26 ms·

Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell

• cvbox 10mo ago
  2024 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42373343 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42373343 2023 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38467691 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38467691 2022 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34190421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34190421 2021 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29667095 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29667095 2020 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24947167 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24947167 2019 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20899863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20899863 2018 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17790306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17790306 2017 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15148804 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15148804
• Frajedo 10mo ago
  Just signed our 3rd customer with TrueCast (600€/month) (https://www.truecast.fr/ https://www.truecast.fr/), which is Granola for tech and non-tech recruiters. Rather than replacing recruiters in the HR process, we want to give them real time hard skills knowledge superpowers so they can better assess candidates before submitting them to their teams. We are convinced that recruiting should remain human-first. There’s also a bot option, for self-conducted interviews, mostly used for open applications for some pre-filtering. We are still unsure on how to enter such market, so we are doing direct networking atm, if you guys have an idea on how you’d do it or want a free trial of the product we’d love having a chat with you about it.
• mkummer 10mo ago
  https://dreamandcolor.com/ https://dreamandcolor.com/ has been a fun solo bootstrapped side project for me for the past 2.5ish years - (specialize in converting photos to coloring pages for parents, educators, etc) I started it primarily wanting to take a shot at productizing an image diffusion model (Stable Diffusion 1.5 when I started) in a novel (at the time) way and it ended up growing legs of it's own. She's steadily chugging along, growing about 10-20% per month with minimal marketing, exceeding all expectations I had for the project when I set out
  • pillefitz 10mo ago
    Well done! How does it compare to using built-in image models like nano banana?
    • mkummer 10mo ago
      You can get great results with nano banana nowadays (ex: "convert this image to a coloring page") - I'd say we focus on 1. consistency with our base style from image to image, 2. likeness (still really tough to get 100% right but we've come a long way since our MVP) and 3. offering fun alternatives (South Park inspired coloring pages, Minecraft style, etc) We also handle all the post-processing (upscaling, image cleaning, etc) that you need in order to get great printed results - with Gemini (Nano Banana) or ChatGPT you've got to pull each image out, possibly remove the watermark, set the curves/levels in photoshop/gimp, upscale it, etc then print the page - you can just hit Export and download a pdf ready to print from our site
  • jama211 9mo ago
    This is fantastic, a perfect example. Good stuff!
• JKCalhoun 10mo ago
  I'm… Oh, making or losing $500/month? Never mind.
  • 3eb7988a1663 10mo ago
    Misery loves company. I am certainly intrigued to see what is out there.
  • Seattle3503 10mo ago
    Only $500? Time to increase the number of nodes in your side projects Kubernetes cluster.
  • groundzeros2015 10mo ago
    I think most ideas should start with the “equivalent” of a cgi bin script and domain name before going crazy with infrastructure. Scaling is so much more fun when customers are maxing out what you have now and improvements lead to direct customer impact.
  • KellyCriterion 9mo ago
    its just about turnover ;-)
• kaesve 10mo ago
  My wife's Etsy shop (https://www.etsy.com/shop/LittleLanternShop https://www.etsy.com/shop/LittleLanternShop) is starting to pick up. She is leaning into creating digital sewing patterns for decorative felt crafts. We have had Etsy success before with 3d printed products, but managing printers and fulfilling orders can be stressful and time consuming, and she was hoping to build up a more passive income stream. She made over $1000 in the past month, which beat both our expectations (We'll get back into 3d printing once life slows down a _little_ bit again)
  • binary132 10mo ago
    Nice one! I love the Our Lady of Lourdes patterns.
  • crobertsbmw 10mo ago
    Yeah, these are super fun! Good luck!
  • bluemoola 10mo ago
    How have you promoted it so far?
  • Keats 9mo ago
    Any tips on that? My wife is starting her Etsy shop (https://www.etsy.com/shop/BravinaPrints https://www.etsy.com/shop/BravinaPrints) but she is not really getting any visits and still trying to figure out what kind of stuff she wants to draw.
• mvkel 10mo ago
  https://www.repth.com https://www.repth.com, an AI cycling coach that I vibe-coded back when gpt-3.5 was hot and vibe coding wasn't yet a thing. We've come a long way! Free for athletes, but I license the underlying "coach" logic to actual, human coaches.
  • Brystephor 10mo ago
    How does this compare to Trainer Road?
    • mvkel 10mo ago
      TR's "AI" claims are a bit of a stretch. It basically just monitors fatigue and will ramp down a prescribed workout to ensure you don't overtrain. The workouts themselves are templates chosen from a list and do not adapt to the rider as an individual. It plugs in a standard periodization schedule with flexible dates. Repth uses AI for everything with a few guardrails. You pick a peak date, describe your peak event, weekly availability, and ftp. Repth then generates a macro plan, and the next week of workouts. As you perform, it will monitor for compliance and adjust the prescription depending on your compliance and feedback. All of it is unique per user, optimized for the demands of the specific event. Overall, TR's approach is fine. Any plan can work as long as you stick to it. I built Repth simply to replace my (human) coach in 2022 and in that regard it has been a huge success
      • ferrufino 9mo ago
        How did you promote it? I find myself in the same market but for planning based on route weather and fitness conditions w/ https://brezza.cc https://brezza.cc - It is very hard.
        • mvkel 9mo ago
          Haven't promoted it at all, beyond having a marketing site live on the web with competent SEO. I should say, it's not hugely popular or anything. But considering that I only built it for my own needs, I look at it more as art than craft. In that way, it can only be a success.
• yboris 10mo ago
  Occasionally $500/month, but more reliably $300/month in sales of my Video Hub App - lets users browse, search, tag, and organize videos on local / network drives. Aiming to have an 8th anniversary release February 2026. $5 per copy (Windows, Max, Linux; keep forever) https://videohubapp.com/ https://videohubapp.com/ MIT open source (build your own copy) https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App
  • combyn8tor 10mo ago
    Curious how you manage licensing?
    • yboris 9mo ago
      When a person buys, they get the download links in the mail; the installers work without any license keys, so buy once, use forever.
  • markdown 9mo ago
    Intel macs only?
    • jotaen 9mo ago
      Not OP, but it looks like the wording of their downloads page (https://videohubapp.com/en/download/ https://videohubapp.com/en/download/) is slightly confusing: - Clicking “Demo” (for macOS) points to the 3.2.0 ARM version - Clicking “Intel Mac” points to the 3.1.0 (!) Intel version The Github release page appears to list all available versions: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App/releases https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App/releases To me, it would have been clearer to avoid the “Demo” button label altogether and be explicit about the different versions and OS targets. Also, I think the visual hierarchy of the two respective buttons is too subtle.
      • markdown 9mo ago
        Hey thanks!
• trubalca 10mo ago
  I sell laser cut decorative maps TheMapsGuy.com
  • darknavi 10mo ago
    What's your laser setup? 80-100W CO2 laser?
    • trubalca 10mo ago
      I use a CO2 laser yeah
      • DubMFG 10mo ago
        If you use LightBurn, hi from the team!
        • darknavi 10mo ago
          Wow! I was using LightBurn this evening for some holiday presents. Hello from a very thankful MacOS user.
  • chirau 10mo ago
    These look nice. If I request a custom city, how long would it take?
    • trubalca 9mo ago
      I can usually get a map shipped out within a day of the order (depending on what time you order at). I'll have you give me the custom map information here: preview.themapsguy.com
  • lemonberry 10mo ago
    These are gorgeous. Nice work.
    • 9mo ago
• strongpigeon 10mo ago
  https://fivethreeone.app/ https://fivethreeone.app/ a weightlifting app for 5/3/1 has been earning me ~$1000 a month for over two years now. I'm actively working on a successor that allows you to create your own custom workout programs using formulas: https://vis.fitness https://vis.fitness
  • greenknight 10mo ago
    Love the AI generated image, "Extra-Large (>72pt) Font". Made me chuckle. Definetly a feature of the app. But looks really cool ill be trialing it this week!
    • strongpigeon 10mo ago
      Send me an email (see my profile) if you want to try the custom program creation. I’m starting the beta this week.
  • sonderotis 10mo ago
    Wow this is pretty cool. I am working on my first mobile app. what tips can you give. I am planning to build in public on twitter, substack and share my coding process here on HN. It is a carpooling app.
    • strongpigeon 10mo ago
      Don’t rely on organic App Store traffic until you’ve hit a certain size.
  • aaronbrethorst 10mo ago
    What’s the sweet pup’s name?
    • strongpigeon 10mo ago
      Her name is Greta
  • 10mo ago
• rriley 10mo ago
  https://unrav.io https://unrav.io . Lets users reshape any article, paper, or video into the form that actually helps them think, mind-maps, summaries, podcasts, or interactive Q&A. Launched as part of the Bolt.new hackathon in August and growing steadily. Going from a 100% vibe coded web app to a full production system has been quite a ride!
  • nefrix 9mo ago
    This is such a cool idea; i am afraid in a few years people will stop watching full videos, instead they will ask ai bots to summarise it.
• parttimelarry 10mo ago
  Been doing a YouTube channel on Python for Finance for quite a while and make some affiliate revenue: https://youtube.com/@parttimelarry https://youtube.com/@parttimelarry
  • chirau 10mo ago
    Oh, it's you! One of my favorite channels on YouTube. Learnt Alpaca and TA-Liband backtesting from you and also built my screener with your vids. Awesome content always. I am looking to go through the IB ones soon.
  • KellyCriterion 9mo ago
    Jesus, 130k++ subscribers, WOW!!!! This is a huge success!!! Im also in this field, never thought that you could collect so many people on this niche topic! If you say: some affiliates - think about getting a sponsoring partner for some B2B stuff, and speak the advertorial by yourself(!), one slot per one video/show. In my country we have a small but good&nerdy startup podcast run by two guys - they do advertising this way, mainly B2B tech stuff (accounting software etc.) - in an interview recently, they unveiled their numbers - per slot (20-25 seconds) they get 8k - 10k. And they have a couple of slots per month.
    • KellyCriterion 9mo ago
      haha, getting downvoted for applauding someone who built a successful product, while I judged based on my own professional experience? :-))
• crobertsbmw 10mo ago
  I’m still selling Computer Engineering for Babies. And I just launched a new book called Simple Machines Made Simple on Kickstarter a month or two ago. Both books are basically just simple interactive demos for kids and adults. https://hackylabs.com https://hackylabs.com
  • gustavoaca1997 10mo ago
    I always see your ads. My first baby is expected to be born next year and I cannot wait to buy it for her
  • anotherhue 10mo ago
    Literally the first book I bought for my hellspawn. We had fun working out the mechanisms.
  • 1-more 10mo ago
    Bought probably 6 copies between the first and second. Love this book! First gets stuck in NOT mode sometimes but it’s chill.
    • crobertsbmw 10mo ago
      Yeah, I’ve improved it a lot, but a lot of the books from the run I did 18 months ago get confused on the cover page thinking it’s open to the NOT page.
      • 1-more 9mo ago
        ooooh what was the fix? It seems so hard to rely on light for the page numbers! My niece was just doing "For Big Babies" in a dim room and my brother in law had to point his flashlight at it to keep it on the current page.
  • tyrust 10mo ago
    My kid got a copy of your first book as a gift a couple years ago. It's really fun to have on the shelf. The buttons are so satisfyingly clicky. Thanks!
• czhu12 10mo ago
  https://canine.sh https://canine.sh - makes it dead simple to turn your Kubernetes environment into a Heroku like PaaS. Mainly used in organizations with developers who want to deploy to a corporate Kubernetes environment, but don’t want to deal with the complexities. It’s fully open source so we’re covered by sponsors, the largest being Portainer $5k+ / m from sponsorships. Makes it possible to keep the cloud offering totally free.
  • ekropotin 10mo ago
    Holy cow! That’s exactly what I’ve been looking for my homelab.
    • czhu12 9mo ago
      Give me a shout if you need help setting it up! On the discord, or chris@ canine<dot>sh
  • SeriousM 10mo ago
    Is canine for kubernetes as coolify is for docker? Lovely!
    • czhu12 10mo ago
      You know what, that’s a better way to describe it than I’ve ever been able to come up with!
  • strangelove026 9mo ago
    API Reference returns a 404 btw https://docs.canine.sh/swagger/page.html https://docs.canine.sh/swagger/page.html
    • czhu12 9mo ago
      Yeah, it’s currently https://canine.sh/api-docs https://canine.sh/api-docs Been trying to find time to fix the issue on the other side
  • 9mo ago
• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• mesmertech 10mo ago
  Got two websites but the second one is basically a clone of the first with better visuals and better tech stack that I actually want to work on https://aieasypic.com https://aieasypic.com - 3k per month (declining cause not working on it a lot, just maintenance) https://bestphoto.ai https://bestphoto.ai - 2k per month (increasing cause of better SEO) Now trying my hand at an actual non-consumer product, not that b2b but something to make making ads easy because that’s where I find myself getting stuck on when doing fb ads or TikTok organic stuff : https://admakeai.com https://admakeai.com
  • rsanek 9mo ago
    It doesn't seem like any of the photos on bestphoto.ai load for me. This is on Firefox on Mac; does seem to work in Safari.
