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Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?

• Judson 13y ago
  I've been making ~$400/mo for the past 6 years from http://askjud.com http://askjud.com. Its a simple trick you can play on your friends. Info about how to use it http://www.wikihow.com/Use-Ask-Jud http://www.wikihow.com/Use-Ask-Jud
• toumhi 13y ago
  I didn't post on the last threads I think, but I have had some modest success with passive income, was making up to 700 euros a month 2 years ago, this is down to 130 euros a month now. Still not too bad considering I haven't really touched the site for almost 2 years. But my heart isn't in that kind of projects anymore. Passive income is a bit overrated in my experience. Still nice to get a small check at the end of the month. The site in question is http://www.giftcertificatefactory.com http://www.giftcertificatefactory.com, it provides printable gift certificate templates. EDIT: I should add the money comes in from Adsense. I tried other monetization schemes as described there http://www.sparklewise.com/my-first-passive-income-project-one-year-later/ http://www.sparklewise.com/my-first-passive-income-project-o...
  • marioluigi 13y ago
    Nice site. Has the income come down due to a reduction in traffic spend or just a loss in rankings due to reduction in freshness metric wrt SEO or any other reason?
    • clone1018 13y ago
      He mentioned it's probably seasonal. All the traffic he gets during non-events are people who have friends with a birthday soon.
    • toumhi 13y ago
      My site got slapped by Google Penguin update, lost 90% of its traffic and never really recovered. It's going down steadily now for some time. As for the Google penguin update drop in rankings, it might have been a stale content penalty, or a devaluation of spammy links - I wrote manually lots of articles for supposedly respectable article directories pointing back to the template website to go up in search engine rankings and it worked well for some time. The idea was to extract myself of this process at some point since it was painful to write not very interesting articles. But didn't get around doing it, or outsourcing it.
      • erichocean 13y ago
        My site got slapped by Google Penguin update, lost 90% of its traffic and never really recovered. It's funny how you don't really build websites anymore (did we ever?), you build sites for Google's search engine. Even thought websites are conceptually different from writing a Photoshop plugin, in reality? Not so much. You're just as dependent on Google as you are Adobe, it's just hidden.
      • helen842000 13y ago
        Would you consider passing it on to someone else, with a view to getting hands off royalties for a time. Or would you just want to sell it and have it clear cut?
  • taphangum 13y ago
    After reading your post last year, i started my own niche website making iphone app templates (easily googleable). I ended up taking it to roughly $3k/month in revenue and have just sold it to a private company. Thank you for writing that post.
• kbelbina 13y ago
  I generate around $2,500/mo. I operate a company which mines poker data and have a couple of partners, plus some large server / tech / support costs. No-one is full time on the business any more as after Black Friday there isn't a lot of $ in poker: http://hhsmithy.com/ http://hhsmithy.com/
  • myleshenderson 13y ago
    Typo: Playing multiple limts and games.
  • asciimo 13y ago
    This is fascinating. It took me a while to discover the purpose of subscribing to this data, and I finally found it at https://www.hhsmithy.com/tour https://www.hhsmithy.com/tour "Finding the best tables to play on is impossible without up to date statistics and data on the player pool and consistently playing pots against opponents with no reads or statistics is a sure fire way to lose your bank roll fast." How do you harvest this data? Do you use player bots? Also, you have a typo on that page: "Your on the cut off with AJo and a player under the gun has opened". Should be "You're".
    • kbelbina 13y ago
      The data is used with 3rd party tools that scan tables, find the best seats, display statistics etc. The most popular tool is holdem manager (http://www.holdemmanager.com/ http://www.holdemmanager.com/). After buying data off our site you can import hundreds of millions of hands and have detailed info on almost every player on a poker site (how often they raise, fold, call etc etc). If you also scan tables and sit with the "fish" (recreational players) then you will win a lot more. One day I'll write a blog post about what online poker is really like (game theory, tools, and statistics). On the tech side its some fully reversed clients that we just have linux command line clients which connect to sites, and other sites its a ton of Windows XP VM's which open tables and observe. At the heart of it all we have some command servers which handle distributing the table load, parsing and aggregating all the data etc. Each day we "mine" over 10 gbs of data zipped and at peak times can be watching over 10,000 poker tables. It's pretty nuts that it somehow all works. And yeah, lots of typos :-O
• anovikov 13y ago
  $800 a month for support of a few scripts i written 3 years ago. Drop in the bucket but still keeps me very motivated doing any work for that customer (and this is the only work at all that i still do myself, not my employees).
• 23andwalnut 13y ago
  I've made about $3k a month in semi-passive income from my codecanyon portfolio in 2013. I call it semi-passive income because I have to spend some time on support each day, but it usually doesn't take more than 30 minutes. EDIT: My portfolio http://codecanyon.net/user/23andwalnut/portfolio http://codecanyon.net/user/23andwalnut/portfolio
  • pestaa 13y ago
    What plugins did you publish?
    • 23andwalnut 13y ago
      Mostly apps, but you can see them here - http://codecanyon.net/user/23andwalnut/portfolio http://codecanyon.net/user/23andwalnut/portfolio
  • peacemaker 13y ago
    I sell on codecanyon as well though only make around $300 a month right now. I have almost the same number of items as you do yet can't seem to get the visibility. Do you have any tips you can share? Also, completely agree about the semi-passive! Lots of questions to deal with daily.
    • 23andwalnut 13y ago
      In my experience quality sells. Quality code. Quality feature set. And most importantly, quality design. I think a lot of items on codecanyon neglect the design aspect and therefore don't sell as much as they could. Also, I've been somewhat lucky in that almost all of my items have been featured. This probably has something to due with how much time I spend on design - at least 40% of my total development time is design. Feel free to email me with a link to your portfolio if you want some specific pointers...
      • peacemaker 13y ago
        You're probably right about the design side of things, mine is definitely lacking I just have zero ability in that area. I've send you an emails, thanks!
• jamesgagan 13y ago
  I make around $5 to $10 a day from my site http://tunes.io http://tunes.io I haven't put any effort into marketing it or trying to monetize it other than adsense. Maybe I should be trying harder!
  • iliiilliili 13y ago
    Nice. I don't see any ads though.
    • ThomPete 13y ago
      All the way in the top
  • asciimo 13y ago
    I was about to post, "How do you make money on this?" And then I remembered that I use AdBlock. D'oh! I paused it and refreshed a couple times.
    • jamesgagan 13y ago
      Yeah I use adblock too - even on my own site ;) I was thinking maybe I would make a tunes.io android app and sell it for a buck just to see what happens.
      • ashray 13y ago
        I'll tell you what will happen. I would pay for it! tunes.io is great!
