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Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

• DreamGen 3y ago
  I am building https://dreamgen.com https://dreamgen.com : platform for story-writing and role-play based on my own open-weight models [1][2]. Sort of alternative to NovelAI and CharacterAI. Launched November last year. Why? I think building on top of (and using products built on top of) closed models in this space is not sustainable. Currently the largest limiting factor, and why I am not spending on marketing just yet, is the model quality at longer contexts. This is my main focus right now, and I am in the middle of data collection for opus-v1 (which will also be released in various sizes). I also hope GPU prices will go down soon :D It's a lot of fun, being able to work on data, models, backend and frontend all within the scope of 1 project. [1] https://huggingface.co/dreamgen/opus-v0-7b https://huggingface.co/dreamgen/opus-v0-7b [2] https://huggingface.co/dreamgen/opus-v0-70b https://huggingface.co/dreamgen/opus-v0-70b
• longnguyen 3y ago
  I started working on KTool[0] in 2022. Here was the Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32637996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32637996 It recently reached $1K MRR. Not enough for us to pay the bills, so I started 2 other projects: BoltAI[1] & PDF Pals[2] I sell traditional licenses for these app and so it's not "recurring revenue", but it's well over $500/mo and help me going full-time on these products. [0]: https://ktool.io https://ktool.io [1]: https://boltai.com https://boltai.com [2]: https://pdfpals.com https://pdfpals.com
  • dchuk 3y ago
    You make great products, good job (I’d love to connect offline to discuss things in more detail, let me know) With pdf pals, can your app support time sequenced docs like sec filings? I’d love to easily drop in the last few quarters of a company’s filings and get coherent answers on its performance while not accidentally smashing all the filings together and hallucinating false stuff.
    • longnguyen 3y ago
      Thanks. Not sure if we could connect offline but sure. PDF Pals allows you to highlight a section and ask only about that content. I’m not entirely sure but for some advanced questions, it might require a code interpreter similar to ChatGPT and that feature is not available in PDF Pals yet. Would love to talk more about your use case.
• nice_scott 3y ago
  I have a simple sex life tracking app that fills a niche many users are willing to pay for. (iOS only) https://nicetracker.app https://nicetracker.app It has a single one time purchase of US$9.99. I loathe subscriptions personally, so all premium purchases just get all and any new features I add.
  • v1l 3y ago
    I thought I'd seen it all. Who tracks things like partners and locations and rates partners like this? Amazing that you figured out this niche though.
• jerrygoyal 3y ago
  I built a Chrome extension that integrates with Gmail (and other sites) to write emails, messages, etc using ChatGPT. This is my full time work and I'm living comfortably from it (for now). https://chatgptwriter.ai https://chatgptwriter.ai
  • topicseed 3y ago
    Start thinking about a different domain name as I am sure it's only a matter of time until someone sends you a cease and desist letter from OpenAI...
• rozenmd 3y ago
  I've been running OnlineOrNot (https://onlineornot.com https://onlineornot.com) since early 2021 now (almost three years). I recently wrote about how last year it grew twice as fast as I expected: https://maxrozen.com/2023-focus-single-product-pays-off https://maxrozen.com/2023-focus-single-product-pays-off It all started because I needed a weekly report for my contracting clients to prove their web host sucked to the point where it was costing them significant money. They were paying for cheapest tier WordPress hosting at the time, and didn't believe me when I said random 5 min blocks of downtime throughout the day were adding up. I built a dirt-simple form that takes a URL and sends a notification when the site goes down/up, with a weekly summary email. Then, I kept adding features every day, responding to customer requests and fixing bugs 2 hours at a time, even after I stopped being a contractor. Since then I also added status pages (example: https://hackernews.onlineornot.com/ https://hackernews.onlineornot.com/) and cron job monitoring, to ensure database backups and whatnot run when I expect.
  • nicbou 3y ago
    This is really nice. The front page tells me everything I need to know. For your consideration, I'm really struggling to find a tool like yours that expect a regular ping ("the daily build has not failed") and that support pushing a status ("the last build was green"). I have two matching use cases: one to detect when my static site generator fails to build in production, and the other to detect when my appointment finder does not find appointments for a longer period of time. I'd really like my uptime monitor to handle that, so that I don't have to implement something myself. Another brilliant feature is allestörungen, which lets people report troubles with common services. It fulfils the similar niche of "is this down for anyone else?"
    • rozenmd 3y ago
      Ping success/failure is something I've been looking at - I'll add it to the backlog :)
      • nicbou 3y ago
        In this case the server would be POSTing a status to you ("I'm not ok!"), not responding to a ping.
• thedangler 3y ago
  I do payment processing and have an all in one business suite of tools I use to build sites for clients. clearpayments.ca for CAD clearmerchantsol.com for US sytescope.com for website builder, email marketing, AI content Generation. These are side projects as I have a full time job.