• tndibona 10mo ago
  Trendyzip.com Home sale trends to help buyers make informed decisions. A basic report is $5
• abe-101 10mo ago
  https://mergecal.org https://mergecal.org - First project I built when learning Django a couple years back. Takes multiple iCal feed URLs, merges them into one feed. Turns out people actually need this!
  • tiziano88 10mo ago
    cool project, but what on earth is going on with scrolling and back button?
  • tecleandor 9mo ago
    I almost built something like this a short time ago. Some devices/softwares (in my case it was the Supernote calendar app) only allow for one calendar as a source, and I had to merge my work and personal calendars to show up in my device. :)
• devornotdev 10mo ago
  [dead]
• dSebastien 10mo ago
  Around 3K/m with my side projects: https://tools.dsebastien.net https://tools.dsebastien.net Revenue from courses, apps, community, books... Still not able to pay myself anything though
• upmostly 10mo ago
  https://dbpro.app https://dbpro.app I’m building DB Pro, a modern desktop database client for developers who want a fast, local-first workflow. I started in October 2025, launched v1 at the end of November, and just crossed $1k MRR. I also post devlogs of life building and marketing DB Pro and am about to post devlog #4. The latest one is here if anyone’s curious: https://youtu.be/-T4GcJuV1rM https://youtu.be/-T4GcJuV1rM Still very early, but it’s been fun seeing something fairly “boring” resonate once the UX is treated seriously.
  • bgdkbtv 10mo ago
    Looks cool and congrats on the $1k MRR! Is the app built with electron?
    • upmostly 10mo ago
      Thanks! Yep, it’s built with Electron. Performance has been a big focus from day one, and it’s been really performant in all of my testing so far. The goal was a proper desktop-first experience with local performance and direct database access, rather than trying to force it into a web app. Although I do have plans to offer a self-hosted version as well.
  • devonhk 10mo ago
    Any reason why neon isn't supported even though it speaks the postgresql wire protocol?
    • upmostly 10mo ago
      It has some behaviour differences (connection handling, pooling, serverless constraints) that I want to support properly rather than “mostly works”. Right now I'm focused on making the core experience rock solid across the most common setups first. My focus has been UX and DevEx and it's working. Neon support is on the roadmap though, and once I add it, it’ll be first-class rather than a checkbox integration.
  • kaizenb 10mo ago
• and-not-drew 10mo ago
  I've got 2 that are kind of intermingled. Each averages a little over $500/mo on their own though. Sportsbook API (https://sportsbookapi.com/ https://sportsbookapi.com/) - A single API to get odds data from a number of US Sportsbooks Odds Assist Pro (http://pro.oddsassist.com/ http://pro.oddsassist.com/) - An odds scanner tool that shows both current odds and things like arbitrage, plus ev, middles. This actually started as just a UI for me to quickly do sanity checks on the API data and eventually grew into a full site. The site is on a subdomain of a site my business partner had built long before we met, so it's kind of positioned as the plus version of that site. API revenue is really stable and has been pretty consistent slow growth. Pro's revenue is all over the place since it's almost all referrals and promos with big spikes around major sporting events. Probably averages at least $500/mo if you look at the entire year.
  • daverathmanner 9mo ago
    Awesome sites!
• huydotnet 10mo ago
  I started my project in 2023 and posted here, made 20k that year. The traffic has been slowly decreasing during 2024, and last October, I was officially entering losing territory, where the cost of running it exceeded the total earnings (mostly due to free trials). It's been a good journey. Thank you so much to whoever keeps running this thread!
  • ycombinete 10mo ago
    What do you think led to the fall off?
    • huydotnet 10mo ago
      Many reasons: 1) lack of marketing, 2) I stopped working on it for a while, 3) because of #2, the app lacks new features to attract users. Another one but turned out it was never really a big deal: some chatbots from frontier AI labs started to support those niche features (people still coming to my app for the flexibility of using multiple AI models). I think the biggest problem was #2, life kept pulling me the other way.
  • KellyCriterion 9mo ago
    how do you deal with continuous Google-degrading-risk? I stopped a site lately i ran for 10 years, because Google changed the ranking so often over the years, finally traffic drowned nearly completely like 1k visitors per month, it was so frustrating so I just stopped the webserver after so many years.
    • huydotnet 9mo ago
      I think the sustainable way is to put more and more backlinks out there, more blog posts, etc. I actually suffered from it too.
  • tecleandor 9mo ago
    Just a small comment, as I don't know if you're planning to wrap up or keep maintaining the product... I can't find the pricing of the product on the site, I only find that I get '10 free credits', but I don't know how much a credit is and what can I do with it. Home page says it's one credit per diagram, but then the docs say it's a certain amount of credits per modification (that could be correct or not, I guess...) I usually skip if I can't find the price, but it could also happen that people create the trial account, spends quickly the credits, then they find the price and it doesn't fit them. Of course, there's always people coming just for the free credits. I don't know if this is helpful to you or not, but I hope so :)
• pdyc 10mo ago
  does negative 500 count?
  • KellyCriterion 9mo ago
    sure, its just about turnover :-D
    • pdyc 9mo ago
      wow i did not think of that! here is my project EasyAnalytica.com - Build dashboards from google sheets, CSV files.
      • KellyCriterion 9mo ago
        What you have looks like an "up & running product" - great! How many paying customers do you have, if I may ask?
• whitefang 10mo ago
  Formester started as a side hustle but today we make $7000/month. All I wanted was to build a good product which our users feel like using. Help them with exceptional customer service and build a team and a company worth waking up to.
  • crobertsbmw 10mo ago
    But you didn’t say what you are making!
    • djmips 10mo ago
      https://formester.com/ https://formester.com/ Easiest way to build powerful forms
      • bilekas 9mo ago
        This is huge, actually I have used this before the free version, is this a 'side-project' or do you have some staff because it seems a big operation. Nice job.
    • deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
• hboon 10mo ago
  I work on https://theblue.social https://theblue.social which provides Bluesky native tools and cross-posting tools.
• bsnnkv 10mo ago
  Not consistently, but there have been a few months this year where I have hit $500 selling individual commercial use licenses for my tiling window manager[1] https://lgug2z.com/software/komorebi https://lgug2z.com/software/komorebi
  • pillefitz 10mo ago
    I'd buy it for a 20 USD one-time fee
    • bsnnkv 10mo ago
      The experiment is end-user mediated wealth redistribution from large corporations by leveraging reimbursement mechanisms, and so far I'm content with the results
      • cess11 10mo ago
        I like this, bookmarked in case I'll ever be forced by work into MICROS~1 operating systems again.
  • piekvorst 10mo ago
    Nice licensing
• __mharrison__ 10mo ago
  Courses and books about Python, Pandas, XGBoost, Visualization, and soon AI
• davidcann 10mo ago
  I make https://universymbols.com https://universymbols.com and it’s still new, but off to a good start. It can create/restyle feature icons to expand an app’s icon set. It supports SF Symbols, Material Symbols, and a bunch of open source styles, but I’m adding the ability to make a private custom style target.
• postatic 10mo ago
  I run SideProjectors - https://www.sideprojectors.com https://www.sideprojectors.com - a marketplace where people can buy/sell their side projects and businesses. I've been running it for over 14 years now.
  • fandorin 10mo ago
    interesting! how is it going? what’s the average price tag for such projects?
• AwkwardPanda 10mo ago
  Just over $500 in subscriptions right now since posting on HackerNews and Reddit. This is mostly because of the posts gaining high engagement and people signing up and subscribing. Many also migrating from other apps. Expecting the revenue to go down next month https://onlyrecipeapp.com https://onlyrecipeapp.com
  • nefrix 9mo ago
    Cool app but i feel 35$/year is a cost that is not justified for me, specially that i can extract the ingredients and the steps of any recipe from a video recipe in chatgpt, and then save it in notes.
• manuelmoreale 10mo ago
  Not sure if blogging, collecting blogs, and interviewing people about blogging is considered a side project but ever now and again, depending on how generous the people on the other side are, I hit 500/month in donations. Everything I do is free for everyone but for the past few years I’ve been running an entirely optional membership program that starts at $1/month. I’m (probably naively) a big believer in kindness and I keep refusing to monetize what I do in any other way.
• noelfranthomas 10mo ago
  My friends and I are working on Norma. It helps you curate a dataset that captures as much signal as possible for model training. See norma.grouplabs.ca
• alessandra140 10mo ago
  My parter and I made a fun erotic story generator called Smitten (https://smittenstories.com https://smittenstories.com ) during the valentine's day weekend as a way for couples to spice things up. Initially it was running on donations, but with model costs rising we had to add a paywall. I have a full time job but it's still fun to run this on the side by spending few hours on it over the weekends!
• agotterer 10mo ago
  A friend and I host a monthly dinner club for people interested in ethnic cuisine. We work with a single restaurant each month to create an 8-12 course all inclusive price fixe menu. The food is served family style and is authentic to the region we are hosting. We typically host the dinners on a Tues or Wed when the restaurants in our region aren’t too busy and could use the extra business. Since 2023 we’ve been to 44 restaurants. In 2025 we served 1,099 guests and generated $126k in revenue. https://www.deadchefssociety.com/ https://www.deadchefssociety.com/
  • VoidWhisperer 10mo ago
    Out of curiosity, if you don't mind sharing, what is the sort of profit you see on that 126,000 as i'm assuming alot of that goes to paying the restaurants?
    • agotterer 9mo ago
      Most of it goes to paying for the meal. We make around a 20% margin. Our cost to operate the business is quite low, but we do invest a lot of our personal time into it. It’s a labor of love. Our biggest cost center is when we guarantee a minimum number of seats and come up a little short. Doesn’t happen often, but when it does it eats into the margin fast.
      • gaws 9mo ago
        > we do invest a lot of our personal time into it What's the process like?
        • agotterer 9mo ago
          My partner and I divide and conquer. He focuses on front of house and I handle the backoffice. The process starts ~3 months before the event. We start by picking a theme or region. Then contact some restaurants that fit the criteria and pitch them the event. That kicks off the back and forth on cost and menu. Around 4 weeks before the event we send a save the date + previous event recap email. We summarize the last event and tease the next event, without giving away the actual resturant or type of food. Over the next week we prep the invite email and payment forms. This requires putting the dishes on our menu template, research and writing about the history of the dishes, the region, and the resturant. Some of this content also goes onto our website. Three weeks out we send the invite, which is a lottery system. Members have 5 days to request a seat and place a credit card hold. 5 days later we run the lottery (I wrote some basic software to randomize assignment, conver the card auth to capture and release any cards that didn't get assigned a ticket). Then we send an email to everyone who got in with which night they recieved and another email to anyone who was waitlisted. Everyone is added to a spreadsheet to track. 1 week before the event we send a reminder email and a last chance to cancel before the ticket is non refundable. At the event we play host and check each guest in and say hi to everyone. Then we give a prepared ~5 min intro about the food, restaurant, celebrate any milestone members, and make any general house keeping accounments. Our 20 club members get a branded apron. At the event we take video and pictures. Over the course of the next 4 weeks we post dish pictures with descriptions and history of the dish on our instagram. We also make a 1-2 min recap video of the event which also goes on our instagram and website. Separate from the actual event related work we have to manage the books, handle members emails, and review membership requests. More recently we started selling shirts, so there's a little work in managing that as well.
• duck 10mo ago
  Still doing https://hackernewsletter.com/ https://hackernewsletter.com/ after 15 years thanks to many of you.
  • zoomastigophore 9mo ago
    I subscribed last december after knowing about it in last year's version of this thread. It is great and gives a very good summary of the HN week, I love it!
    • duck 9mo ago
      That is great to hear, thanks for being a subscriber!
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    freshly subscribed - had a peek in the archives, noticed a link to curpress.com that appears to be offline.
  • 0x00cl 9mo ago
    How are you making money on this side project?
  • johntash 9mo ago
    Are you making money just from sponsors or something else too?
    • duck 9mo ago
      Yeah, just sponsors. I hope to use it as an outlet for other projects in the near future.
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    I'm reading this because of the newsletter! HN is a time sink so the newsletter lifts only items worthy of attention to my email. Been a sub for many years. Thank you!
• wahnfrieden 10mo ago
  Manabi Reader - learn Japanese by reading More than $500/month. It currently sustains my full-time focus https://reader.manabi.io https://reader.manabi.io I quit my job a couple years back to work on this app full-time, as well as its companion flashcard app, Manabi Flashcards. The goal is to help you learn through immersion and eventually replace some of your flashcard reviews time with reading (once I finish auto-reviews for flashcards) What's special about it? Manabi Reader became popular as an Japanese-focused alternative to services like LingQ in that it locally tracks and analyzes all the words and kanji you read and study. It shows you which words are new and which you're currently learning via flashcards, so you can easily find content that suits your level and see what flashcards to prioritize adding. It also passively accumulates an on-device (and in your personal iCloud) corpus of example sentences from your reading. It’s also one of few ways to mine sentences including pitch accent directly into Anki on iPhone. I had built this part-time while working over many years (starting with flashcards and then the reader app) but going full-time gave me the time to do a full rewrite: SwiftUI, native iOS + macOS, and an offline-first architecture that syncs with iCloud and my server in the background. Although it has a companion SRS algorithm (FSRS) flashcard app, it's also excellent for mining Anki cards. This works with AnkiMobile on iOS and AnkiConnect on desktop. You can use it like a web browser for the web, or subscribe to RSS feeds. It comes with a bunch of curated content by level. Recently I added EPUB support, pitch accents, and note-taking with todos. I'm now almost done adding a manga mode via Mokuro, and Netflix/streaming video support via realtime captioning of audio streams. To scale this with UGC/influencer market I need to make it more beginner friendly. Currently it assumes you can read kana at least.