        • jamesgagan 13y ago
          Thanks! Tell your friends ;)
  • cjstewart88 13y ago
    How much traffic do you receive a day?
• pmtarantino 13y ago
  A better question I'd like to read is "Good ideas for recurring income".
  • ThomPete 13y ago
    And the only sensible answer you would ever receive should be "anything that people want to pay repeatedly for" :) My point being. I don't think anyone would give you a specific idea for recurring income cause then they would go ahead and do it themselves. I might be wrong but I doubt it.
  • readme 13y ago
    Any idea which hasn't been proven to work already is practically worthless. You're better off looking at cases of existing successful passive income and emulating those. Then, you can tweak it, one small change at a time.
  • HeyLaughingBoy 13y ago
    Sort all the answers to this topic by revenue and your question will be answered.
  • gremlinsinc 13y ago
    Good ideas to make money are a dime a dozen -- just look at android forums.. there are a million ideas that could make money.. Seeing real examples can sometimes give a better idea of what an idea is really worth, with real numbers, not what a concept could be worth IF(and a BIG IF) people really want to buy it, or visit it, or download it..etc... 1 Real life case study is worth 100 ideas for apps/businesses.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
• jaytaylor 13y ago
  Previous discussions: Sep 3, 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4467603 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4467603 Sep 4, 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4470293 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4470293 Sep 24, 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3029771 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3029771 May 21, 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2567487 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2567487 Mar 9, 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2300599 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2300599
  • joshdotsmith 13y ago
    Thanks for sharing the past discussions. The more often we can talk about this, the better off the community can be.
  • jdminhbg 13y ago
    First link is to 9/3/2012, not 2013 as labeled.
  • fogonthedowns 13y ago
    I'm just going to post this question every day, since it seems to be so popular on this site : )
• otikik 13y ago
  Nil.
  • segmondy 13y ago
    likewise. :-(
    • kintamanimatt 13y ago
      Can I ask why? Is this intentional because you're busy doing other stuff, or because your efforts have yet to be successful?
      • segmondy 13y ago
        working full time job, don't really have any great idea. fear of failure and over thinking leads to paralysis.
• zrail 13y ago
  I wrote a guide to integrating Stripe payments into Rails applications that expands greatly upon the 10-minute quick-starts[1]. It launched a little over a month ago and has generated more than $10k. I'm expecting that to drop quite a bit going forward but I'm still hoping for ~$500 in monthly revenue. [1]: https://www.petekeen.net/mastering-modern-payments https://www.petekeen.net/mastering-modern-payments
  • terhechte 13y ago
    How do / did you market it? As it seems as if you're only hosting it on your personal website? How do people find it?
    • zrail 13y ago
      I set up a mailing list right at the beginning (there's a signup link way at the bottom of the landing page, need to make that more prominent) that generated quite a bit of interest. My website by itself generates a decent amount of traffic as well. It's also been featured in a few podcasts and email newsletters which generate traffic and sales.
      • terhechte 13y ago
        Thanks for the info! Did you ever consider also selling it via a couple of ebook sites?
        • zrail 13y ago
          I've been considering selling on other sites (maybe Amazon) and/or doing some limited affiliate deals, but I haven't put any serious work into it yet. What sites were you thinking of?
• beachstartup 13y ago
  in the millions/year and growing. managed hosting and cloud hosting. the hard part is keeping the profits as we learn to scale the business.
• leviathant 13y ago
  I have $200-$300 in (mostly) eBay and (less so) Amazon affiliate income from a message board and news site I run, both about a band.
• cageface 13y ago
  I make about $500/month from my iOS apps. Considering how much time I put into them I can't say it's really been worth it yet but I plan to at least upgrade them for iOS 7. They did open the door for some unsolicited contracting work though. http://www.plastaq.com http://www.plastaq.com
• simonswords82 13y ago
  TL;DR: The top of our funnel is fine, and our app is making money, but it's not "easy money" and our trial to paying customer sign up needs some serious attention. I run a HR app for SMEs called http://www.staffsquared.com http://www.staffsquared.com. We're making a comfortable 5 figures each month. We're reinvesting this income back in the product either in the form of new functionality (paying programmers) or advertising (paying Google Adwords). We've increased our Adwords spend, invested in SEO (on page and off page) and a recent redesign saw a decrease in bounce rate and increase in trial sign up rates. Our site visit to trial sign up rate for the last five months looks like this: April: 13.02% May: 12.37% June: 13.76% July: 15.61% August: 16.46% Our bounce rate for the last five months looks like this: April: 39.54% May: 40.06% June: 37.21% July: 32.8% August: 31.17% So both of those top end of the funnel stats are moving in the right direction. Our free trial to paying customers is the area we're really focussing on at the moment as it's really not high enough. So we're re-targeting accounts that have expired to find out how we can serve them better and tell them about new features. We're also working hard on our onboarding stuff (the type of stuff you'll read patio11 talking about) including more intelligent automated e-mails based on the status of their account at a point in time. Happy to answer any questions you good people might have where I can...
  • ultimoo 13y ago
    This is very interesting. Thanks for sharing and best of luck!
  • joshdotsmith 13y ago
    Please share anything you can about how things go in the future. I'd love to see how your dunning emails turn out. Can you also share some background? When did you start? How many people are on your team? What kind of initial investments did you do? Really awesome to see people being so transparent about how they're doing. By the way, if you ever want to write any blog posts and cross-post them to Lifestyle.io [0], we'd be happy to have them. [0]: http://www.lifestyle.io http://www.lifestyle.io
    • simonswords82 13y ago
• asciimo 13y ago
  I mine about .0015 BTC a day, a figure that has been declining consistently and rapidly.
  • redblacktree 13y ago
    Time to pony up the cash for your very own ASIC!
• vldx 13y ago
  It might sound kind of obscene here on HN, but I'm making about 3500 euros per month, semi-passive from adult related site/community. It's subscription based and the content is user submitted (that's why it's semi-passive). Some moderation is necessary, as well basic user support, but overall - not so much hustle.
  • Phlarp 13y ago
    How did you break into this industry? I've done random work as a freelancer for a few different adults sites, but I've always felt like running my own was the real "money shot" as far as passive income goes. Can you elaborate on how you got started and how you keep an edge in such a competitive space?
