete goal. Front-end is actually easy to pick up if you don't get carried away by the latest thing on the block. IMO, it's pretty mature nowadays and I prefer the tools available now over the ones I had when I started way back. If you've no front-end experience, just pick framework like Vue or React and start building stuff. If you've the time, I'd even advice you to start with vanilla JS, HTML & CSS (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/ https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/ should be your bible). It will not only set you up with a solid foundation but let you appreciate the conveniences & conventions when you pick up a framework. There's tons of tutorials available for pretty much anything web related. Good luck!

asdfzalsd 4y ago

tinderglowup.com - an AI product to generate you with abs

kachurovskiy 4y ago

Electronic lead screw for metal lathe - https://kachurovskiy.com/ https://kachurovskiy.com/ - started about a week ago and sold 4 kits so far. Unit cost today is 61€ so margin is rather slim too.

Ancapistani 4y ago
This is actually really cool. Have you thought about contacting littlemachineshop.com to see if they'd be interested in carrying it? I've used them in the past to put together similar upgrades for my lathe.
- kachurovskiy 4y ago
  That's a great idea, I will get in touch with them once I wrangle my unit price and figure out how to scale the manufacturing :)

mNovak 4y ago

https://www.bytebucket.co/ https://www.bytebucket.co/ Made as a hobby during the pandemic -- it scrapes eBay listings for laptops, and provides a parametric search (RAM, SSD etc) inspired by the likes of Digikey and Mouser, and sorts on total value. I like to buy used electronics, but this kind of search is still shockingly bad on typical marketplaces (Amazon etc) An example search to get you started: https://www.bytebucket.co/?mincpu=800&minram=12&minssd=500#t https://www.bytebucket.co/?mincpu=800&minram=12&minssd=500#t pretty quickly finds for example an 11th gen Intel, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD laptop for ~$200. That sounds like a pretty good deal to me. The really good deals get swiped up within a day or two though.

bberenberg 4y ago
Really cool. Any plans to add GPU analysis support? I am looking for a cheapo "gaming" laptop to play iRacing, and your tool would be helpful in that. Btw, I think you have a bug with power usage: https://www.bytebucket.co/?mincpu=800&minpower=15#t https://www.bytebucket.co/?mincpu=800&minpower=15#t this should show a number of results

dxxvi 4y ago

What's the definition of a side project? If it's not "something that you like to do", then doing a 2nd job will earn you much more than $2k/month (I think at least $10k/month).

arkenflame 4y ago

An audio adventure game on mobile: https://roadtripadventures.msol.io https://roadtripadventures.msol.io A humorous book of quotes with profanity added: https://whatacools.com/serenity/ https://whatacools.com/serenity/ An app to use your e-reader as a typewriter: https://solarwriter.msol.io/ https://solarwriter.msol.io/ (actually, this one is free)

Wronnay 4y ago

I also have multiple: https://alphalerts.com https://alphalerts.com Alphalerts helps investors find new investment opportunities by offering stock, options and crypto alerts. https://chapati.systems/autoupdate/ https://chapati.systems/autoupdate/ Autoupdate automates the update process of various software like Python, Gitea, Zitadel, Drone, Kanboard, Caddy, Podman and System.

akudha 4y ago
Do you pay for financial data? I remember searching for financial data APIs for commercial use few years ago, they were quite expensive. Don’t know if it has changed
- Wronnay 4y ago
  I don't want to go into detail of all my APIs as most APIs are very expensive for commercial use and I see getting a really cheap one as a business secret. I also created multiple libraries for fetching business data from official government sources (e.g.the SEC) I try to get most of the data directly from the source and plan to launch a different product which will resell it.

polalavik 4y ago

https://SignalProcessingJobs.com https://SignalProcessingJobs.com - a niche job board for signal processing engineers, but trying to drive traffic with content, tutorials, and videos. Looking to grow both the content and the job board aspect of it.

gcheong 4y ago

I just released an iOS app a few days ago so it hasn’t been a month yet but so far it’s made a grand total of $0.00 :). https://apps.apple.com/us/app/stretch-timer-dx/id6447534919 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/stretch-timer-dx/id6447534919

flopriore 4y ago

Foldie to transfer files between Android and MacOS: https://github.com/FLopriore/foldie https://github.com/FLopriore/foldie It's a small project in Flutter I showed on HN few days ago. It's basically an alternative to Android File Transfer, but with a better UI and without the limitation of 1.5 GB files because it uses adb under the hood. MRR: €0 and it will always be this amount of money :)

AlexITC 4y ago

My most successful side-project so far is a small service for launching preview environment (https://codepreview.io https://codepreview.io). I have a couple of customers involved, receiving great feedback so far, unfortunately, it doesn't generate enough revenue yet and it is progressing very slowly (chicken-egg problem). I believe we can scale the number of customers but it is hard to find the right balance between doing sales and feature improvements. For obvious reasons, I prioritize consulting hours that pay our bills.