• dbgrman 10mo ago
  Launched Standly, a standing desk companion app on iOS and Max in Feb 2025. Steadily grew it by talking to people on reddit and in person. Mostly word of mouth sales and ASO. Initially it was only for mac but launching iOS has been good. Most downloads coming from organic search. Most people like it to build stamina for standing and stretching while working, especially those with lower back pain. Most customers are from EU. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/standly-standing-desk-timer/id6502892335 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/standly-standing-desk-timer/id...
• mmoustafa 10mo ago
  Right about $500 now, down from $5K at peak AI assistant in your iMessage group chats https://olly.bot https://olly.bot
  • peterspath 9mo ago
    How did you make a bot that can send iMessages? I want to make a service on my Mac that can send notifications through iMessage. (preferable multiple chats, different topics for different notification types)
    • westondeboer 9mo ago
      seems to be a few apps that can do this, but you need a mac to do it https://github.com/linjunpop/imessage https://github.com/linjunpop/imessage https://github.com/danikhan632/iMessage-API https://github.com/danikhan632/iMessage-API
• breakingstuff 10mo ago
  Started Find Boxes in 2024, it's a project and inventory management tool for audio visual companies. Took longer than expected to get the first customers, but I'm a bit above $300 a month now. I hope to cross the $500 a month mark sometime next year. https://www.findboxes.co https://www.findboxes.co
  • nefrix 9mo ago
    This app looks really cool. Did you developed also an ios app for it? It would be much easier to do all the task in an app.
• mickael-kerjean 10mo ago
  I launched Filestash [1] as my response to the infamous “Dropbox should just be FTP” comment. Once I had a decent FTP experience, I kept going: adding support for pretty much every storage protocol, plugins to expose Dropbox (or anything else) over FTP, SFTP, MCP, or S3, and all the features I wished Dropbox had, with plugins to customize everything. The base product is open-source and I make money from custom builds, additional plugins, paid support, and the occasional extra feature for companies with specific needs. It's a bit more than noodle profitable but quite under a normal salary. [1] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash
  • PurpleRamen 9mo ago
    Where is the dropbox-part in this? This seems to be a filemanager for remote storages, which is kinda the opposite of dropbox, which is mainly a local service for syncing data. Or did the documentation missed explaining the sync-function?
  • randallsquared 9mo ago
    The faux screenshot of HN tickled me.
  • two_handfuls 9mo ago
    I found a typo: "Apply fined grained access control to keep your shared content under control." should be "fine-grained access control". There: https://www.filestash.app/smb-client.html https://www.filestash.app/smb-client.html
  • eleventen 9mo ago
    What a blast from the past. I attempted to build a file-sharing tool for my team when we had video and images strewn across the org. I prototyped embedding filestash for the frontend. It was basically a backend for generating STS credentials on the fly using a more ergonomic interface. It never went anywhere and I haven't thought about it in years, but I still believe it was a good idea that I just didn't have the organizational clout or time to push forward. Edit: apparently I contributed at some point too? I *barely* remember that. Glad to see the project is still succeeding! [1] https://github.com/subdavis/workspaces-io https://github.com/subdavis/workspaces-io
• bradyriddle 10mo ago
  Not quite a side project, but I launched CoPlay about 3 years ago. Slow but steady growth up to 6k MRR for 2025. I think we will just about double that in 2026. CoPlay is a platform for managing fleets of gaming consoles, users and subscriptions for pediatric hospitals. Think of it as an mdm for Xbox devices/users that does managed subscriptions https://coplay.io/ https://coplay.io/
• habosa 10mo ago
  https://codeapprove.com https://codeapprove.com Basically it’s a code review UI on GitHub for ex-Googlers who miss Critique.
• wonderfuly 10mo ago
  Last year, I came across NotebookLM and immediately noticed a pain point: importing the web pages I was browsing into NotebookLM required several steps. So in less than a day, I developed this Chrome extension: NotebookLM Web Importer[1], which allows for one-click importing. As NotebookLM has gained popularity this year, my extension has also seen great growth. So, in July, I added paid premium features to unlock additional features. It exceeded my expectations and quickly went over $500 a month. It now has over 100,000 users and is still growing. [1] https://notebooklm-web-importer.com https://notebooklm-web-importer.com
  • Fiveplus 10mo ago
    I really liked your extension having used it in the past. Great job and really useful! If you don't mind me asking, how do you manage the paid features from a technical point of view? Do you give paid users a token to enter in the extension which then activates certain features or is it something else?
    • wonderfuly 10mo ago
      It is account based, and I'm using Clerk for the auth.
  • gustavoaca1997 10mo ago
    That sounds awesome. Can you please talk about which premium options you added?
  • donchuru 9mo ago
    Wow, this is awesome. How did you market this? 100,000 users is a lot.
• hemmert 10mo ago
  About 8 years in, Escape Team steadily keeps growing, which surprises me (I didn’t add any new missions for about 5 years): https://www.escape-team.com https://www.escape-team.com It‘s making about $700 on iOS and $300 on Android, solely from $2.99 IAPs for the later missions in the game (the first 2 missions are free). I think a main reason for this is that escape rooms (and games) don’t „saturate“: you play them only once, because then you know the solutions. So another escape room (place, game, app) doesn’t cannibalize the market - it may rather strengthen the others by fostering it as a group activity. I also put 0$ into ads- it solely spreads itself by being a group activity (3-5 people are best) and through its mission editor (people can make their own missions, used in school and for birthdays etc). Curious to see where it goes next!
  • 3eb7988a1663 10mo ago
    The link to your community built missions is down.
    • hemmert 9mo ago
      Uh-oh, thank you!
• jimnotgym 10mo ago
  Can we establish a convention? If you sold $500p/m and had costs of zero, then you made $500. If you sold $500p/m and had costs of $450 p/m then you made $50p/m I know the saas people have high margins, but some of the commenters clearly have a much lower margin
  • Lionga 9mo ago
    Angry Scam Altman noises who "made" 20 Billion by spending 100 Billion
• gabriel-uribe 10mo ago
  Sadly not $500/mo, but I do get a few sales on https://dailychinesestories.com https://dailychinesestories.com each month. It's as simple as it sounds - a story in Chinese at your HSK level for your preferred themes once a day.
  • xcubic 9mo ago
    AI?
    • gabriel-uribe 9mo ago
      Yes
• ablanton 10mo ago
  I'm at year 1.5 and built this software for making small art books https://zine.baby https://zine.baby The goal is to make physical books. It's still early days, but fun to see what people are creating.
  • chrismorgan 10mo ago
    I see no indications of any revenue?
• rozenmd 10mo ago
  I run OnlineOrNot - https://OnlineOrNot.com https://OnlineOrNot.com It started as just an uptime checker for websites, eventually I added support for APIs and cron jobs, and automated status pages (you may have seen this one yesterday: https://hackernews.onlineornot.com/ https://hackernews.onlineornot.com/) I started it in 2021, I give it two hours a day before work every workday, and I cut scope on most features to ensure they're shippable in two hours. Then I iterate. It works because it's default-alive. I keep a full time job to be able to build it exactly how I want. Like my React blog, I started it knowing thousands of others were doing the same thing. I made a bet that my unique perspective would be useful to others, and it paid off. Has been above $500/mo since 2022, growing steadily since (still a few years away from being able to replace my salary).
  • josefresco 9mo ago
    This interests me because I recently started building my own monitoring service but stopped because of the existing / entrenched competitors. While it was fun to build the PoC I got to a point where it was becoming "work" and I questioned the ROI. How did you decide to persevere despite this?
    • rozenmd 9mo ago
      I had a habit of building for two hours a day, so I didn't have a lack of motivation or anything, but what boosted it most was getting better at sales and marketing to make it worth building.
• tikotus 10mo ago
  https://cluesbysam.com https://cluesbysam.com I started making a daily logic puzzle called Clues by Sam in May and it's been stadily growing since. The number one thing people were asking for was more puzzles, so I started selling puzzle packs instead of monetizing with ads. The reception has been great, and the revenue has been enough for me to decline some consulting gigs and instead focus on improving the game.
  • DuncanCoffee 9mo ago
    Love it, I discovered it last week and bought a supporter pack after two days! Everytime I get stuck I'm 100% sure you made a mistake... Until I find my own mistake
    • tikotus 9mo ago
      Thank you so much! Indeed, it's quite tempting to blame the game, but the algorithm that ensures all valid deductions are enabled hasn't been wrong a single time since it was finished in June. Often I don't believe it myself, but it always turns out to be smarter than me!
  • kurtis_reed 9mo ago
    Hi Sam
    • tikotus 9mo ago
      Hi there!
  • lucasqueiroz 9mo ago
    I love the puzzles, I played once and already got the Pack #1, it's a great game! As soon as I finish #1, I will for sure get #2!
    • tikotus 9mo ago
      Awesome! Thank you so much!
• jianzong 10mo ago
  I have been building an iOS net worth tracker app as a side project for more than 5 years now: https://www.percento.app https://www.percento.app I was an accountant for 3 years before I switched my career to be a programmer, then I kept coding for 10+ years in big tech companies and had always wanted to build a product on my own. Eventually, I found the niche to combine my finance knowledge and my iOS skills into this App and happily building for a few years.
  • leipert 9mo ago
    Can I share data with my partner? I’ve been looking for a way to help my partner understand where we at money-wise.
    • jianzong 9mo ago
      ah sorry currently there is no share data feature although I've heard this feature request from time to time, I probably should consider implementing this later. The premium membership can be shared with family members though -- one purchase for all members.
• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• nhatcher 10mo ago
  I was hesitant to add my own but I think you might find it interesting as we make money not from clients but from grants. We have IronCalc[1]. We don't make money from customers as we don't have a finalized product yet. But we have an ongoing grant from the NLnet[2]. You can have a look at the kind of projects they are granting money. It's always a source of inspiration. That being said IronCalc takes a lot of time from me. Way more than a side project should. [1]: https://www.ironcalc.com https://www.ironcalc.com [2]: https://nlnet.nl/project/IronCalc/ https://nlnet.nl/project/IronCalc/
  • written-beyond 9mo ago
    This is lovely! I'm surprised I had never heard of it before today
  • tda 9mo ago
    The friction to try it out is already really low, I like that! But it could be even lower if instead of an image the interactive version is served right on the landing page. Great project!
    • nhatcher 9mo ago
      Yes, Dani the designer involved in the project, keeps saying that. There are two things that stops me from doing that: * It would make the landing page a bit heavier * I would need to synchronize deployments somehow But I guess I should do that sooner rather than later. Thanks!
      • RestartKernel 9mo ago
        Just my two cents, but: - In terms of data, this is nothing compared to any site serving a bunch of images. The compute would differ, but loading speed shouldn't be an issue if you can render the HTML first, and hydrate it after page load. This static HTML would then also serve as fallback when Javascript is disabled. - For a quick demo, I doubt you will lose people by embedding an older version. Serving a version of a few months ago seems like 80% of the work, with 20% of the effort, in terms of deployment. Anyhow, nice to see government funds put to a good cause!
• janm31415 9mo ago
  https://www.jamp-audio.com https://www.jamp-audio.com I started making audio plugins for iOS 2 years ago. I'm making about $300/month.
• sschueller 9mo ago
  I made a public transportation departure board (for Switzerland) for your home or business. https://stationdisplay.com/ https://stationdisplay.com/
  • PUSH_AX 9mo ago
    This is pretty cool, can I ask why you decided to ship hardware and not a subscription to a dashboard that people could put on any mounted monitor?
    • KeplerBoy 9mo ago
      Most likely because those dashboards are available for free from your local public transport operator.
    • sschueller 9mo ago
      It came out of a project that I did [1] from which I wanted to see what it takes to turn that into an actual product[2]. Hardware is a while other game than software especially in low quantity as you still need to deal with things like CE. [1] https://sschueller.github.io/posts/vbz-fahrgastinformation/ https://sschueller.github.io/posts/vbz-fahrgastinformation/ [2] https://sschueller.github.io/posts/turning-a-project-into-a-product/ https://sschueller.github.io/posts/turning-a-project-into-a-...
  • LunaSea 9mo ago
    Fun project! What type of customers do you have?
  • butz 9mo ago
    Neat. Consider building a version that is usable outdoors and clearly visible from further away in daylight, and at night, and you might be able to offer it to some public transport companies in various countries, that are still using devices running Windows to display transport schedules. Market them using digital sovereignty and sustainability angles.