    • vldx 13y ago
      I'm not really into the industry - my main income is coming from working for major brands in the ("mainstream") ad industry. I saw the service of acquaintance of mine and what revenue he's making, so I though I can do better. Generally, in this industry there's massive shortage of talent, ideas and innovation. This is a big opportunity for people who are delivering value in the "mainstream" startup scene and that was one of the reasons which made me try - you can get in and disrupt pretty easily if you think out of the box, which is not so hard in this context. Most of the stuff is almost scam, the customers are threatened like idiots and technologically the year is 2002-2003. There are people who say there's no money anymore in this industry and they're right - there's no money for people who are short on skills, ideas and execution, but there is huge potential for people who are coming from other "mainstream" industries. My prediction is that lot of talented kids will enter this industry with great services - I see it as emerging trend at the moment.
      • oijaf888 13y ago
        Is technology really that behind? I mean redtube/et al are some of the largest websites out there and the blog posts seem to show a pretty high level of technology behind them although with a larger focus on cost than most startups.
• Kanbab 13y ago
  low 4 figures from real estate
  • nether 13y ago
    Buying/selling? Renting? How long did it take to get into it, and what did you do previously if different?
    • Kanbab 13y ago
      Buy and hold. I had been patient and bought after the market crashed. I bought it in another state and put 25% down on a 4-plex. Rent pays my mortgage and I have money in my account every month. I would have tried to earn more money in order to purchase more.
  • santa_boy 13y ago
    Passive income? Online? details ...?
    • Kanbab 13y ago
      For me it is passive, I have a property manager. I did all of my research online, met my agent over the phone after Googling. Did not visit the property before purchasing. I did a lot of research however...
• ape4 13y ago
  It seems the big winner is Apple and Google. They passively collect 30% on the apps we spend months making.
  • mansigandhi 13y ago
    Nothing about what Apple and Google provide for developers/App Store is "passive".
    • romanovic 13y ago
      I suppose Apple devotes a lot of manpower and is very "active" in excluding all developers and applications outside of its walled garden. Google is much different in that you have the option to publish on alternate app markets, or self-publish your own apps, of which Google gets a cut of $0. This lack of control over their own app marketplace is probably the cause of Google's flagging stock price and Android's failure to effectively compete with iOS in the mobile market.
      • onebaddude 13y ago
        >"the cause of Google's flagging stock price and Android's failure to effectively compete with iOS in the mobile market." Was your comment sarcasm, or just terribly misinformed? "Flagging" stock price? You mean the one that's hovering around all-time highs? Android's "failure to compete" with iOS for the mobile market? With 80%+ of global market share?
    • logicallee 13y ago
      Look, the fact that these two companies happen to be be geographically located in resource-rich land is in no way a merit. Apple pretty much did a survey and struck the iPhone, which has been guzzling up ever since. Google bought some land from Herman J. Android and it turned out to have a large natural deposit of everything that has been coming up ever sense in the form of its mobile offering. But make no mistake: if you had put a stick in the ground you would have seen the same result, provided you were as geologically fortunate as these two lucky suckers.
    • 13y ago
• AliEzer 13y ago
  I make enough to buy a Frappuccino from day to day, mostly from a reaction gifs application on the App Store : https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/my-reaction-when/id632831985?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/my-reaction-when/id632831985... By the way, all in-app purchases are free today and tomorrow...
  • pa5tabear 13y ago
    How long did it take you to make this app?
    • AliEzer 13y ago
      It took me maybe 3 weeks (3 to 5 hours a day) but I experimented many solutions (APIs, sharing, Vine...). I used RubyMotion and I had prior experience with the iOS environment.
• trevorcreech 13y ago
  $2500/mo from AdSense on http://coverphotofinder.com/ http://coverphotofinder.com/ Zero-maintenance, which is nice.
  • resu 13y ago
    That is insane! How did you attract users in the beginning, and do you use the same strategy now?
  • TallboyOne 13y ago
    You know, what I would love to know is how you attracted the initial audience. This stuff is always so easy to make, but my past attempts never really got enough traffic boost. I'm wondering how you got over the 'plateau' (which in my experience seems to be ~1000 visitors a day.
    • gesman 13y ago
      This site forces you to login via facebook and then sell all your friends by forcing you to allow it to spam to all connections, thus promoting itself. Dirty "viral" tactic.
      • mapster 13y ago
        seems Google, Facebook, Yahoo etc. have been using this practice for decades.
    • trevorcreech 13y ago
      Sorry, forgot about this thread! We were first-to-market (may have had insider information about the Facebook Timeline launch...), and got on Mashable. Spread through the blogs and hit #1 on Google for "Cover Photos". We've stuck that #1 spot and it's where 80% of our traffic comes from.
  • eob 13y ago
    .. but where are the ads? I don't see any. EDIT: Oops. I've had an ad blocker installed so long I forgot it even existed. :-) Leaving my comment up though to save this discussion thread in my history. Nice site!
• jaymzcampbell 13y ago
  Around $40-50 from admob and amazon affiliate links. It pays for my netflix. I originally set myself a goal "just to see" of buying myself one pint of ale from a pub over the course of a year for app sales/ads - not exactly ambitious but I thought i'd end up at best shifting a few cents a month. I had already an app on android with ~3000 active installs for doing simple shopping look ups. I changed it to throw in some affiliate codes and fixed a crash and updated it approximately 18 months ago now and haven't made a single update. It's next to nothing but it encouraged me to look more into at least trying things out for myself - I would never have thought (and still can't) it would be any more than a personal exercise. If I look at it as "free netflix for 2 years" then it's a real thing to me and "means something".
• amberes 13y ago
  About €1000 from a subscription based web analytics niche thing and another €2500 from my wife as she works for the government.
• widdershins 13y ago
  I make around £400 per month on tutorial videos for music production applications. It used to be more like £1000, but I've neglected the site in favour of pursuing programming (so I can make my own music applications, instead of talking about other peoples').
• xoail 13y ago
  Few years ago I wrote a solution manual to one of my text books (half of it was part of the assignments). I sell it on Amazon for $30 for pdf download. Been making around $200/month.
  • Phlarp 13y ago
    How much time did you put into this upfront? Seems like the most "passive" item in the entire thread so far. Can I ask what book this is for? whats the lifespan of a solutions manual like this? Have you been selling it for several years or does it obsolete itself in sync with the aggressive textbook versioning schedules?
    • xoail 13y ago
      I guess I am lucky that the text book still gets prescribe in some universities. I also think there is no other version of the text (I need to check that) I do not maintain it at all. And like I said, I solved most of the questions as part of the assignments and later worked out the left over ones, packaged it into a pdf.
      • Casseres 13y ago
        When my professors found out that there was a solution manual floating about, they changed the textbook. Apparently all of the student's answers started looking the same.
• Ologn 13y ago
  Between $1450 and $1650 a month from ads on Android apps. One app does about $1100 a month, another does $325 and the rest collectively maybe $150.
  • jamesgagan 13y ago
    Do you think ads are a better way to make money than charging for the app?