• seanwilson 3y ago
  I run a Chrome extension that gives SEO, speed, and security tips after crawling all the pages of a site: https://www.checkbot.io/ https://www.checkbot.io/ There's a lot of sentiment on HN about SEO ruining the internet but the SEO tips I promote are ones that make content more readable for humans (e.g. setting image ALT tags, avoiding broken links, giving each page a unique title, using valid HTML) rather than tricks for gaming Google: https://www.checkbot.io/guide/seo/ https://www.checkbot.io/guide/seo/
  • nicbou 3y ago
    On-site SEO has a lot of overlap with accessibility and good user experience.
  • lippihom 3y ago
    Tried running my site through Checkbot, it's lightweight and helpful. "Indexable" pages has been a pain, can't seem to find clarity there on why our stuff is discoverable yet not indexed.
    • seanwilson 3y ago
      You mean Checkbot is confirming your pages should be indexable as you expect but the pages aren't turning up in Google? Some general suggestions: add a site map, submit your sitemap and pages via Google Search console, see if changing the internal linking of pages helps (e.g. pages that have links in the header/footer will seem important to crawl/index, maybe hubs for or "related pages" links for related pages would help), get more (and better quality) backlinks, and make sure pages don't look like duplicates (as Google will group together repetitive pages).
      • lippihom 3y ago
        Yes that's correct. Regarding your suggestions - thank you! I've done three of the four but still missing back links. We do have 1000s of pages that have a very similar structure, so I would understand why Google would mark them as duplicates, but the content on each differs, so I'm hoping that's not the case.
• takkatakka 3y ago
  Just recently surpassed $500/mo with a pdf to csv converter, https://bankstatement2csv.com https://bankstatement2csv.com But as someone else mentioned, from a purely financial stand point, I'd be better off investing in an index fund.
• coreymaass 3y ago
  During the pandemic, I made an online version of the game Mexican Train ( mexicantrain.online ). It became popular in retirement communities during lockdown. Gameplay has dropped off significantly since, but I still have several regular players. It averages about 50 games/day and between $500 and $1000/month, all from donations.
• XCSme 3y ago
  Getting around $1-$2k/mo building self-hosted web analytics: UXWizz[0] since 2013 and WPLytic[1] since 2022. I am trying to market it more, tried a partnership, unfortunately it didn't work out, so this year the plan is to do the marketing myself or continue building and improving the product and hoping the quality of the product will lead to word-of-mouth marketing. [0]: https://uxwizz.com https://uxwizz.com [1]: https://wplytic.com https://wplytic.com
• em-bee 3y ago
  another post of this topic two weeks later: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39110194 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39110194
• TotoHorner 3y ago
  I've been writing an email newsletter on backend dev for the past few years - https://quastor.org/ https://quastor.org/ Basically, I look through all the Big Tech engineering blog posts and look for interesting posts. Then I'll write up an article talking about the tech stack and the main takeaways. I've been learning Adobe Illustrator + After Effects recently and am now starting to add some visualizations + graphics to accompany the articles. I make more than $500 per month but this is more of a passion project and the income is honestly not competitive (at all) with what I earn as a dev. It also gives me a way to learn about marketing/growth + monetization. Hard to learn that stuff w/o doing.
  • precompute 3y ago
    Just signed up, awesome resource! Thanks a lot!
  • pighive 3y ago
    For the curious, OP's blog: https://blog.quastor.org https://blog.quastor.org
  • kaeruct 3y ago
    Thanks for your newsletter, I have found out about many interesting tech because of it. I think I found it here in HN :)
  • curious_baldy 3y ago
    How do you earn money? By selling customer emails?
    • mettamage 3y ago
      I just subscribed to the newsletter. I found out that there's a pro content section on the site.
    • TotoHorner 3y ago
      No, I've never shared customer emails and doing so would obviously be grossly unethical (and illegal!). I sell sponsorships to tech companies (ex. PostHog, InfluxData, Hubspot) + have a premium version of the newsletter that is $12 a month.
• rjdlee 3y ago
  I started a travel inspired bakery with my partner in the bay area - https://kayabakerysf.com/ https://kayabakerysf.com/ We do popups once a week alongside our day jobs. It's been a long journey and we would like to open a storefront at some point. The bakery makes well over $500/month, but not quite enough to sustain ourselves full time yet. It's a great way for me to learn about design and marketing as well.
  • bilsbie 3y ago
    What do you mean by popup? Do you get permission from the venues? Any issues with permits and regulations?
  • nicbou 3y ago
    Speaking of design, your website asks me to sign up for a newsletter before I can see the page. It's missing an X button where I'd typically look for it.