  • alsetmusic 9mo ago
• laurentiurad 9mo ago
  I built and run several SaaS platforms: - https://dave-bot.com https://dave-bot.com -> a full-stack AI platform where you can generate videos, images, music, code, 3d objects with frontier Gen AI models. - https://headsnap.io https://headsnap.io -> a platform that you can generate images of yourself based on 4 selfies. - https://quantiq.live https://quantiq.live -> a service providing financial and historical data for stocks, as well as government trades. - https://aivestor.tech https://aivestor.tech -> an AI agent that picks small/midcap stocks and trades them using Alpaca API. It uses Reddit, news, polymarket, Google Trends and many other data sources to take investment decisions. - @Polyglot_lingua_bot -> a voice-enabled Telegram-based bot that can help you learn new languages. - https://select.supply https://select.supply -> a directory of carefully-curated and well-crafted products. All of those allowed me to quit my day job and live a comfortable and flexible life. I still invest time in maintenance and adding new features, but I love coding, marketing and everything that comes with promoting and selling a SaaS (and I also have a serious addiction for Stripe notifications). On top of that, I developed my own software agency where I help clients build and scale software (https://bitheap.ch https://bitheap.ch).
  • eXpl0it3r 9mo ago
    What's your source and/or quality of the financial data? How much do you cover? What data fields do you provide?
    • laurentiurad 9mo ago
      I fetch those from 10-Q forms through an internal scraper I built. The response is quite big, you can check it out here: https://www.quantiq.live/docs https://www.quantiq.live/docs
      • infecto 9mo ago
        Honestly looks like a scam and your description of it makes it even sound more like one. Most of those fields you return in that docs page have nothing to do with k or qs and are equity pricing data you are buying from another third party. Not a knock just being honest as it looks like you just don’t know so maybe this helps. Here is an example of a real company that scrapes k/q docs. https://sec-api.io/docs https://sec-api.io/docs
• dsincl12 9mo ago
  We're a group of developers who worked together years ago. We meet a few times a year, but scheduling is always a hassle with endless back-and-forth trying to align everyone's calendars. Frustrated by this, I built Troviamo to solve it automatically. I know similar tools exist, but this one is modern and tailored to exactly what we needed. https://troviamo.app https://troviamo.app
  • MyFirstSass 9mo ago
    How's this different than the good old Doodle everyone uses in europe at least? https://doodle.com/en/ https://doodle.com/en/
• kobiguru 9mo ago
  It's just been a month since I set up a proper website, and I've already received my first $ 500 in a side gig. The jobs started before I set up the website. I help businesses automate their admin work if they already use Google Workspace products using App Script and Typescript. https://mereth.dev/ https://mereth.dev/
• BeniBoy 9mo ago
  I designed a pocket music instrument. I partnered with a company in China called Seeedstudio, they do the manufacturing, shipping, customer handling, etc. and I receive royalties on each sale. I varies from month to month, but above the 500$/month on 2025 :) I love to be able to focus on the design and not the practicalities of selling a hardware product! https://minichord.com/ https://minichord.com/
  • alsetmusic 9mo ago
    I'm a recording electronic musician and clicked through with interest. Maybe I overlooked it, but I didn't see where I could hear how it sounds. It should be so obvious that I can't miss it, so even if it's there, I'd suggest making the link more prominent.
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• pewpawpew 9mo ago
  Made PrivacyPolicyURL.com => get a live URL for all the forms asking for it in under a minute.
• fullstackchris 9mo ago
  I have a variety of education (books, courses) and run fintech SaaS, which combined are finally providing around $2K/month in profits since around July this year (for a long time, was hovering around that $500 mark) My first successful SaaS, The Wheel Screener, a screener optimized for selling options: https://wheelscreener.com https://wheelscreener.com A sister spin-off LEAPS Screener, for buying LEAPS options: https://leapsscreener.com https://leapsscreener.com And, just launched in November, but already profitable, VannaCharm, a dashboard to view and watch in real time dealer hedging metrics: https://vannacharm.com https://vannacharm.com Looking to launch 1-2 more SaaS in 2026, trying to get to the point where I can do this full-time, let's get it folks!
• Etheon 9mo ago
  I created Multy 5 years ago. Thanks to a post on HN at that time, it was a small success (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25870504 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25870504) Since then, I continue to maintain the website and I have around 50k lists, 8k users, and around 400€ MRR (ads and subscriptions). I'd love to see more users, but I'm glad of what I did with multy ! If you want to check: https://multy.me https://multy.me
  • internet_points 9mo ago
    how do you deal with spam/abuse?
    • Etheon 9mo ago
      Dashboard and moderation. I created an admin dashboard to check users and lists and can easily delete / ban users. Right now it's fine with the number of lists created per day
• brzezmac 9mo ago
  I'm building a "mail merge for PowerPoint": - https://pptxmailmerge.com https://pptxmailmerge.com Still in MVP mode - but it already made some sales. What's different about it from similar solutions is the way you can get data from an Excel file (most other companies have the JSON and CSV figured out). It supports Excel style addressing so it's pretty flexible on how you reach for the data inside a PowerPoint template (access every sheet, every cell, named range or table to use it in merging process). People use it for various kinds of use-cases - creating certificates, automating pricing offers, delivering employee feedback forms, preparing market research presentations and even subtitles for a theatrical play.
• skwee357 9mo ago
  I run a dead-simple, one-time, online fax service called JustFax Online[0]. While I don't have a recurring revenue as I operate one one-time payment, for the past months I have been consistently grossing over €500/mo. This also brings tears to my eyes, as I remember[1] browsing these threads and being amazed (still am) by all the people who make side projects and make money from them, and at the same time thinking that I will never reach this milestone, and yet, here I am. [0]: https://justfaxonline.com https://justfaxonline.com [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39110194#39141819 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39110194#39141819
  • zandert 9mo ago
    That's super cool, how do you run it? Are you using some other service under the hood, and just abstract their annoying pricing model?
    • pjc50 9mo ago
      It used to be possible to do this with a faxmodem; these days telephony is over IP, so there might be telco APIs for it. But, because it's a telco, that will be annoying and hidden. UK: OFCOM are phasing out the fax support requirement https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-and-broadband/telecoms-infrastructure/farewell-to-the-fax-machine https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-and-broadband/telecoms-infra... (I slightly balked at the $5 initial price, but then realized: this is a desperation fee and I think for a lot of the users a clear fee for a clear one off service is the best deal. Anyone who wants to send 1,000 faxes will (a) be in the top 1% of fax users in their country if it's not Japan and (b) make their own arrangements. Also patio11's "charge more") Software wise, if you have a PBX line (which the telco will change for) you can run Asterix and then https://www.asterisk.org/products/add-ons/fax-for-asterisk/ https://www.asterisk.org/products/add-ons/fax-for-asterisk/ to send as many faxes as you like to the other person in your country with a fax machine.
      • randallsquared 9mo ago
        Why would you need a PBX line to send faxes with Asterix? You'd just need a normal phone line with a plan that includes free ("long distance") calling to the whole country, right?
• mlitwiniuk 9mo ago
  Humadroid (https://humadroid.io https://humadroid.io) - AI-Assisted SOC 2 & ISO 27001 compliance for small teams. $125/month flat (for now, during beta). Recently crossed the $500/month mark after a painful pivot from HR tech earlier this year. The whole thing started because I did ISO 27001 back in 2019 and was completely lost - overpaid for consultants, got lost with policies and controls, figured it out the hard way. Passed SOC 2 Type I earlier this year using only Humadroid (yes, dogfooding a compliance tool through an actual audit was... an experience). Currently finishing automated evidence collection (AWS and GitHub integrations first). Pretty proud of that one - compliance shouldn't mean "panic-screenshot everything before audit."
  • 946789987649 9mo ago
    What's the USP over something like Vanta/Drata (aside the cost being much lower currently)?
    • mlitwiniuk 9mo ago
      The big difference is context-awareness. Vanta/Drata give you templates and checklists. Humadroid starts by understanding your company - what you actually do, how you operate, your tech stack. From there, the AI generates policies that are yours, not generic docs with [COMPANY NAME] placeholders. Same with control descriptions - they're specific and actionable for your setup, not "implement access control" with no context. It also identifies risks based on what you actually do and helps build business continuity plans around your real critical processes. You still review everything (it's compliance, not magic), but you're editing 80% done work instead of staring at a blank template wondering where to start. The price difference is real too, but honestly that's a side effect of being early and solo - not the core value prop.
      • 946789987649 9mo ago
        Gotcha. And then how does that translate into the audit process? Because Vanta/Drata have auditors they work with regularly, there's a bit of an incentive on both sides to use these templates because then it speeds up that part tremendously. I can't imagine the auditors being happy about really diving into hyper bespoke documents for every audit. Your product seems great for actually doing the spirit of these frameworks (reducing risk, improving controls and processes etc.). However from what I've seen the reality of these audits is it's a box ticking exercise for everyone involved, and so improving the efficiency there tends to be the goal. How do you position yourself in that? Also hope this doesn't come off too critical, it's just something I've been through recently and love seeing new things! I'd definitely add a vanta/drata comparison to your website though as that is inevitable.
• emil-lp 9mo ago
  So, if these posts come at the same time each year, and IDs are consecutive, then year,id 2025,46307973 2024,42373343 2023,38467691 2022,34190421 2021,29667095 2020,24947167 2019,20899863 2018,17790306 2017,15148804 And the delta is year,delta 2025,3.9M 2024,3.9M 2023,4.2M 2022,4.5M 2021,4.7M 2020,4.0M 2019,3.1M 2018,2.6M Has HN peaked?
  • esjeon 9mo ago
    I'm pretty sure that the peak b/w 2020 and 2023 was a temporary boost induced by COVID-19.
  • the_gipsy 9mo ago
    We're on the verge of an unprecedented economic crisis.
  • npodbielski 9mo ago
    Everything comes and goes. HN is no exception. With that in mind does it matter for you? Are you here because HN is at its peak? If commenting here makes you life better a bit keep doing that. If not then just don't and go somewhere else. Or stop using the internet altogether and just became goat farmer. Do what makes you happy and not what crowd thinks will make you happy!
    • emil-lp 9mo ago
      Crafting CSVs is what makes me happy.
      • npodbielski 9mo ago
        Awesome! I found it interesting. Keep doing that :)
      • Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
        it is a very interesting observation and I did some calculation and it seems that every 8 seconds, one hackernews comment is made I feel like the reason why it has peaked is that when hackernews was created, it probably had both youngsters and experienced alike since it was the hot new thing once but over time it matured and I think that very few young people are here and I doubt that there are surveys for hackernews median age I am one of the youngsters and honestly I joined because of youtube (fireship -> primagen -> theo t3 -> hackernews) And I feel like the reason hackernews doesnt feel attractive to youth is probably because of attention span, like only recently I saw someone create a thread about what clicks on hackernews or not as if its a game and I do feel like hackernews isnt conventional social media and our whole new generation has never really understood something beyond conventional social media To me, it was unstimulating at first (which in retrospect is a good thing), like just large amounts of texts and texts in comments and I didn't understand the situation And I don't think hackernews should change. Once I got the hang of it, it became one of the most interesting websites to me personally. But don't worry I think that the spirit of hackernews/tinkering is still there in youngsters whom I see in their own ways, people (my age) are definitely being fed up and are taking steps like clippy and other interesting stuff that one can argue go similar to tinkering/curiosity of computers I will have to admit that even my attention span was "cooked" and I don't think it was something extremely because I have talked about it but like, as a youngster the culture is changing so fast sometimes like, after I was on hackernews for a long time, I do not feel talking internet slang but that does alienate me sometimes because people my age have low attention span and when I used to send long messages to my friends they were kinda responding like, "aint nobody reading ts" or even on platforms like discord, I genuinely felt like a left out person because all people my age had slang or something and I didn't Nowadays I do not feel this way because this is the person I am and I kinda see opportunities for myself which are unique to myself because of hackernews and the tinkering curiosity it has given me but still I just wanted to share a perspective about something that had troubled me once. Apologies for the yap and have a nice day!
• iceboy 9mo ago
  Wanted to teach my little brother about logic gates. Saw that for him to truly grasp the idea of it, he needed some "hands on" experience to develop the intuition about it. I decided to develop a PCB board that basically turns-on-off the lights based on the inputs. He was like "cool" and kind of threw it in the corner. Rather than just leave it, I decided to further develop it and make it as a learning tool for myself as well(web design, marketing, BOM optimization etc). Then I started to get feedback on the initial project which was quite helpful(universities, EEVBlog and colleagues) and based on that made a "Logic Trainer" which is like very advanced version of the initial idea. It has so many features and it kind of has taken off in a sense that 2 universities want to buy it for themselves. Also I didn't expect it but most people who buy it do it for their kids. IMHO its way too complicated for kids, but practice and feedback that I have gotten shows that it really isn't. I haven't made any profits from the project yet (due to high development cost) but hopefully in the future it help to pay my rent :). Check out the website at https://logicgat.es https://logicgat.es
• leejo 9mo ago
  I sell photographic prints. A breakdown of income and costs for this year can be found here: https://leejo.github.io/2025/11/01/print_costs/ https://leejo.github.io/2025/11/01/print_costs/ TL;DR? It's a grind, an absolute grind.