    • epoxyhockey 13y ago
      I am also wondering about this. I have an app selling at $0.99 and make a couple hundred per month in sales. It's hard for me to project how much ad revenue I could make, especially since I don't know how many additional people would use it if it were free.
      • GVIrish 13y ago
        Is your app for Android or iOS?
        • epoxyhockey 13y ago
          Both iOS and Android.
      • mathrawka 13y ago
        The beauty of Android is how easy you can create a new developer account and test out some ideas.
    • Ologn 13y ago
      It depends on the app, the needs and desires of the development team etc. I do not focus on game apps, but when I did a few the ad click through rate was very low for them. So if I was doing games, I might look for a different revenue model. Pay apps, freemium etc. It depends on the specific app. Some are better with an ad based revenue model, some are better when sold. European car navigation apps used to sell well. On the other hand, some simple flashlight apps with ads have also done well. So you can make money either way, and which way depends on the circumstances. I should also say I have seen some new developers release their first app as paid and they make few if any sales. Unless you already have existing business knowledge of a specific area, for most new Android developers, they are usually better off releasing their first app quickly and for free.
• clarky07 13y ago
  I make between 5-10k a month on my apps and book. (It depends on the season. Summer and Christmas are best.) http://buildanappbusiness.com/ http://buildanappbusiness.com/ https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/30-south-llc/id331245760 https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/30-south-llc/id331245760
  • peacemaker 13y ago
    Your book site uses the same theme as an old book of mine no longer selling! Nice landing page though isn't it? :) Also, my latest book sells nowhere near that amount. How are you marketing if you don't mind me asking?
    • clarky07 13y ago
      The book is actually a tiny portion of those sales. I'm one of those rare guys that makes money off the thing the book is about and not that much teaching people about it. It does make some though so I include it in the calculations. Mostly I haven't done much marketing for it outside of my blog so far. I've been toying with some other ideas for it, but I haven't really had the time to devote to it. Mostly it's just a side project I've had fun with.
  • withoutfriction 13y ago
    Derek, you're missing out on an extra ~7%! Sign up for Amazon's affiliate program and use your own affiliate links on your links to amazon. ------- Also, as commented below - I posted the first of these recurring income threads almost two years ago - I'm now compiling some stats, data and insights [1] for myself so that I can learn how to boost my numbers closer to yours :) [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6432851 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6432851
    • clarky07 13y ago
      That's actually a good call. I'm already an affiliate from another blog I have. I've been meaning to change those links and I hadn't gotten around to it. Thanks for the reminder.
• tachibana 13y ago
  I am a data point for the worst-case example. I don't have a hot application or a popular website, and most of my money is earned the old-fashioned way. My passive income from my investments in government bonds is enough to cover mortgage, basic living expenses for my family, and two family trips a year. Source of money for investments: - savings from many years of working and diligently saving - some real estate investments
  • newppc 13y ago
    To be honest though, since we're all inundated with startup and marketing information all the time, it's refreshing to know the old fashioned investing still works :)
  • pilom 13y ago
    I'd like to put some math with this because this is the path I took too. 4 years ago I was offered a job with a startup and a job with a government contractor at the same time. The contractor was offering 15k/year more and I took that offer and saved all 15k of it every year (index fund investing). 4 years in, with reinvesting dividends, my passive income from the money is around 400/month. Very happy I made the choice I did.
    • tachibana 13y ago
      Kudos on the great rate of return! I tell everybody around me it's surprisingly easy to become financially independent. By saving s% of my income investing with a rate of return is i%, then the worst case is that I should be able to completely replace my income in i%/s% years. I was saving 30% (actually more) and investing at around 5%, which resulted in complete income replacement in around 10 years.
• nish1500 13y ago
  21, drop-out, profit ~ $7k a month, working part-time, and no partner. Up from $31/month last December. Comes from sale of plugins. Not recurring, but stable.
  • 23andwalnut 13y ago
    Sounds great. What kind of plugins? Where do you sell them?
    • nish1500 13y ago
      ;) http://codecanyon.net/user/nCrafts http://codecanyon.net/user/nCrafts
      • peacemaker 13y ago
        Really like your plugins on CC. I sell on there too but don't get close your number of sales. Do you have any tips or advice on how to increase visibility?
      • nish1500 13y ago
        Until now, I didn't do anything for visibility. Making good stuff will suffice :)
    • asenna 13y ago
      I loved your Duet app. I have a question regarding CodeCanyon. The most popular things selling on there seems to be Wordpress plugins and stuff. Do you see a pattern of some kind? I was thinking of making some templates for Android Apps but those don't seem to be popular for some reason.
      • 23andwalnut 13y ago
        Thanks! Yes, wordpress definitely sells better than other types of items, especially on Themeforest. This makes sense because Wordpress itself is extremely popular. I'm not sure why other categories like apps don't do well though. Perhaps envato doesn't invest as much in advertising for those categories....
• leviathan 13y ago
  $0.1/month from ads in a free iPhone app.
  • donutdan4114 13y ago
    I think this represents the majority of HN user's attempts at monetization.
    • b_emery 13y ago
      The other long tail!
  • frogpelt 13y ago
    10 cents?
  • kehers 13y ago
    Low click through rate or little app users?
• nihaar 13y ago
  I make about $300/mo with https://broker.mapthatpad.com https://broker.mapthatpad.com. Not even close to what I originally was intending (and the amount of time I've spent building it) but to be honest, I have not been doing a whole lot in terms of marketing and selling it at the moment. I hope to do more selling/marketing in the future and get this monthly number higher.
  • santa_boy 13y ago
    What is your revenue model? How are you able to reach out to users and make them pay for it? What are the marketing tactics you have in mind? That is decent revenue btw! Good luck!
    • nihaar 13y ago
      Its a monthly recurring model. I actually partnered with a small company in NY that sells a tangential product to the same market. They do the marketing within the NYC market for me. I can try to sell this more actively to other markets, SF being next since I live here, but with a full-time job and a baby, its hard! In terms of marketing, I think I could manage a small AdWords budget to run but it would initially be more just me cold calling and setting up demos - starting with smaller shops with a shorter sales cycle first.
• dangrossman 13y ago
  Improvely reached $10,000/mo RR recently, less than a year from launch (https://www.improvely.com https://www.improvely.com). I also run W3Counter (freemium) and a couple smaller services and paid plugins for Shopify stores.
  • xpose2000 13y ago
    Well done... those numbers are impressive to reach. How many other people do you work with or are you solo?
    • dangrossman 13y ago
      It's just me, working from home or wherever I feel like bringing a laptop for the day.
      • Nord20 13y ago
        This is meant in the best possible way: I hate you. My hate is constructed entirely of jealousy.