• jameshush 3y ago
  Out of all the side projects I’ve tried, the one that’s been the most lucrative consistently is buying boring index funds. I kinda wish I just doubled down on the boring route sooner .
  • koromak 3y ago
    https://www.reddit.com/r/Bogleheads/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bogleheads/ if anyone agrees. This has been my strategy for a couple years.
    • malfist 3y ago
      Or go to where all the old farts are that's been in this game for a while: https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/ https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/
  • bsmith 3y ago
    Just a bummer that these index funds are unavailable to expats :(
    • unmole 3y ago
      What do you mean? You can open an account with a US brokerage
    • cultofthecow 3y ago
      fully available. your country of residence matters.
    • jameshush 3y ago
      I'm a non-US citizen Canadian living in Taiwan. These are available, you just need to jump through a bit more hoops.
  • brcmthrowaway 3y ago
    Which funds?
• abdullin 3y ago
  I work as head of ML & Innovation at my day job. On the side, as a technical consultant, I help teams to ship products with ML under the hood. I live in Vienna, so that makes it convenient for evening calls with USA/Canada, where my three clients operate. Usually this involves weekly 30min calls with the teams to show them shortcuts, working recipes and save time by avoiding pitfalls. Mostly around ChatGPT/Local LLMs and RAG/Business automation type of things. I run a newsletter [1] to try extending my client base. Not very efficient yet, since all clients came through the LinkedIn [2] and personal contacts. [1] https://abdullin.substack.com/ https://abdullin.substack.com/ [2] https://www.linkedin.com/in/abdullin https://www.linkedin.com/in/abdullin
  • akudha 3y ago
    Is it possible for someone who has no knowledge of ML (but can code) to get into this space? Where would one start?
    • abdullin 3y ago
      Yes, that is the perfect spot! If you already have a coding background and want to focus on practical applications, there is surprisingly little to catch up with LLM/ML/ChatGPT. Here is my quickstart on LLM/ChatGPT for developers: https://abdullin.com/llm/faq-chat-gpt-quickstart-for-programmers/ https://abdullin.com/llm/faq-chat-gpt-quickstart-for-program... Don't hesitate to ping me with questions, too!
      • akudha 3y ago
        Thank you. I subscribed to your newsletter. Might take up your offer for advice :) Thank you
      • em-bee 3y ago
        this is a very helpful guide, thank you! in particular this: https://abdullin.com/llm/how-to-get-into-ml-for-developer/ https://abdullin.com/llm/how-to-get-into-ml-for-developer/ i find it surprising that you can't find people who can do what you suggest at the bottom. it doesn't look like it should take more than a few weeks to learn that. i sent you a connect request on linkedin.
• HermanMartinus 3y ago
  I’ve been running Bear Blog for a few years. It’s a privacy focused, super fast blogging platform, and is making well over $500/mo. It’s also a really fun tool to build and use, with a tight community. https://bearblog.dev https://bearblog.dev
  • imetatroll 3y ago
    Nice X-Header :)
  • ngshiheng 3y ago
    huge fan of your work!
  • em-bee 3y ago
    how did you promote this to find paying users?
  • mutant 3y ago
    Your url?
  • mobiuscog 3y ago
    There seems to be no mention of cost/pricing anywhere. Perhaps it's visible once signed up, as I presume it's not free if it's making money.
    • HermanMartinus 3y ago
      There's a cost to adding a custom domain and media storage at ~$5/mo depending on your country's purchasing power. I'll make a note to add it to the homepage somewhere :)
  • nicbou 3y ago
    It's just so damn fast and simple! And no GDPR banners and newsletter prompts! How do you make money? I can't see any pricing page.
    • 3y ago
• vsnf 3y ago
  These threads, along with the related recurring Show HN solo-founder success stories often seem to either be some form of newsletter/social publication, or analytics platform. I wonder if that's just the natural limit of what teams of 1 can feasibly accomplish, but I do wish there was some more variety in what people were successful with.
  • bmitc 3y ago
    And a lot of the projects, at least in this thread are not passive or even side projects. They're being reported as full-time projects.
  • nicbou 3y ago
    Something different for your consideration: I run a website about German bureaucracy full time. https://allaboutberlin.com/ https://allaboutberlin.com/
    • haaz 3y ago
      Thank you for setting this up, it was incredibly helpful when I moved to Berlin
  • XCSme 3y ago
    I am one of those building an analytics platform. The reason: out of the tens of projects I tried, this is what customers wanted and were willing to pay for. It's not even easy to build, it's a lot harder and more complex than some niche-specific tools. I still do have many other projects, and constantly try new stuff, but this is what worked for me, it was not really my choice, it just happened.