• technusm1 9mo ago
  Here’s my own side project that’s been earning a bit on the side: I built DedupX, a macOS app for finding duplicate and visually similar files fast - especially useful for photographers and anyone with big local storage collections. What it does - Exact duplicate detection using incremental hashing so it doesn’t have to fully load huge files. - Perceptual image matching finds similar images even if they’re resized or lightly edited (not just byte-for-byte duplicates). - Native macOS integration with a Finder right-click scan. Why I built it: My brother kept running out of space because of tons of photos, and every existing tool I tried either missed similar images or was slow and clunky - so I spent a couple of weekends building something that felt fast, accurate, and native. Business side - Free trial (no CC required). - Paid tiers: ~$5.99/yr or ~$16.99 lifetime. Got positive feedback and 100+ paying users shortly after launch. Been growing steadily ever since. Link: https://maheepk.net/projects/dedupx/ https://maheepk.net/projects/dedupx/
  • nefrix 9mo ago
    Smart and affordable app.
    • technusm1 9mo ago
      Glad you like it :)
  • warangal 9mo ago
    How do you market it, through social-media or are there dedicated channels for sharing awareness for such Mac Apps, if you don't mind sharing?
    • technusm1 9mo ago
      I mostly shared the launch post and ran promo campaigns on Reddit, ProductHunt, LinkedIn, Discord and even tried HN (got no replies here -‿-"). Since then, its mostly word of mouth. Thanks to my customers' feedback, I've made a lot of improvements to the app as well. Feels good getting positive feedback and hearing from people about their use-cases. :) Links: [1]: Launch Post: https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1ok5zaq/comment/nmgrfnk/ https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1ok5zaq/comment/nm... [2]: ProductHunt: https://www.producthunt.com/products/dedupx https://www.producthunt.com/products/dedupx [3]: Promo campaign on Reddit for Black Friday: https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1paarc2/dedupx_50_off_for_hitting_110_users/ https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1paarc2/dedupx_50_... [4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45763117 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45763117
• GravityAnalyt1 9mo ago
  Building version 3 of a front-end SaaS application that services proprietary models for analyzing securities, events/catalysts, etc. I am taking what I have learned from 5 years of users asking questions and basically redoing everything. This version will hopefully provide a bot free / pump free replacement for iHub, StockTwits, Twitter, etc. to people who manage money professionally or otherwise. Assuming I get more free time to finish it that is. Version 2 is live here. www.gravityanalytica.com The two products Chat and Horizon both make more than $500/month individually. This is a just side project. I run a family office. For those of you who are in your 20s keep it up. In your 40s getting free time can be a real challenge.
  • riku_iki 9mo ago
    > www.gravityanalytica.com no ssl?
• popupeyecare 9mo ago
  I’ve created Pixie, a platform to employ and track your kids work. For families with a business, it helps reduce tax burden and fund a child’s Roth. I’m a physician with some 1099 income, built the platform myself because my kids help with my side projects, and have since onboarded CPAs who now offer it to their clients. I saved 5k this year on my own taxes by employing my kids and it has funded their Roth. Soon after launching, I crossed the $500/month mark. Link:https://trypixie.com https://trypixie.com
  • nefrix 9mo ago
    What is the maximum amount a kid can earn yearly?
    • popupeyecare 9mo ago
      No limit but for staying under them paying tax it’s the standard deduction (15k). And you can only contribute $7500 (2026) to their Roth. A reasonable amount depends on their age but somewhere between 7500-15000 is a good amount and maximizes benefits.
  • rsanek 9mo ago
    Very cool idea, I feel like awareness of this even being possible has to be quite low.
    • popupeyecare 9mo ago
      That’s the challenge. Educating consumers. It’s completely legal and even listed by IRS. [0] It’s important to be compliant and do it in an easy to use manner. [0] https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/family-employees https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
  • i-dont-remember 9mo ago
    This is neat, I appreciate that even if I can't use the service, i still learned something new about what's possible. Gonna keep it in the back-pocket for sharing with friends. Also reminded me of when Justin Jackson talked about how he hired his kids for help with real projects and the positives from it https://justinjackson.ca/flipping-tables https://justinjackson.ca/flipping-tables
• appsoftware 9mo ago
  My product NumeroMoney (https://www.numeromoney.com https://www.numeromoney.com) is the first I've built that makes over $500, and it's grown surprisingly quickly. I built it because I needed something simpler that the existing solutions I could find for understanding our families spending (YNAB etc were geared too much towards budgeting). It helps users to import and categorize bank statement transactions in a way that makes it really easy to make decisions about household spending.
  • AussieCoder 9mo ago
    Just out of interest, is this a US based product? I'm in Australia and most of the major banks have this as a built-in capability in their apps.
• muragekibicho 9mo ago
  I run a Substack where I show programmers how to turn advanced math papers into C and Python code. I'm a math guy who codes and I do it for fun. I'm shocked people are interested in this stuff. LeetArxiv Substack: https://leetarxiv.substack.com/ https://leetarxiv.substack.com/
  • apprentice7 9mo ago
    This is fantastic and it really looks like a passion-fueled side project.
    • muragekibicho 9mo ago
      Trump defunded my math PhD so I got a programmer job just to pay the bills. The Substack lets me do what I love. Thanks for this comment!
  • donchuru 9mo ago
    Fantastic work. Flying the Kenyan flag high!
• binsquare 9mo ago
  I run a keywords research tool, it scans posts across social media sites like bluesky, mastodon, hackernews, etc. KeywordsPal.com It's actually super interesting the technical aspects to scan 50k posts a day for as cheap as possible. I write about it here: https://keywordspal.com/blog/building-multi-platform-content-aggregator https://keywordspal.com/blog/building-multi-platform-content... I also built it as a result of being unsatisfied with f5bot
  • tonixx 9mo ago
    [dead]
  • lippihom 9mo ago
    What were your issues with f5bot? I tried to sign up and Supabase auth went to spam btw.
• bwb 9mo ago
  I'm building a book recommendation app that tries to make it fun to explore books through what other people loved to read -> https://shepherd.com/ https://shepherd.com/ Some examples of pages we've built over the years using all the interviews we do with authors: https://shepherd.com/bboy/2025 https://shepherd.com/bboy/2025 https://shepherd.com/bookshelf/authoritarianism https://shepherd.com/bookshelf/authoritarianism https://shepherd.com/best-books/if-you-want-to-be-a-mathematician https://shepherd.com/best-books/if-you-want-to-be-a-mathemat... And in the process of bringing on a co-founder and building a full desktop/mobile app so you can track what you are reading, what you loved, and we can use that data to deeply personalize your recommendations (as I am frustrated with Goodreads as I don't think they even try to do this well). https://building.shepherd.com/roadmap/ https://building.shepherd.com/roadmap/ *early beta coming in late January Fun to work on :)
  • jp1652 9mo ago
    lovely, bookmarked!
• davidkuennen 9mo ago
  https://stockevents.app https://stockevents.app Created around 2019 and have recently moved it from side project to main job.
• davidkuennen 9mo ago
  https://stockevents.app https://stockevents.app Created around 2019 and have recently moved it from side project to main job.
• apizon 9mo ago
  Launched "Cadence: Guitar Theory" (https://cadenceguitar.com/ https://cadenceguitar.com/) a guitar learning app with a focus on music theory in September. Currently right above that $500/month when including lifetime purchases. Had a sizeable bump in October thanks to blowing up on here which also gave me an app store boost so thanks guys :) I'm working on new lessons at the moment, after that I'll probably try to improve on the animations and sound effects to give the app more "juice", should be a fun thing to work on. Also still trying to figure out marketing and how to get visibility overall...
• kx0101 9mo ago
  Disclaimer: I haven't make any money, YET. I recently open-sourced my first ever tool! and I'm super excited about it guys It's an HTTP request replay and comparison tool in Go. You can replay real traffic, compare multiple environments, detect broken endpoints, generate HTML/JSON reports, and analyze latency It’s currently at v0.4, so I’d love any feedback, suggestions, or ideas for improvements. (Be gentle, I haven’t used Go professionally, however it’s my main language for personal projects ) https://github.com/kx0101/replayer https://github.com/kx0101/replayer Here's the landing page too: https://www.replayer.online/ https://www.replayer.online/
  • jotaen 9mo ago
    I think you should better post this separately, e.g. as “Show HN”. It’s off-topic for this thread (hence, I assume, the downvotes).
    • kx0101 9mo ago
      probably, yeah. That's okay :)
• piazz 9mo ago
  Making almost exactly $500/mo on an Anki extension that embeds AI / text to speech / image gen deeply into the app, allowing you to generate example sentences, audio, explanations, etc, for whatever you’re studying, in bulk. https://smart-notes.xyz https://smart-notes.xyz Still holding off on the show HN post for now; have a few more features and QoL things I’d like to add first. It’s been an enormously gratifying project and I hear from users all around the world who have feature requests for their specific use cases. Easily the most fun I’ve had working on a project.
  • furk4n 9mo ago
    It looks like a great idea. Kudos on the work so far! May I ask which channels / approaches benefited you the most in terms of reaching your first paying customers?
    • piazz 9mo ago
      Thank you! Almost all of my customers so far have been directly from the central Anki plugin directory. I made sure to use lots of SEO friendly terms / buzzwords in the title so that when people ctrl+f for AI or ChatGPT, they find mine. My next steps I think are to better incentivize leaving reviews so that it ranks higher on the add-on list, and then launch it on various language learning subreddits. There’s a whole cottage industry of Anki influencers on YouTube as well (absurd, I know), so that’s another channel eventually.
• tbensky 9mo ago
  https://www.youhere.org https://www.youhere.org: "Want to know who showed up?" is the tag line. It's an app-based attendance service for teachers/coaches/band directors/conference organizers, etc. I'm a teacher and it scratches an itch I had (students not showing up to class). Been hitting the $500/month more and more often now (even after server fees).
• aria-sfl 9mo ago
  Save For Later – an AI-powered bookmark manager that resurfaces what you save Link: https://saveforlater.pro https://saveforlater.pro
• jclardy 9mo ago
  My portfolio of iOS apps ends up at an average of $500/mo. Most are older, still functional but rarely updated. A few of the newer ones include: https://daylightgoals.com https://daylightgoals.com - Time in daylight tracker, using Apple Watch/HealthKit as the data source. https://airlauncher.app https://airlauncher.app - App launcher for visionOS - was much bigger last year before Apple added the ability to organize your apps. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ibuzz/id304684758?ls=1&mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ibuzz/id304684758?ls=1&mt=8 - iBuzz - I built this app in a day 15 years ago, it still makes about $100/mo from ads and removing ads. Just a simple buzzer soundboard app.
  • asimovDev 9mo ago
    How’s the developer experience on AVP? Any surprises, positive or negative? Did you find the tooling and documentation from Apple sufficient?
• willprice89 9mo ago
  I'm developing Wallpunch, a censorship resistant VPN for people in China, Iran, and Russia. Userbase is pretty small as I'm still polishing things up, but I hope to expand my marketing efforts a lot in 2026! https://wallpunch.net/ https://wallpunch.net/
  • discordance 9mo ago
    How are you going to accept payments for this without outing yourself and becoming a target to authorities in those countries?
    • willprice89 9mo ago
      Company is registered anonymously in another country. I also offer crypto payment options.
  • realsdx 9mo ago
    Site is dead
    • willprice89 9mo ago
      Really? What country are you connecting from? It should be accessible in China, US, Europe etc.
  • huang-b62b5756 9mo ago
    Is it profitable at $7/month with unlimited bandwidth?
  • qiuweishi 9mo ago
    Your website need i18n, for example, switch to Chinese automatically if `navigator.language === 'zh-CN'` ---- advice from a Chinese user.
• decide1000 9mo ago
  I am the co-creator of ShoppingScraper. Convert an EAN / GTIN to pricing information, product specs, content or image. API-based and rapid with pricing and barcode data. The website needs some love, but the webapp is going well. https://shoppingscraper.com/features https://shoppingscraper.com/features
• santa_boy 9mo ago
  I run a side project n0c0de.com [1] ... thats no-code with two zeroes I develop apps for experienced operators who want to start their own business. It averages well over $500 / month in side income. Typically about $3-5K depending on the amount of time I have. I spent perhaps a decade pushing going independent due to inability to get a product ready. I ended up learning the skills and now to solve that pain point for others. [1]: https://www.n0c0de.com https://www.n0c0de.com
• topnde 9mo ago
  I run drawcharts[1], which is a tool to help you build good looking hand-drawn style charts. It is not very expensive so I am currently making around 500 a year from it. Also, as someone who likes to go to conferences and meet and connect with people, I found it hard connecting to 50 people at a conference on Linkedin and then reaching back out to them. So I build LinkedMemo[2] which is a CRM on "top" of Linkedin. You scan a profile, the profile is automatically saved and enriched in the CRM with a quick note. [1]: https://drawcharts.xyz https://drawcharts.xyz [2]: https://linkedmemo.com https://linkedmemo.com
• jasonsgt 9mo ago
  [dead]
• syrgian 9mo ago
  My wife runs https://www.saviament.com/ https://www.saviament.com/, an open-access educational website in Catalan. She also sells printable content following the same style as the website, which has exploded in popularity this year and has become a decent source of income.