gendestus 4y ago

During the LLM insanity of the last few weeks, I used GPT-4 to design a website that synthesizes unbiased news articles out of biased sources and it's producing some great output. Since it's more of a research project, I have zero intent to monetize it so it's definitely less than $2k/month: https://spinreactor.ai https://spinreactor.ai

quickthrower2 4y ago
I love it, but I fear this is temporary. Like the early days of the internet when you could open up port 80 on your home machine and connect via unencrypted http. In other words getting unbiased information from LLMs will be a challenge and LLM biases will become political, but right now, for a minute, we can have nice things.

kebsup 4y ago

My motion tracked gifs tool https://gifmemes.io https://gifmemes.io makes about 250 USD/month steadily for the last year.

frant1c 4y ago

CTF-like puzzles for hackers https://hacker.gifts/ https://hacker.gifts/

mcapodici 4y ago

Building a SaaS and web app starter kit https://github.com/mcapodici/firestarter https://github.com/mcapodici/firestarter using NextJS, Firebase and Tailwind Working on a ChatGPT tutorial now for it: https://docs.firestarterapp.com/tutorials/chatbot-1/ https://docs.firestarterapp.com/tutorials/chatbot-1/ This is all free/open source and will remain so, but in the future I might also offer paid courses/enhanced features.

dang 4y ago

Related ongoing thread: Ask HN: Side project of more than $2k monthly revenue? what's your project? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35567822 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35567822 - April 2023 (424 comments)

perlwle 4y ago

As a huge fan of podcasts, I am building a podcast information database that includes metadata on shows and episodes. 2 millions shows, 70 million episodes collected so far. Now, I just need to find the perfect audience for it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

akudha 4y ago
This is a crowded space, no? Here is one idea - if you can list the advertisers for podcasts/episodes, that might interest new podcasters/other advertisers. Kind of a search engine to search podcasts by advertisers (or vice versa)

perilunar 4y ago

https://www.timepasses.net/ https://www.timepasses.net/ a timeline of your life, human history, and the universe https://sunclock.net/ https://sunclock.net/ a 24hr clock that shows sunrise, sunset, twilight times, and the position of the sun and moon https://bigclock.app/ https://bigclock.app/ it's just a clock, but BIG They're not monetised apart from a buy me a coffee button.

shaunpud 4y ago
How many coffees have you received?
- perilunar 4y ago
  Not very many. Around 30.

iamflimflam1 4y ago

I run a YouTube channel - it ranges between $100-$300 a month ad revenue and $100-$400 sponsorship (depending on how productive I am). The main issue with it is time - there’s no way I would go full time YouTubing with the current numbers so the day job has to take priority. https://www.youtube.com/atomic14 https://www.youtube.com/atomic14

notpushkin 4y ago

https://lunni.dev/ https://lunni.dev/ Lunni is a dashboard for Docker Swarm. It helps you if you already use docker-compose to develop an app locally, and just want to deploy it with as little effort as possible. It also has a bunch of apps available for one-click install in the built-in Marketplace, like Vaultwarden, Chatwoot, or PocketBase. I'm trying to get myself to start writing to potential customers, but haven't succeeded just yet. (If you're interested in a demo, let's chat! https://cal.com/notpushkin/lunni https://cal.com/notpushkin/lunni) As such, MRR right now is still exactly $0.

ezero 4y ago

I'm working on https://base.report https://base.report, a web app to help retail investors and (primarily swing) traders to research the stock market effectively. As someone who got interested in the stock market a few years ago, I didn't find anything that suited my needs in terms of features and design. So I developed a solution tailored to my requirements and eventually opened it up for others as well. The key features include a stock screener with technical indicators like 50-day range, and a report view for each stock including charts and key financials. I still use the app almost daily to aid my own stock market research. We currently have a few dozen active users.

woleium 4y ago
looks great, but your site doesn't show pricing?
- ezero 4y ago
  Thanks! Here’s the direct link to the pricing page: https://base.report/pricing https://base.report/pricing There should be a link to it in the footer as well. On the desktop, there should also be a link in the navbar.
  - DanielRaid 4y ago
    Great product, adding it to my investment research tools.

webjac 4y ago

One I just launched, for fun and maybe profit? https://thefuck.cards https://thefuck.cards Go make one for a friend (or enemy)

dearroy 4y ago

https://earlybird.im https://earlybird.im Helping startup people in early stage to validate ideas before investing too much time and money in product development, just crossed $500MRR after launching it 3.5 months.

tmaly 4y ago

I made a udemy course for teaching kids ages 5 to 8 how to code a project in Scratch Jr. I made $12 on it in 2022 with no promotion. Not sure how people are finding it as it is on the 4th page in the search for phrase: Coding for kids https://www.udemy.com/course/scratchjr-coding-for-kids/ https://www.udemy.com/course/scratchjr-coding-for-kids/