• lucas03 3y ago
  My MMR was on 538 EUR at the end of 2023. I am building not that visually pleasing, but hopefully a useful dividend portfolio tracker - digrin.com. I wrote a small summary here - https://lucas03.com/digrin-com-in-2023/ https://lucas03.com/digrin-com-in-2023/
• eiN3apa7yooz 3y ago
  Doing AI Headshot Generator https://aiheadshotgenerator.app/en/ https://aiheadshotgenerator.app/en/
• binsquare 3y ago
  I started a project to do Search powered by mixture of ai models: https://www.Labophase.com https://www.Labophase.com It's like google but all the results are from different ai models. Some ai models are better at reasoning, others at coding, or have bigger context. Makes money from a tier where more advanced models can be used like gpt4, claude2, mixtral. But a very permissive free-tier has led to a lot of fraud/spam with the associated costs but most users like to see the benefits right off the bat without signing up for an account. Got a few defenses coming up for fraud detection and hopefully cross the $500 barrier soon.
• 255kb 3y ago
  I started working on an open-source API mocking tool six years ago. It's called Mockoon and has recently crossed 500k downloads. Two years ago, I quit my job to focus nearly full-time on it. I'm still freelancing on the side, but it's slowly bringing more money through sponsoring and the SaaS platform I'm building (a bit less than 1000$/month). Hopefully, 2024 is the year I can stop freelancing and live the dream! Work on an open-source project I love while not feeling guilty about not bringing enough money home :D --> https://mockoon.com https://mockoon.com
• RileyJames 3y ago
  I started SupeChoiceForm as a passive income project many years ago: https://superchoiceform.com.au/ https://superchoiceform.com.au/ It started as just a content site, with google Adsense. Making about $1200 per month from ~30k visits. It kept growing in popularity over about 2 years and I finally decided it might be worth some more effort. So I turned it into a web app that took an employee through the process of gathering/generating all the paperwork they require to provide their employer with their superfund details. Effectively just digitising the paper form process with some smart automations. (Superannuation is the 401k of Australia, but probably more widespread as it’s mandatory) That was 2x MVP’s ago. Last year I got two trust partners / co-founders involved and we’ve turned it into an embedded service that can drop into any payroll/hr provider. Raised $1M and now we’re making a lot more than $1200 All because I was nervous about getting Adsense banned for no reason. So thanks google!!
  • KomoD 3y ago
    So is adsense no longer used? (cant see any ads at least) How does it make money now?
    • RileyJames 3y ago
      Correct. We dropped adsense as soon as we could. We now work with, and integrate directly with, the super funds themselves. Often it was those super funds that were advertising on the site via google adsense. We've effectively cut out google as the middle man. But we also now offer a lot more than advertising for the funds.
  • pighive 3y ago
    Your website looks really neat, what JS stack did you choose to build?
    • RileyJames 3y ago
      That website is built on rails, no js stack (beyond stimulus). Our newer, embedded version, is built on Elixir / Phoenix.
• Tidash 3y ago
  1500$ MRR (or ~1000$ after taxes and operating costs) with a (native) Plex audiobook player for iOS and Android. Android accounts for 85% of the userbase and has been the focus last year with a 2.0 release so it's in much better shape than the iOS version, which is still in 1.0 today. MRR is growing 5-10% per month, not sure how big the niche is yet. It's a lot of efforts to maintain both platforms as native apps with a high level of quality, but trully convinced crossplatform solution are not worth it either. -> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.bookcamp.android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.bookcamp.a...
• boundlessdreamz 3y ago
  I built and recently released a UI kit for Rails - https://zestui.com https://zestui.com Built with Phlex, styled with Tailwind with custom built Stimulus controllers. It's got - 25 themes - Dark Mode - Form Builder - Icons - Built in Flash Toast - The components are responsive or have specific mobile views - All the JS needed (Stimulus controllers) is wired up automatically Phlex is a game changer. It is simple, powerful, intuitive and performant. I will never ever write a component as a partial/ViewComponent again. A short video (50 seconds) showing it off: https://youtu.be/OQmDZddLtR8 https://youtu.be/OQmDZddLtR8 It has crossed $500/month but since it's a one time purchase it is too early to tell whether it will sustain since I launched it only in December 2023.
  • dchuk 3y ago
    Well this looks amazing. How easy is it to drop this into a Jumpstart Pro rails app so I can get the best of both worlds?
    • boundlessdreamz 3y ago
      It will work with any existing Rails app as long as you are using - Tailwind - Stimulus Installation instructions are here - https://zestui.com/docs/installation https://zestui.com/docs/installation It is right now only tested with Rails 7 and Ruby 3+ but it should work with Rails 6.1+ and Ruby 2.7+
  • mbm 3y ago
    Nice job, styling Rails in always so painful, at least for me. Been doing it for 10+ years.