  • codeadict 9mo ago
    Molt bé!
• Theoleff 9mo ago
  I wrote a book about modern HTML & CSS to create website with as little javascript as possible. I made almost 5k$ the first month, now I do 300-500$/month with it. Here’s the link: https://theosoti.com/you-dont-need-js/ https://theosoti.com/you-dont-need-js/
• willswire 9mo ago
  Back when I was in the Air Force, I hated the UX for referencing Air Force publications on mobile. So I created an iOS app called AFI Explorer [0] which has continued to get hundreds of downloads every month for the past 5 years. Since I’ve been shifting more towards platform engineering work in my career, the best reward abut this side hustle isn’t the financial benefit, but is the opportunity to stay grounded in software dev. I love seeing the changing APIs each year with the new iOS updates. And the seasonal approach to doing updates is always fun too. [0]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/afi-explorer/id1564964107 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/afi-explorer/id1564964107
• gagarwal123 9mo ago
  I recently exited a Shopify App which was making ~800$ MRR and just shipped my first AI Chrome extension. It dubs YouTube videos into 82+ languages and offers more controls for better youtube experience I’d love your feedback - https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/atlas-ai-youtube-dubbing/ggkjmkjofkcbaobpohgciabgaocebefc https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/atlas-ai-youtube-du...
• planb 9mo ago
  My Mac App Store only scanning app (https://www.pdfscannerapp.com/ https://www.pdfscannerapp.com/) still makes approximately this much a month after nearly 15 years on the store (I published it on day one when the store was realeased) - all updates since then have been free, so I'm just selling to new customers. It's a hobby project that keeps me into Apple platform development and allows me to work on it in bursts (like the last update for Liquid Glass) and then let it rest for a while (if Apple doesn't break any APIs).
• ownagefool 9mo ago
  https://renderapp.io/ https://renderapp.io/ A platform for digital asset management, review and workflow. Current features focus primarily on review of images aimed at automotive configurators. The problem is generic, however, our USP is we have a couple of enterprise customers that upload packs of 60k+ assets for a round, and thus we aim to help discover what demonstrably changed. A bit like Github, only working with images, videos, and other digital assets rather than text files.
• pattle 9mo ago
  I run Brick Ranker a website that tracks the value of LEGO sets and minifigures. You can also signup and catalogue your own collection so that you can track it's value or just see what you own. It makes around $500 a month from a mixture of adsense and affiliate schemes. Would be good if I was making more but I've automated most it so I spend maybe 1 hour on it a month. https://brickranker.com https://brickranker.com
• martylamb 9mo ago
  https://martiansoftware.com/chatkeeper/ https://martiansoftware.com/chatkeeper/ I built ChatKeeper because I wanted to treat my ChatGPT history like a local knowledge base, with local-first access to my data. It’s a command-line tool (GUI in progress) that takes a full ChatGPT .zip export and syncs it with local Markdown files. You can move and rename them freely and they will stay in sync on future runs. It pairs well with tools like Obsidian and lets you link your own notes to specific conversations or even points within them. Revenue is modest but growing month over month. It’s a one-time purchase, not a subscription. Most users so far are researchers and other ChatGPT power users who already live in Markdown or want to do things like curate and compress the context of very long-running conversations.
  • miller_joe 9mo ago
    I’ve been looking for something like this for Claude
    • martylamb 9mo ago
      Yep, you're not the only one, and I want to add support for more formats/LLMs. Right now ChatKeeper's internals are very ChatGPT-specific, but I have a plan to change that and Claude (which I also use frequently) will be the first one I add support for.
    • anarticle 9mo ago
      I've started using this: https://github.com/jhlee0409/claude-code-history-viewer https://github.com/jhlee0409/claude-code-history-viewer so far so good...
    • mario_pad 9mo ago
      Hey miller_joe! I actually just built this - Claude Vault! (Free) Same philosophy as ChatKeeper - local-first markdown files that sync and work great with Obsidian. I had the exact same problem with my Claude conversations buried in JSON exports. Just published to PyPI: pip install claude-vault claude-vault init claude-vault sync conversations.json ---- Auto-generates tags using local Ollama (completely offline, no API costs) and detects relationships between conversations Would love to collaborate or integrate with ChatKeeper down the line - seems like we're solving the same problem for different LLMs! Check it out: https://github.com/MarioPadilla/claude-vault https://github.com/MarioPadilla/claude-vault
• jspizziri 9mo ago
  https://soundreads.io/ https://soundreads.io/ An audiobook streaming service that focuses on timeless classic works in the public domain. I do everything from building the app to the audio engineering. One thing I'm especially proud of is the restoration I did on the "War of the Worlds" 1938 Radio broadcast. I'm really happy with how it turned out. I've made it temporarily free to listen to [1] in case anyone is curious. You should compare it with the original [2] and let me know what you think. [1] https://app.soundreads.io/discover/item/war-of-the-worlds https://app.soundreads.io/discover/item/war-of-the-worlds [2] https://archive.org/details/WarOfTheWorlds1938RadioBroadcast256kbps/War-of-the-Worlds-1938-Radio-Broadcast-136kbps-cleaned.mp3 https://archive.org/details/WarOfTheWorlds1938RadioBroadcast...
  • rafram 9mo ago
    I’m seeing a lot of AI tells in the cover art (like for War of the Worlds) and book descriptions. Didn’t see any discussion of where the narration comes from on the site. Are all your audiobooks restorations of classic readings? Do you hire narrators to record new ones? Or is there AI involved there too?
    • jspizziri 9mo ago
      All the audio is by real humans but I definitely use AI help on the descriptions and images, as graphic design and copywriting are not areas I’m competent in, and as a side gig currently I only have so much time. A good chunk of the initial audio has been curated and re-engineered/enhanced from librivox, however I’m also working with voice actors to produce originals. For instance I just release A Christmas Carol which is original to our platform (also see Metamorphosis and Alice and Wonderland). More are coming every month but it takes time to develop real audio recordings with humans. I appreciate your constructive feedback and welcome more!
      • rafram 9mo ago
        Thanks, this is good to hear!
      • 9mo ago
• simonsarris 9mo ago
  I made https://meetinghouse.cc https://meetinghouse.cc as a way for twitter people to put themselves on a map and write a bio, and what they're looking for. It's a way to find and be found, if you want to see who's interesting nearby for friends, dating, new parents meeting new parents, etc. Pins cost $12, there are 474 pins placed so far. This keeps the quality high (there are no spam pins, only real people) but will fundamentally limit the growth, I think.
  • callamdelaney 9mo ago
    I keep zooming but the profile pictures never get bigger!
  • daveguy 9mo ago
    > but will fundamentally limit the growth, I think. Thank goodness. We need more small social media with inherently limited scope to protect from the manipulative garbage coming out of big social media companies.
  • lippihom 9mo ago
    The map for this is cool but a table view would also be nice.
• StackBPoppin 9mo ago
  I released a game on Steam, and work on it a few hours every day. Income each month varies but is consistently above $500. Link to game if anyone is interested: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2250550/Tornado_Research_and_Rescue/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/2250550/Tornado_Research_...
• insin 9mo ago
  I'm selling browser extensions on the App Store, but the main money-maker is currently https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-twitter https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-twitter When Twitter killed off third-party apps, the browser extension I'd been developing ever since "New Twitter" launched in 2019 suddenly became one of the few ways to make Twitter more tolerable to use, and the number of users of the Chrome version tripled from 30k to 90k in a fortnight (mostly in Japan). When they confirmed third-party apps had been killed on purpose and jacked up the price of the API to discourage new ones, I started selling it on the App Store the next week and it's made more than $500 per month ever since. Before the end of the year I'm hoping to roll out a single paid subscription which works across all my extensions when you sign up for it, which enables syncing settings across all your browsers and devices, unlocks additional subscriber-only features, and will enable creation of extension-specific APIs if there are future features which require one. Between Control Panel for Twitter and https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-youtube https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-youtube I have ~390,000 users, so, y'know, please like and subscribe. That will _eventually_ include my free Hacker News extension ( https://soitis.dev/comments-owl-for-hacker-news https://soitis.dev/comments-owl-for-hacker-news ) so things like new comment counts, user notes and muted users can sync across every browser and device you use Hacker News on. If that takes off, I hope to make the App Store versions free and figure out how to give anyone who bought it 3 months of the subscription per extension they bought as a thank-you. If anyone's done something like that before, I'd be happy to hear about it via any communication method in my HN profile!
• ebobby 9mo ago
  I built a SaaS for photographers specifically designed for latam’s market: https://pickyour.photos/ https://pickyour.photos/ Been running 1.8 years, current mrr is ~$790 usd.
  • ebobby 9mo ago
    Current costs are around ~$190 usd monthly - vps: $69 - cloudflare: $25 - r2: ~$50 - crisp: $45 - customer.io $1
• Aldipower 9mo ago
  Because I was frustrated of the pricing and feature list of TrainingPeaks, I've built my own training planning and analytics platform for endurance athletes (and coaches too!). It is called Tredict (https://www.tredict.com https://www.tredict.com.) and it covers almost everything for runners, cyclists and swimmers over training effort forecasting and prediction, a comprehensive training log, training plans, workout planning, Vo2Max calculation, FTP assessments and collaboration with other athletes and coaches, equipment tracking and so on and so on. Quite a lot of things TrainingPeaks offers too. It has integrations for sending and execution of planned workouts to your watch with Garmin, Wahoo, Suunto, Coros, icTrainer and it receives executed trainings or health data from Polar, Dropbox, Oura, Withings and others! I think I did more then 15 oAuth integrations in total over Tredict's existens? And the platform offers an oAuth2 API for 3-party integrations on its own. The payment model is a pre-paid model for 12 months of write access to your calendar. It brings ~500-600 Euros (before taxes) a month since 6 years. https://www.tredict.com https://www.tredict.com
  • bot347851834 9mo ago
    Nice! The site looks very clean, good job! I recently bought a Garmin and I was looking into analytics-heavy training platform since I'm doing a lot of different sports so I can't just go for a 10k training plan or something. I ended up going with intervals.icu, how is tredict different from it? It appears a little tighter on the visual maybe? Anyway good job!
    • Aldipower 9mo ago
      Thank you. Tbh I cannot tell too many difference to intervals.icu, last time I had a look was 2 years ago or so. I remember it lacked some things, but this could have changed. I think Tredict is a little bit more on the straight forward site, just looks cleaner, visually and also from the workflow, also more performant. But this is of course opinionated as I am the inventor of Tredict. I have deep respect for Intervals too. You just could use both for a certain amount of time to see which one fits better for you. :-)
• FarProfessor 9mo ago
  I run an iOS app! Half Lemons. It finds recipes using your ingredients. (https://halflemons.com https://halflemons.com) It's freemium. And offers lifetime purchases and monthly sub. Will experiment with adding an annual sub soon.
• throwaway5757 9mo ago
  I put sponsor information on my open source project, and it has been giving me $600/mo in the past few months. There are only a few thousand stars on GitHub, but it's already the most popular tool in a paticular niche area.
  • cirelli94 9mo ago
    Show it off!
  • eXpl0it3r 9mo ago
    What are the reasons to use a throw away account and neither mention the product nor the niche area?
    • throwaway5757 9mo ago
      There are 5%-ish code are contributed by other people, I feel really bad for not sharing the money with them. Anyway, I wish that GitHub offers the option to sponsor a project, not one single maintainer.
• sporp 9mo ago
  I earned more than $500 a month once: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lyoc/last-year-of-carbon-the-board-game https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lyoc/last-year-of-carbo... This game was developed by my friends and I during college, then we Kickstarted a few years after. Sales have dwindled since, but I still like the game. So much so that I turned it into a free web app. Still a WIP but it's maybe 75/80% there. Play for free here, you will need to make an account: https://lastyearofcarbon.com https://lastyearofcarbon.com Buy a copy here, but you should play the game first to see if you like it: https://lyoc.shop https://lyoc.shop
• duckkg5 9mo ago
  Cold call training aka 'exposure therapy' https://coldcallgym.com https://coldcallgym.com Just a call a number and practice a cold call with a bot. People seemed to like it when I built it so I made a free and paid tier. Getting like 3-5 new users per day without really doing anything.
  • donchuru 9mo ago
    This is pretty unique and amazing. How are you marketing this all the way to $500/mo.?
    • duckkg5 9mo ago
      Thank you. I'm not doing any marketing at all. In fact I noticed about a third of the traffic comes from ChatGPT of all places. I guess that's just from the SEO. But users keep trying it out, maybe because it's really simple to start. Just call the number.