• KamiCrit 13y ago
  ~$130 from ads on YouTube videos (http://www.youtube.com/user/YTBYlover http://www.youtube.com/user/YTBYlover)
  • tokenizer 13y ago
    Hey really cool videos thanks for sharing the link. I've been extremely interested in starting a youtube channel and ones that are currently similar are somewhat similar to your youtube stats. An example: 5,000 subscribers 1,000,000 views Joined 2011 So my question is how did you monetize your channel? I have a few more months to go before I can get good equipment for recording and editing so I'm unfamiliar with youtube's monetization for niche channels. Thanks.
    • KamiCrit 13y ago
      Somewhere in the YouTube settings there is a Google Adsense sign up procedure. It is a bit of a trick but if you can figure it out then your set for life!
• drpancake 13y ago
  I'm making roughly $300/month from three iPhone apps. They're all quite simple and I'd estimate that I've put in less than a month's actual work building them; although as a disclaimer, this is my day job so I can put these together relatively quickly. My fourth app was a larger time investment and gets quite a lot more downloads. It makes no income now, but I'll add In-App Purchases soon. I'm freelancing for ~45 hours a month to fund this while backpacking all over the world. I should blog about it. --- Edit: I put up a LaunchRock page, if you would be interested in a blog about this stuff, leave me your details: http://theoreticalblog.launchrock.com http://theoreticalblog.launchrock.com
  • andyakb 13y ago
    Please do blog about it. Freelancing while traveling is a concept that a lot of us are really drawn to, but most of the current blogs focus on the travel and only briefly mention the freelancing aspect. Maybe if you focused a bit more on the business side of things you could find a niche within the blogosphere.
    • sitkack 13y ago
      Having just traveled around the world over 7 months but NOT freelancing, I would have to say that: * net connections are very very spotty, prepare to work offline * supplies are rare (usb devices, upgrades, etc), expect to pay more for less * desk conditions are poor, rarely did we find a place where I could get into the flow. Checking email and noodling on the net was fine, but getting real quality work done requires spending time to find the right location. I think it could be possible, I have written some of the best code of my life in a corporate budget hotel holed up for a week with only a 1Mbps internet connection. You can simulate work/travel by playing with IPFW settings on your mac and only working out of a macdonalds.
      • drpancake 13y ago
        Pretty accurate. But you can mitigate this by 1) sticking to the kinds of locations where you know you'll find a decent connection, e.g. Thailand, and 2) pausing when you find a good setup and working for extended periods to make up for poor conditions later on.
• n1c 13y ago
  I'm not sure if my project counts; 'cause it's running at a loss? http://dressed.so http://dressed.so I made it because it seemed like /r/malefashionadvice needed somewhere to host their fits with a little extra functionality. Every now and then I build a feature or two but mostly it just ticks over. For revenue I make a little via adsense but mostly try and focus on the affiliate products, for example on this page http://drsd.so/15YxDWv http://drsd.so/15YxDWv the 'shop this look' links earn me affiliate revenue.
  • masonhensley 13y ago
    Neat, I've seen your site on /r/malefashionadvice. Since your site is focused on men, you should try and filter out women's products in your shop section. Example for a search on "sperry" topsiders: http://dressed.so/shop?q=sperry http://dressed.so/shop?q=sperry I'm guessing that mixing in women's products will hurt your conversion rate for affiliate products. If your affiliate network can't filter like that, you may want to check out http://prosperent.com/ http://prosperent.com/ or http://www.cj.com http://www.cj.com
    • n1c 13y ago
      Yeah I've been quite slack about optimising the search stuff. It should just default to 'male' and have a radio to change. Thanks for the links; just yesterday I put 'investigate alternate affiliates' on the top of my list.
  • contingencies 13y ago
    Feedback: Great domain, crap photography. There are some killer fashion sites out there, the ladies have been driving them for ages. You know, search by anything, real time refresh, change the colors, suggest a match, SAVE SAVE SAVE SALE DISCOUNT FINAL STOCK 3 LEFT! The area is good, execution can be improved. Refine. (Alternatively, punch out and sell me the domain ;)
• coherentpony 13y ago
  Run a consulting firm. Make about $250,000 per month.
  • kilroy123 13y ago
    That's not 250k in profit is it? How many employees do you have?
  • Omnipresent 13y ago
    I'm really interested in this. I work full time right now but am thinking about opening a consulting firm. Could you please share details of how you started and took the first few steps? I don't plan to quit day time work to concentrate fully on consulting work (at least not initially)
  • pc86 13y ago
    Clearly this isn't passive though unless you're paying employees to do literally everything and just skimming the profit, right? I mean "running a consulting firm" could be anywhere from 0 to 100+ hours a week.
• mflanagan 13y ago
  I make 1-2k/month from WindowTabs (windowtabs.com), I've been neglecting it, I think I could make a good bit more if I put some time into it. It's hard to say no to the consulting work...
  • NicoJuicy 13y ago
    Actually, that's an awesome app :P
• yumraj 13y ago
  My wife just posted an eBook - Startup Financing, Equity & Tax, which might be of interest to some folks here. Link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/startup-financing-equity-tax/id701661334?mt=11 https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/startup-financing-equity-ta... There is no sale data yet, but would be happy to share in the next thread. Also, if anyone has any pointers on how to market an eBook, would love to hear.
  • matznerd 13y ago
    It seems you already found one vector of marketing... dropping links on niche related forums ;)
• ghc 13y ago
  I generate about $900/month of semi-passive income from http://algorithmic.ly http://algorithmic.ly, but the initial setup cost is high. In the future I want it to be the goto-company for adding generalized algorithms to apps, products and services (provided as a service), but while I validate the market there's a huge initial setup cost (about 10 hrs), spent on data modeling, cluster deployment and secure key generation.
  • WesleyJohnson 13y ago
    Closing out of your site crashes my browser; just a heads up. Windows 8, Chrome Version 29.0.1547.76 m.
    • ghc 13y ago
      Hmm, can't replicate under the same conditions. Do you have any chrome extensions installed that the site might be interacting badly with?
  • larsolefson 13y ago
    Is that 10 hrs per new customer?
    • ghc 13y ago
      Yes, including sales, support and integration. Nothing much is needed afterwards, but it's still doesn't scale.
  • rjbwork 13y ago
    The concept of "algorithms as a service" is really interesting to me. Basically implement complicated algorithms well and efficiently, hook them up to a web service, let people call the services. Seems like a dream if you really just like programming, once you've got your funnel streamlined and your infrastructure banged out, you can add new algo's and consequently money to your service in a flash. I'm impressed.