• moinism 9mo ago
  https://ffmpeg-api.com https://ffmpeg-api.com As the domain (hopefully) indicates, A REST API for the FFmpeg service. So far, it's been a plain API, but now it's adding MCPs and AI endpoints, so you don't have to remember ffmpeg commands.
• dubme1 9mo ago
  I run https://aliveai.app https://aliveai.app a large uncensored (i.e. adult) AI image and video generator. It started as a small side project but slowly grew every month and recently exploded to well over 50k USD revenue per month. It's fun to have a large community of paying users but honestly I never thought out of all my side projects this one will make it. I am still a one man show managing everything from development, marketing, customer support and content moderation. If I am honest the money is nice but I am severely burnt out and not sure if I can or want to do this much longer. It is a 24/7 job and I miss the days where I can just sit down and code a nice feature that people will like. Also looking at NSFW content all day kind of messes with your mental health. I had some discussions of potential buyers but selling something for less than its monthly revenue seems crazy so I am still here trying to do my best and waiting for the right exit.
  • LollipopYakuza 9mo ago
    Have you considered hiring someone to reduce the load of repetitive tasks?
    • dubme1 9mo ago
      For a while I was looking for a non-technical co-founder, but I found it difficult to find someone who is both skilled and motivated in the adult content domain. I am currently rewriting the user role and permission system with the goal of introducing a moderator role in the future that has limited, moderator-only access rights. At the moment, there are only admin and regular user roles. Even with this in place I am unsure where to advertise for an NSFW content moderator position.
      • LollipopYakuza 9mo ago
        That's interesting! I didn't know this could be such a barrier. Is this because of the potential impact on mental health? Or just because people wouldn't like to be publicly associated with NSFW content in any way? While job hunting years ago, I got approached by a company running adult websites. They seemed to be pretty relaxed about it and they were multiple candidates for the position. There were advertising through LinkedIn as just any similar small business.
• jacobp100 9mo ago
  I do a few apps that get about this, but the one most interesting to the audience here is a scientific calculator for iOS, iPadOS and macOS https://jacobdoescode.com/technicalc https://jacobdoescode.com/technicalc One time payment, no subscriptions or IAPs
• hotdogsalesman 9mo ago
  kitecourier.com - the end-to-end certified mail platform that makes sending legal notices as easy as sending email. Revenue is very spiky. Some months ~$10k, some ~$100. Inspired by this Patrick McKenzie thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7135833 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7135833 Certified mail is weirdly powerful leverage. I decided to productize that.
  • ddon 9mo ago
    https://www.kitecourier.com/pricing https://www.kitecourier.com/pricing is returning 404 page
    • hotdogsalesman 9mo ago
      Fixed, thanks!
  • hankmh 9mo ago
    How do you handle the logistics? I presume you aren't printing and mailing everything manually...
    • hotdogsalesman 9mo ago
      https://lob.com https://lob.com handles printing/mailing
      • hankmh 9mo ago
        Nice! Thanks.
        • popupeyecare 9mo ago
          how do you get customers?
          • hotdogsalesman 9mo ago
• rogutkuba 9mo ago
  I run a couple projects, only one makes money at the moment: SFX Engine: https://sfxengine.com/ https://sfxengine.com/ - ~1.2k MRR I launched another two and hoping to get these scaled up as well Sparkpod.ai: https://sparkpod.ai/ https://sparkpod.ai/ - $20 MRR Disstrack AI: https://aidisstrackgenerator.com/ https://aidisstrackgenerator.com/ - $0 MRR
• TCSoft 9mo ago
  https://www.condoally.com/ https://www.condoally.com/ and https://www.hoaally.org/ https://www.hoaally.org/ - Simple yet powerful tools for running small/self-managed HOAs. The site is 15 years old now and pretty solid. I dreamed much more for it, but I still can't figure out the marketing. The front-end is open-source: https://github.com/CommunityAlly/CommunityAllyWebApp https://github.com/CommunityAlly/CommunityAllyWebApp
  • hankmh 9mo ago
    What have you tried for marketing?
    • TCSoft 9mo ago
      Hey, thanks for asking! I used those Facebook and Google ad credits you always get when you sign-up for something, ran two postcard campaigns sent directly to HOA presidents, paid to rank higher on Capterra, hired an SEO firm for 2 years, was in a Valpak insert, and ran an ad in The Chicago Cooperator for 6 months. The Capterra campaign was by far the best ROI, but still too expensive to make sense in the long term.
      • hankmh 9mo ago
        That seems like a lot! My assumption would be the best marketing, given you are a team of 1, would be demand capture campaigns. And it seems that your Capterra results bear that out. But, your SEO agency would probably have focused on high intent keywords for demand capture, and presumably that didn’t work so well. Anyway, seems like an interesting marketing challenge targeting a niche market that frankly I don’t know much about. I wonder if you could target HOA management agencies rather than the association presidents. I know that many HOAs are managed externally at least from an operational perspective. That said, I know so little about the market…
        • TCSoft 9mo ago
          This is great, thank you! I had to look up "demand capture campaigns" and that makes a lot of sense. Yes, I totally agree that property managers can be a source of growth. I'm very lucky to have a property manager user out of Michigan helping guide me with what she would need from a property management perspective. Their needs are just different enough that it will require some serious dev work and I'm "so very tired", haha. Everyone wants the equivalent of QuickBooks built-in to the software. I need something to bring back my enthusiasm from years ago.
• DamnInteresting 9mo ago
  My long-running website damninteresting.com and its affiliated projects (e.g., omiword.com) earn me a combined ~$700/month profit on average. Donations have been declining, however, so I don't know if I'll be piping up in next year's thread.
  • nicbou 9mo ago
    I love your website. I stumble upon it again every other year and I'm always amazed by the quality of the content and writing. I was reading your articles on my Windows Mobile phone, ages ago! Have you also had a decline in traffic in the last 18 months? It seems like the entire independent web is getting strangled out.
    • DamnInteresting 9mo ago
      Thanks! We had our 20th birthday earlier this year, so we've certainly been around for some vintage devices. Over the years our primary audience moved from desktop web browsers to mostly mobile readers, and now our largest audience is podcast listeners. Site traffic is indeed down in recent years. The largest decline was when Facebook introduced "boosting," and stopped showing our posts to 90%+ of our Facebook followers overnight. I despise advertising, so I was unwilling to cave to their demand to "boost" our posts into ads. I'd have been happy to pay a reasonable monthly fee to reach our audience there, but that option was never available. That big dip in traffic came with a big dip in donations, and as a consequence I eventually had to move from a part-time day job to full-time. The sharp reduction in free my time led to a sharp reduction in original content on Damn Interesting, which further shrunk the pool of people willing to donate. This is a spiral that some would classify as "death," if I were willing to let it die. But it settled into an equilibrium where it pays for itself, makes a modest profit, and remains rewarding. Frankly I'd probably still do it even if donations dried up entirely, the research and writing give me a sense of purpose that would be difficult to replace. I used to hope that a wealthy benefactor would discover us, and decide to fully fund our project for a few years, giving us space to realize more of the project's potential. But such offers come with strings attached, and I don't have the stomach for most of those. Perhaps I am broken.
• vlucas 9mo ago
  BudgetSheet ( https://www.budgetsheet.com https://www.budgetsheet.com ) -> $6k MRR avg. for the year. Will likely have my first $10k month in January. Live Bank Transactions + Google Sheets. Links accounts with Plaid to track transactions and balances over time with some helpful templates. All the data is yours in your own spreadsheet to do with what you want. Revenue is somewhat seasonal. Most revenue comes in Q1+Q2 and trails off in Q3+Q4. Used by individuals and small businesses that love spreadsheets and want to manage their own finances.
  • cssanchez 9mo ago
    Is this self hosted or giving the cloud the keys to the kingdom?
    • vlucas 9mo ago
      Not really sure how to answer this, because there are varying degrees of "self hosted" vs. "cloud hosted". This is a Next.js app hosted on Render.com, which is a managed VPS offering similar to Heroku. BudgetSheet is also of course completely reliant on Google Cloud though with Google Apps Script and the Workspace Marketplace where it is listed.
  • iSloth 9mo ago
    Interesting that it’s seasonal, I guess tax season?
    • vlucas 9mo ago
      Yes. Tax season for small businesses and New Year's resolutions for personal finances are the times I get the largest influx of new signups and subscriptions.
• ferrufino 9mo ago
  Route weather forecasting based on date/time, speed/pace, ideal conditions in Settings. As also go/no go callout windows, AI nutrition/gear list. Deterministic engine of fitness readiness, being able to see progress and fitness and overall body health. Used it for: Skiing, hiking, cycling. Any outing with a route. Import a route from Strava, RideWithGPS, GPX/FIT, Apple fitness. Plan for weather forecasting! Fitness readiness is obtained from metrics collected from a smart watch. I actually turned it free recently. But barely reached over 400 MRR then started dropping. Consumer market is hard and I'm more interested in learning about AI and a full stack side project. https://brezza.cc/ https://brezza.cc/
• podlp 9mo ago
  I run a podcast app for flip phones called PodLP. Revenue hasn’t always been $500/month, but averaged over the past 5 years it’s been over $500. It’s been primarily from sponsorships (podcasts get featured on the homepage to get more listeners), although next year looks more uncertain so I’m looking at other avenues. https://podlp.com https://podlp.com
• devgoth 9mo ago
  while not exactly $500/month, my side project Whenish (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/whenish/id6745035749 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/whenish/id6745035749) makes me some beer money. I made Whenish cause i was frustrated with apps taking you outside of group chats to schedule events and find out dates when people are available. Whenish is an iMessage extension app and it works pretty nicely so far. recently got my first user feedback email which was really exciting! hope to figure out how marketing works to get some more users and hopefully double downloads + sales next year.
• bortbortbort 9mo ago
  I sell the canvas space within https://www.minigenitals.com https://www.minigenitals.com to private parties looking to settle scores. Between the coffee's I'm bought and averaging out the monthly "ad buys", it's just over $500/month, usually 3 or 4 $50 2-day campaigns a month and then a bunch of satisfied fans, apparently ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ We recently had to reset the coffee account due to phishing, but otherwise it's been a riot. I think there are a few backed up in the IA
• Jabbs 9mo ago
  https://www.unlistedjobs.com/ https://www.unlistedjobs.com/ 26.3% of jobs found on company websites are not advertised on any job boards but found using this tool. The app scrapes company's directly (24/7) and give the user: - a head start over other job seekers - access to thousands of jobs not listed anywhere else - daily job filter emails with ability to be highly curated to reduce noise
  • akudha 9mo ago
    1. What is the churn like? Don't people cancel after finding a job? 2. Has any company objected to scraping?
    • Jabbs 9mo ago
      1. Churn isn't as bad as I would have thought. There is also the use case for someone who has a job and wants to find the next one. But yea if someone wants to only use for 1 month, that is expected 2. I think companies (or the ATS's they use) might object to reposting a job listing on my site but I'm not doing that. You can search/sort/filter jobs but in order to view the job posting you will open a link back to the original job.
• i-dont-remember 9mo ago
  I've been helping with a small portfolio of Slack apps under the brand https://happybara.io https://happybara.io, including Nightowl (multi-DM broadcast for Slack, like BCC for email), and Channitor (channel management & auto-archiving). It's been a really interesting journey making mistakes & learning from them. One mistake that made me feel foolish: I assumed no one would ever pay for one of the apps. A paywall was added "just in case" -> boom, customers almost immediately started signing up. I felt incredibly silly after that, especially for the number of times I've read on HN and similar sites "your work is valuable" and "charge more".
  • bot347851834 9mo ago
    This is cool! I looked into building a slack app myself, I'm curious: how are you liking the slack store and its policies? Was starting out difficult? I vaguely remember having to have your app installed in multiple workspaces already before being listed in the store
• phaser 9mo ago
  Microlandia - The Brutally honest city builder. I started making this game several years ago, sporadically, abandoning it for month-long periods, but after posting it here a few times in Show NH I got the encouragement I needed to publish it to itch.io, then to Steam. This month it crossed the $500/month mark by far, but it was a long road to get it to a state where it can actually be an interesting enough game to make money. https://microlandia.city https://microlandia.city
  • Schiendelman 9mo ago
    I'm curious, what happens if you allow much more unlimited zoning to begin with in a city? Do you have ways to model decreasing regulatory burden for new development?
• superfamicom 9mo ago
  Super Fine Cuts, super low run custom "vinyl" records. I have been working on automating some processing but currently it is all manual. Had an overwhelming response as people are finding it mostly though ChatGPT which has been very interesting as I did a soft launch to friends only and no marketing. https://superfinecuts.com/ https://superfinecuts.com/
  • meetingthrower 9mo ago
    Now that is cool! What is pricing?
• Jeremy1026 9mo ago
  I've been 3D printing accessories for the Volkswagen ID. Buzz since July. I started by modeling and printing a couple of things that I wanted, then added a couple of items that other owners have talked about on various subreddits and Facebook groups. I'm now moving about $750 worth of items a month. http://buzzprintco.etsy.com http://buzzprintco.etsy.com
• flet 9mo ago
  Hey! Late to the party, but a friend and I have been plugging away at CineQuote https://cinequote.net https://cinequote.net a daily movie quote guessing game that uses audio quotes. We've been running the web site for a few years now (just past 1000 daily games!) and we just launched iOS and Android apps in the last couple months! Its been quite a learning experience for sure!