• spencerfry 13y ago
  https://www.uncover.com https://www.uncover.com has been up and running for about four months now. We're bootstrapped and doing a bit over $5,000/month in recurring revenue. I wrote a three-month recap on our progress last month: http://spencerfry.com/what-i-ve-learned-since-releasing-uncover http://spencerfry.com/what-i-ve-learned-since-releasing-unco...
• maxprogram 13y ago
  ~$1000 a month. Designed, edited and published a book of Warren Buffett's letters to shareholders (see http://amzn.com/1595910778 http://amzn.com/1595910778). An opportunity I stumbled into. But I suppose "get publication rights from Warren Buffett" isn't a repeatable business model :)
  • BMarkmann 13y ago
    Not repeatable in that specific case, but have you thought about doing the same thing for other high-profile figures (either in finance or elsewhere)? You might be able to leverage your experience and success to get them to agree to a similar sort of thing...
    • maxprogram 13y ago
      I have thought of this but haven't really pursued anything yet. I also have permission from Buffett to publish his early partnership/hedge fund letters from the '60s, so will probably be doing that in the next year.
  • bennesvig 13y ago
    Interesting. I bought the Kindle version a while ago, mainly for the ability to highlight and not have to go to the web page each time. Do you have to share revenue on the book? I'd be curious to know how you went about obtaining the rights and what the process is like.
  • PanMan 13y ago
    Interesting! I saw the book a few weeks ago and wondered who put it together. I assume the letters are public? How did you get the extra material? And do you share any income with Buffet? (That would feel strange, but would also make sense)
    • maxprogram 13y ago
      Most of the letters are freely available on Berkshire's website. The "extra material" includes a few early letters not on the web (got these from Buffett so the collection would be complete), and charts/tables/indexes that I put together myself. The income is not shared with Buffett, but any income I receive is "return on capital" from me taking inventory risk. So I do have to invest some of my $$$ to buy the book inventory, and as it's sold to Amazon I make (great) return on that money. But the profit per book is actually pretty low compared to other published books -- I could be charging much more for the book, but it was part of our "agreement" that I make the total price of the book as cheap as possible. (Which I think is accomplished with Amazon's price of $19-25 for a 700 page textbook-size book.)
• eekfuh 13y ago
  Around $1000 per month for an iOS app I wrote in 2008 and have made some updates to. It used make around $2k a month.
• wellboy 13y ago
  $2000/month from free Android apps. I just copied existing apps on android like Logo Quiz, 4 pics 1 word etc. that were number 1 in the play store. Just took 24h to rebuild this apps, since they're quite simple. Did that around 10 times. Admob makes $500/month, Airpush $1,500/month. However, Google just shut down Airpush push notifications, so the latter is now gone. ha.
  • rufugee 13y ago
    Very interesting strategy. Thanks for sharing.
  • pjbrunet 13y ago
    I hate to play Devil's advocate (please prove me wrong) but you have almost a million app downloads (more successful than most) and high school kids at Taco Bell make more than you. And that's before taxes. What will you owe the IRS if you're in the US? What are you paying in hosting? Is this really the "mobile revolution" glorified day after day in the news? So $500/month after Google pulled the rug from under you? Only "24 hours" but what about tech support, compatibility issues, the market research, artwork, learning to package the apps, complying with Google's rules, setting up your development environment? How many days does "24 hours" add up to, start to finish? But forget the money, at the end of the day this sounds like unrewarding work: ripping off other people's ideas. Which makes me wonder, you're obviously clever enough to get a million downloads, why such an uncreative approach? I'm just trying to understand the app market everyone is raving about. How many times have we all heard "the future is mobile, the future is mobile." Is making these apps (games?) really that enjoyable? I'm curious because I'm thinking of making an Android app. When I read stories like this, makes me think twice. What you're doing sounds really smart from a marketing perspective because 1. you're making games which are by far the most popular apps and 2. you're replicating the most popular games. So you should be killing it, making 100x more than all the other app developers who didn't sell out, the developers building interesting, original, useful apps. Yet, you're not. Am I over-analyzing this? Or is the "apps market" totally overrated?
    • tluyben2 13y ago
• suhastech 13y ago
  http://thehorcrux.com/ http://thehorcrux.com/ currently making $400-$500. Fluctuates a bit. I haven't done much marketing (apart from a Show HN) I'm not even sure how people are finding it. My analytics software says 85% come from "Direct Traffic" which is weird.
  • hamstu 13y ago
    Direct Traffic is either just what it says, or traffic from 'https://' https://' (SSL) sites. Your site is just http:// http:// (no SSL) and thus can't get the referral information.
• withoutfriction 13y ago
  It's good to be back! I guess it was around 864 days ago that I posted the original one of these threads! My current stats: $~500/mo from a few supplement related websites, and some fitness stuff. Last worked on these back in April. Total work/month is roughly 30 minutes. My current project: Doing the research so that I can boost this to around $5000/mo :) I figure this is as good a time as any to announce that I'm actually putting together a little recurring project of my own - and it's pretty meta. It's pure stats and useful information on who generates recurring income, how much work they had to do to get there, what they learned/should've done/shouldn't have done. I'm researching this purely for myself, because I want to get to more recurring income faster (because recurring income is so, so, so freeing) - but a few friends asked me to package it up so I'm doing so! Check it out [1]. Also I figure I should post it to HN, so I'll update this comment when I do so :) Thanks guys - and really glad to see this thread live on longer than when I first posted it almost three years ago! [1]: http://recurringincome.meteor.com/ http://recurringincome.meteor.com/ Edit 1: On HN. [2] [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6432851 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6432851
• newppc 13y ago
  I make about $30 a month running a small coupon code website focused on cell phones. Again it's almost nothing but the upshot is if the site takes off in any way, it can bring in some ok money on the site. A lot of it can be outsourced once you get the system down, but there is a good amount of manual labor. Site: http://www.newphonepromocodes.com http://www.newphonepromocodes.com
  • ajaxguy 13y ago
    would you mind sharing the source of these coupon codes. I am trying to come up something like this other niche area. But struck in getting the sources for these kinds of codes/deals. Thanks in advance.
    • newppc 13y ago
      No prob - a most of them are from the advertisers/brands themselves through the big affiliate networks. Almost all of them are on Commission Junction. The few left over are on Linkshare and even less on the others like Impact Radius, etc. Google shut down their affiliate network a few months ago and almost all of the brands went to Commission Junction and Linkshare. For coupon codes you can't find from the retailers themselves, you can take a look at competitor websites.
• benmorris 13y ago
  $1k-$3k/m (depending on season) mostly passive income from my design online niche sign related websites. I've done a lot in design online software so I made my own and farm out the production side. I've automated most of it and it provides a nice steady income when I'm between clients. I also license the same platform to clients when it fits their needs.
  • euroclydon 13y ago
    I'm curious what exactly you mean by "design online"? I wonder if it's similar to what I do. Shoot me an email; I'd love to chat.
• wingerlang 13y ago
  Around 0-300 USD from stuff I've developed for jailbroken iOS devices. Note that that's a couple of months after release, and most of the revenue comes during the first two to three days.
• jankins 13y ago
  I'm making $200/mo on average from one iPhone app. It took me a month to build it a year ago and sales have remained stable, except for one $800 month when I got featured in a popular newsletter. I'm currently polishing up an iPad version and will experiment with increasing the price when it goes Universal.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• acketon 13y ago
  I do a bit of freelance design work each month, but I've been working on a few products for designers to generate recurring income and solve some annoyances I have in my workflow and tools. The first ( http://www.mockuprocket.com http://www.mockuprocket.com ) is close to finished and will be a desktop app to help quickly create design mockup presentations and upload them to your server. There are some services that do a similar thing but I've always preferred to keep client work on my server...especially for designs that need to kept under wraps until release. The app will also handle different layouts and let you customize the templates for each client so you can setup branding and so forth. I'm a designer and front-end developer so it is my first serious attempt at building and creating something more involved and it's been a fun learning experience. Hopefully some other designers will find it useful and I can make a few bucks on it. My wife is a self-published fiction author (http://www.amazon.com/Stephanie-Void/e/B0035Z08GI http://www.amazon.com/Stephanie-Void/e/B0035Z08GI & http://www.stephanievoid.com http://www.stephanievoid.com ) mostly young adult fantasy/scifi. Visibility is the hardest thing when going independent because the Kindle/iTunes book stores are very hard to get found in. I actually think there is some sort of opportunity for a startup offering some kind of better book shopping experience with a bit of Netflix's recommendation engine or something. She hasn't gotten enough visibility yet among her young adult audience to really take off but has been making enough each month that it is worth it. She keeps writing more books though so it should slowly increase over the years.
• emhart 13y ago
  I've usually read these threads without thinking about my own situation, but suddenly realized, I'm getting checks every month. It's not much, only $100-$250 per month, based on advertisements on my youtube channel, most coming from a 24 part series I made on locks & lockpicking a few years ago, but it's passive to the point that I literally forget about it. Unfortunately I'm the sort who is very uncomfortable asking for money, or even advertising on my content (only about 50% of the videos I put out have ads at all, and many of the most popular do not), but at the same time I'd love to have the time & resources to produce more & better content in the future. Not looking for advice, as my disposition away from revenue is much stronger than my wish to get money, and I've learned that lesson many times, just adding another voice to the thread.
  • jsleuth 13y ago
    Now that's interesting. Please do share more about your disposition away from revenue. What does that mean to you?
    • npsimons 13y ago
      Not the OP, but I can put forth that perhaps it's an ethical dilemma? Objections could be raised to collecting money without expending effort. Similar to objections to copyrights that last indefinitely.
      • emhart 13y ago
        I do think that it has some sort of knurled ethical/moral center in the middle there. It's definitely an emotional response, but logic & emotion are at odds on this one for me.
    • emhart 13y ago
      I'm trying to think how to explain it without using anecdotes, as I want to understand it myself without punting to simile. I know that I undervalue the importance of money in my own life (I have been poor to the point of homelessness once, poor the point of selling possessions to get rent/food money a few times). I also undervalue my worth, almost never charging an appropriate amount for my time. I've cultivated a niche expertise that I translate well to a wide range of communities, but when asked politely I tend to give my time and even tangible goods away for free. Now, I'm actively trying to change that. I'm getting married next year and am very excited to have a family in the relatively near future, so I'm paying off debts, I re-entered the workforce at a decent salary, and have been trying to train myself to be comfortable asking people for money in exchange for my time & expertise. It has been harder than you might imagine, but I'm making progress. Being able to externalize the need to earn money via the idea of a future family has helped me, but I remain very uncomfortable asking and often find myself under-reporting hours spent, transportation costs, etc. If I could just produce content, conduct research, give workshops & lectures & have someone else handle the money, I would be in heaven, but the few people I've spoken to about it, despite initial enthusiasm, have never followed through. Considering my own disposition, I obviously don't blame them at all :)
• jeffwilder 13y ago
  Every year around Halloween I make $400-600 via adsense with http://trickortreattimes.com/ http://trickortreattimes.com/ which lists trick or treat times for cities/towns. It felt like a good service to provide as you really have to hunt for the data. First year I did the aggregating myself, last year I added user submission which made it much more passive. It's time for me to update it for another year!
  • diydsp 13y ago
    I make about $200-$300 per evening during Halloween. I go around to websites that list trick or treat times, I am short, dress like a ghost and collect candy for free than re-resell to convenience stores.
  • ChrisNorstrom 13y ago
    Your countdown timer is broken. Holloween is not -328 days away.
• benhirashima 13y ago
  i make around 1300 USD a month from this android app i made two years ago. i have to update it every time a new version of android is released, and i spend maybe 5 minutes a day on email support. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.benhirashima.unlockwithwifi https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.benhirashi...
  • codygman 13y ago
    That's really cool :D
  • asenna 13y ago
    The app looks pretty cool. Could you please share some of your thoughts on how you settled on the price? I am about to launch an App and this app would later have a web backend to go along. I am not sure whether to launch the app for free and have some kind of subscription on the website or make the app paid.
• clemesha 13y ago
  I make ~$400 per month off of https://itunes.apple.com/app/the-wiki-game-a-wikipedia/id459318432 https://itunes.apple.com/app/the-wiki-game-a-wikipedia/id459... (and counterpart: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wiki-game-hd-wikipedia-game/id616897548 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wiki-game-hd-wikipedia-game/...). I started 'The Wiki Game' by building this web game: http://thewikigame.com http://thewikigame.com - but all revenue comes from the iOS apps, not the site. Been meaning to potentially monetize the site some day. It gets ~30,000 players per month, with time-on-site ~9mins.
  • cageface 13y ago
    Nice artwork and presentation. Looks a lot better than most of the one (wo)man show apps I've seen.
• acoleman616 13y ago
  I make $0/month now, but I'm working on a book ("Your First Web App", http://www.alexpcoleman.com/your-first-web-app/ http://www.alexpcoleman.com/your-first-web-app/) and another SaaS app now to hopefully change that soon.
• bmcd 13y ago
  I make under $1,000 per month with a Salesforce.com application: https://appexchange.salesforce.com/listingDetail?listingId=a0N3000000B3eYIEAZ https://appexchange.salesforce.com/listingDetail?listingId=a... I'm working on a few more to try and supplement this.