  • akudha 9mo ago
    This is fun! Where do you get the audio from?
    • flet 9mo ago
      Thanks! We handcraft each game my pulling audio quotes from different media available on the internet and also from the original sources. We also have a workflow to pull clips from clip.cafe via their API (with a workflow process to extract the audio only and generate subtitles and other cool stuff) but we usually still trim and normalize those by hand too.
• jborak 9mo ago
  I run Packetriot: https://packetriot.com https://packetriot.com, which is an alternative to ngrok. It's been in operation for 6-ish years and reached $500/month in year two. It doesn't replace my salary (yet) but that's what I'm working toward. Thankful to have thousands of users and some big companies using our services or self-hosting our server. This is a fun space to work in but there's lot of small competitors and opensource alternatives. In the first few years it was sometimes demotivating, but at some point I began seeing competitors bow out and Packetriot kept getting better and better each year. This year I published a lot of updates across the platform. Our UX is better with a new web-based UI for our client and all of the features of the platform can be managed in the client UI. No more going back forth between the client and user portal. I'm planning on releasing a community edition of our server in 2026 so that anyone can use our network server for free, for personal use or to evaluate for commercial use.
• jawuilp 9mo ago
  This year I've been working on AccelPrompt--> https://accelprompt.xyz https://accelprompt.xyz , a tool to generate instructions for different AIs, but I haven't been able to monetize it yet :(
• petit_robert 9mo ago
  I built an accounting app : https://compta.libremen.com https://compta.libremen.com Did not intend to at first, but having quit Windows, I had to replace the Access application I had built with an accountant friend of mine to manage my small business. Looking around the web, I could not find something I liked. I ended up re-writing the thing as an SaaS for my own use, but then figured that if I'm using it, others might want to, and all I had to do was to add an 'id_client' field to the database. It turns out to be a bit more complicated than that, as users tend to come with different needs, and to think of ways of using your app you did not anticipate. Also, when I tell an accountant that I wrote an accounting application, his eyes pop, his head tilts slightly, and he appears to be evaluating whether I'm the dangerous kind of crazy before ending the conversation. Must be due to the horrors they have to deal with all day. It's a hard sell, revenue is closer to $500/year than $500/month, because I have very low fees and very small clients. But I take great pride in counting one accountant using it in his professional practice. It's also great fun to tune as the number of lines grows, however odd this may sound.
• nsim 9mo ago
  For projects of this size, what legal/financial structure do you use? Particularly of interest for what Australians do, but any stories would be good. When I've looked, a sole trader with liability and cyber insurance seemed reasonable (maybe $2k/yr), but a Pty ltd with the same would probably be safer ($5k/yr). It all comes down to what the risk of being sued is though. I'm sure selling games wouldn't require this.
• lhr0909 9mo ago
  I built a receipt organizer and tracker app on iOS in May this year and now it has just past $200 in monthly recurring revenue and >$500 in December. Before this I have been collecting my own receipts and scanning them into a private website I built for myself, then one day I was like, why don't I make it into an app so it is easier to use and I can share it with others? https://receipt-genie.com https://receipt-genie.com https://apps.apple.com/us/app/receipt-organizer-receiptgenie/id6740299816 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/receipt-organizer-receiptgenie...
  • aristofun 9mo ago
    What do you use for OCR, I wonder if it's LLM isn't that too expensive (or flaky if cheap) to be scalable?
    • deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
    • lhr0909 9mo ago
      I was using an OCR service but I have migrated to use LLM recently. It is actually cheaper and more scalable because it is accurate enough and I can also get more information (guess currency and timezone, and translate, and even help tag the receipts) with a single prompt. Currently it sits just a tad bit cheaper than my previous OCR service per receipt scanned. Since I am providing this as an app instead of as an automation, there is UI for user to make edits and they seem to be happy enough about the results with very minimal need to edit. I have also been playing with open source VLMs like Qwen3-VL and it was surprisingly not too far behind. I think the next generation I should be able to switch over and save a bit more on cost.
      • aristofun 9mo ago
        Thanks for elaborating! Btw, what model is currently cheap yet accurate enough for you?
• terrortib 9mo ago
  I built a timesheet / activity report management app years ago. In the French freelancing market, there’s a specific administrative hurdle: the Compte Rendu d’Activité (CRA). It’s a signed activity report that acts as the "source of truth" for billing. Most people use messy Excel sheets. I built Timizer to solve my own frustration with this workflow. What started as a side project for my friends eventually caught the eye of larger agencies. It’s now a nice $1k/month SaaS. I recently translated the app in English so I can address larger markets, but I have no idea if this activity report is even a thing in foreign markets, like US, UK,...And if somebody has the answer here I would love to talk about it :) My website is here : https://timizer.io https://timizer.io
• xyzzyx2025 9mo ago
  [dead]
• BrunoBernardino 9mo ago
  bewCloud [0] is a simpler alternative to Nextcloud if you don't use a lot of its customization options. This year I got a grant from NLNet [1] for it, which averaged to over $500 / month. I also have some customers for it, but not close to that at all, which I'd rather have, as more sustainable way to keep improving it. Still, I'm quite grateful to NLNet! [0]: https://bewcloud.com https://bewcloud.com [1]: https://nlnet.nl/project/bewCloud/ https://nlnet.nl/project/bewCloud/
• xk3 9mo ago
  I make between $400 ~ $600/mo between these two: Disk Prices on eBay - https://unli.xyz/diskprices/ https://unli.xyz/diskprices/ Digital Film Stock - https://unli.xyz/digitalfilmstock/ https://unli.xyz/digitalfilmstock/ Both are very similar... just a lot of regex (200+ expressions) to parse eBay item titles and descriptions
  • rjh29 9mo ago
    FYI United Kingdom is the right term and the one UK users are more likely to look for!
• karolcodes 9mo ago
  https://slouchsniper.com https://slouchsniper.com i'm solving the "sitting is new smoking" problem. Basically an app that uses your webcam and local AI models to predict if you are sitting + your sitting posture, so you don't develop neck pain.
• pawurb 9mo ago
  https://abot.app/ https://abot.app/ currently at ~$2k/m, down from 4k a few years ago.
• meerab 9mo ago
  VideoToBe.com - Transcription & Chat for Audio/Video (board meetings, lecture notes, churches summons etc.) Started as Pay-per-use service (upload the file and receive an email with transcript). Now we also offer subscription based service for media library, AI summaries, chat Q&A, insights/highlights. Makes between $200 to $600 per month. https://videotobe.com https://videotobe.com Tips for sub growth in transcription space?
• firefax 9mo ago
  I play poker. I buy in for 500 and can make 1-200 a session. But a session is ~8 hours, so I stopped and use that time to study or work a job outside my field that has health benefits that is less fun than playing Texas Hold 'Em.
• techtalksweekly 9mo ago
  https://techtalksweekly.io/ https://techtalksweekly.io/ I run a newsletter called Tech Talks Weekly[1] where my subscribers get one email per week with all the latest Software Engineering conference talks and podcasts[2]. I originally built it for myself because I was subscribed to too many conference channels on YouTube and things started getting messy, so I wrote a script to fetch the new talks automatically. Eventually, I turned it into a newsletter. I currently have over 7,500 subscribers with email open rate consistently between 32%-35%, although I plan to trim the list soon to get into the 40-50% range. I recently started offering sponsorship options[3] and made $500 in Nov and $700 in Dec so far. [1] https://techtalksweekly.io/ https://techtalksweekly.io/ [2] https://www.techtalksweekly.io/p/what-is-tech-talks-weekly https://www.techtalksweekly.io/p/what-is-tech-talks-weekly [3] https://www.techtalksweekly.io/p/sponsor https://www.techtalksweekly.io/p/sponsor
• trowa159 9mo ago
  I made a RPG pornsite blocker on Chrome https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/mrnofap-block-porn-sites/cpigeaemojebhijbmencldogableknlf https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/mrnofap-block-porn-... Was helping a Porn addict friend, turned out there are a ton of people need it.
• garnett 9mo ago
  Appreciate that we go meta here and it has been done many times before - for my own research and record-keeping I've made a catalog out of these https://dlebedev.com/500-bucks-a-month-idea/ https://dlebedev.com/500-bucks-a-month-idea/
• meshosh 9mo ago
  I run a porn website that gets me around $1000 a month now. I'm doing this for about 5 years and it started as a side project to learn more about hosting, SEO, and monetization. This was a simple Wordpress site, but then eventually I rebuilt the whole thing with Nextjs and tailwind because Wordpress was just too damn slow. In the process, I ended up building a custom CMS, which I'm now working on a white label version that I could sell in the future. I'm hosting the whole thing on a VPS that costs about $30/month and have videos on cloudflare R2 for about $15/month. [obviously NSFW] - https://blowjobit.com https://blowjobit.com
  • phone_book 9mo ago
    How are you dealing with porn verification laws? I have an idea for something porn related but it feels like there is a lot of red tape now that I don't want to deal with but I haven't done all that much research into it so I am probably wrong
• bespoke_engnr 9mo ago
  I love fountain pens, and use handwriting as a kind of superpower to remember everything I need to at work. So I started an online fountain pen shop: https://www.bottleandplume.com https://www.bottleandplume.com - it's focused entirely on all the stuff I love: fountain pens, fountain-pen friendly paper, bottled inks, and everything else you'd want or need if you were getting into the hobby, playing with . I got lucky with timing a few marketing things and it's grown considerably, with lots of repeat customers (I'm really active in the community, not as a business strategy but as a result of my fountain pen addiction, so that helps). I have a tech job that pays the bills so I'm more focused on having fun and building the fountain pen store I wish existed than on squeezing every last dollar out of my customers and business. It's a lot of work but I'm really enjoying it.
  • csixty4 9mo ago
    It's a great looking site. I'll keep it in mind once I use up more of the ink I already have!
    • bespoke_engnr 9mo ago
      Thank you! I can relate...buying too much ink is what got me into this mess in the first place :-D.
• mergesort 9mo ago
  I started running AI workshops this year [1], stemming from work that I do teaching at a non-profit in New York. [2] I've spent a lot of my life teaching people, but for the last 2-3 years I've been fascinated with AI. I'm not in the "Sam Altman is building a digital god" camp, but I've seen how amazing AI is by watching people who have no technical background build products, launch their own businesses, and change their lives in under 9 months. It's pretty remarkable what's already possible, but not everybody knows or believes that. I set out to find a niche when it comes to teaching: I make AI more accessible to regular people. A lot of what's written about AI is unbelievable — either because people say AI can do things that it cannot or because people say that AI cannot do things that are already possible today. I've been bridging that divide one workshop at a time. They've spread very well by word of mouth because there are no tricks here. People bring an idea that they want to build, and we do that in three hours by learning the mental models and communication skills necessary to work with AI in a short period of time. I've had a few workshops every month since I started in April, which is remarkable as an indie who's been trying to earn a living by helping people. I'm grateful to my friend who sat down with me for what became my first workshop, and helped me start this new line of business. It's very gratifying to hear a PM with great ideas tell me "I have a new hobby that I can't put down". That's what I mean when I say I'm making AI accessible — people are this close to manifesting the ideas in their head the way programmers have been able to for decades — they just may need a little bit of guided learning. [1]: https://build.ms/ai https://build.ms/ai [2]: https://pursuit.org https://pursuit.org
• hanamizuki 9mo ago
  I built a GLP-1 tracker app for iOS/Android called mojo. mojo connects your health data (apple health/health connect) and get real-time AI feedback when new data is logged. It proactively detects your changes and provide insights on achievements and suggestions. So far it's around $1150 revenue per month with 200 paying users and 4000 downloads. https://mojoapp.ai/ https://mojoapp.ai/
• callyma 9mo ago
  I'm not quite at $500/mo yet (just launched the waitlist), but this is my attempt to get there in 2026. I'm building Snaption (https://snaption.cc https://snaption.cc). It solves a specific pain point I had as a developer: "Screenshot Chaos." I take dozens of screenshots daily (bugs, UI inspo, code snippets), but manually tagging and organizing them into Notion was too much friction. Snaption automates this: Shortcut to capture. AI analyzes and summarizes the content. Auto-syncs to Notion. The stack is Next.js + [Insert your specific tech here, e.g., Supabase/OpenAI]. I'd love to hear feedback on the landing page or the core concept from the community here.
• tangjinzhou 9mo ago
  I’m making around ~$600 MRR with Mentorbook. It’s a tool that turns long-form content (PDFs, docs, YouTube videos) into structured, personalized courses based on how you want to learn. I built it initially for myself — I consume a lot of content but struggled to turn it into a system I could actually finish and retain. Early users came mostly from Twitter. Pricing is intentionally low ($9.9/mo), so it’s more of a slow, steady project than a high-growth one. Still early, but I’ve learned a lot about what people are actually willing to pay for. https://www.mentorbook.ai https://www.mentorbook.ai
• academic_agent 9mo ago
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