• gurvinder 13y ago
  About $400 per month from websites ( ads) and iPhone apps. Used to be 2k per month but has dropped low because of lack of time for attention.
• chromaton 13y ago
  I'm at around $12000/month REVENUE from my side business doing online machining. Unfortunately, it's neither as passive as I'd like it to be, and much of the money goes back out as expenses.
• europa 13y ago
  Making $4000 + / Month profit . Running a consulting firm. I have two direct employees and few pass-through 's . Revenue is much bigger a number at $100,000 + /Month . Effort is very less to maintain this profit as only spend few hours /month to run payroll , invoicing clients and make timely payment out to the vendors. pass-through : Consultants not employed by my company but work for my clients.
  • peterjancelis 13y ago
    You only take 4% profit margin? Seems very low.
    • europa 13y ago
      Yes . Most of the revenue coming in goes out as employee salary and vendor payout.
    • hartbren_ 13y ago
      This rate is not an atypical profit margin for partners (owners) of a consulting firm. Keep in mind that if the parent poster is really only spending a few hours a week then his hourly rate is fantastic. In many consulting firms the partners are also active employees, and so receive salary as well as a portion of the profits.
• xur17 13y ago
  I make anywhere from $300 to $800/month on http://pizzacodes.com http://pizzacodes.com. About 3 or 4 months ago I switched domain names to make it more memorable, and I dropped out of search results for everything but my site name. Traffic has increased pretty substantially from other sources over the past few months, so I'm back just over $600/month again.
  • Nord20 13y ago
    Hmm. Lovely concept, but when I put my address in, it says there are no results - mainly because it thinks my UK address is just between Tuvalu & Tokelau in the South Pacific (so technically, the results were correct - Papa John's are unlikely to deliver there).
    • xur17 13y ago
      Unfortunately it's US only right now. It appears to default to 'just between Tuvalu & Tokelau in the South Pacific' if no results are found - I'll fix that. Thanks for the feedback.
      • kngspook 13y ago
        On the East-to-West axis, it's probably defaulting there because it's the International Date Line. No idea how it's picking that spot on the North-to-South axis though.
  • jsonau 13y ago
    Haha good job! Interesting niche and decent site!
  • kal00ma 13y ago
    How do you make money? Some sort of affiliate deal?
    • xur17 13y ago
      Mostly AdSense. I get a small amount of money from affiliate links to Groupon also.
• bond 13y ago
  Making about $800/month from 2 Android apps. Not much but it keeps me alive. Trying to release some games and see if I can increase that amount in the next few months...
• jdlshore 13y ago
  I gross just under $10K per month from http://www.letscodejavascript.com http://www.letscodejavascript.com, a subscription-based JavaScript screencast for professional developers [1]. It's a full-time job: I put out two new episodes every week, plus a "special" every month that takes quite a bit more effort. That leaves me with about half my time for developing the business. I'm bootstrapping this, so it's just me. I don't plan to hire any employees until there's more money coming in. (I also make a few hundred a month from royalties on my book [2], which is truly passive.) I've talked about Let's Code JavaScript on HN before; check out the previous thread [3] for some details about how I started and market the site. Since simonswords82 was so generous with details about his business, I'll do the same. About 2% of the visitors to the site sign up for the free trial. That seems poor, although I don't have a lot of insight as to what the number "should" be. I do require a credit card in order to sign up for the trial. The trial automatically converts to a subscription after seven days. About 70% of trial subscribers convert to a paid subscription. This seems pretty good to me, although I'd of course be happier if it was higher. Once they've subscribed, I lose about 25% of subscribers in the first month, and then the number drops asymptotically down to about 5% (of the initial total) per month. I'm reasonably happy with this as well. It's poor by the standards of a SaaS, where a churn rate of 1-2% is doable, but I think it's pretty good for a content site. My most recent push was an inbound marketing campaign: I took one of my monthly specials and turned it into a dedicated site on object-oriented JavaScript [4]. That was very successful; it nearly doubled traffic in the first month (from 2,800 uniques in the previous month to 5,400) and looks like it will permanently add about 1,500 uniques per month. Trial rates went down slightly as a result, but overall subscriptions went up. The biggest challenge for me is having lots of things I'd like to pursue, but not enough time to do them all. The Object Playground inbound marketing campaign was successful, but a lot of work. I recently released another special that might make a good inbound campaign (on large-scale JavaScript fundamentals: modularity and automated cross-browser unit testing), but I'm not sure it's worth the time it would take to create a marketing site for it on the scale of Object Playground. For now I'm focusing on A/B testing various ideas for improving conversion. It takes less effort and potentially has longer-term impact. So far, I've improved the subscribe page [5] by adding testimonials and a better design. Next, I'll probably provide more opportunities for people to preview the series without signing up, as well as more obvious calls to action on the video pages. I also have some other plans in the works that I can't talk about yet. :-) [1] My screencast is Let's Code: Test-Driven JavaScript, a series for professional JavaScript developers. It's available at http://www.letscodejavascript.com http://www.letscodejavascript.com. I'd love to hear your feedback. [2] My book is The Art of Agile Development. It's been out for over five years now, so it's nice to still be getting royalties from it. [3] I talked about my experiences launching and marketing the screencast here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6038226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6038226 [4] My recent inbound marketing campaign was Object Playground, a tutorial and visualizer for object-oriented JavaScript: http://www.objectplayground.com http://www.objectplayground.com. [5] The Let's Code JavaScript subscribe page is at http://www.letscodejavascript.com/v3/subscribe http://www.letscodejavascript.com/v3/subscribe.
• euroclydon 13y ago
  I make $300-$500 per month with an online design tool for printable cupcake wrappers. I don't do any advertising. I get 80-100 uniques per day. I have very few quality inbound links. I do rank high for a few keyword combos, but their monthly traffic isn't that big. I spent quite a bit of time early on writing the website, and lost some hair recently trying unsuccessfully to upgrade the OSS libraries, but for the most part it runs itself, at least when GoDaddy's $60/month VPS isn't flaking out. The only other expenses are the domain, e-junkie, and payment processing fees. http://www.makecupcakewrappers.com http://www.makecupcakewrappers.com
  • petervandijck 13y ago
    A whole new world just opened for me.
    • markdown 13y ago
      Imagine all the cupcakes you could buy with the profits!!!
• snori74 13y ago
  My Linux server tutorial course site http://GREP101.com http://GREP101.com brings in $700 on a good month and $100 on a bad one. Simply a reflection of the fact that I don't have the necessary things in place to drive consistant traffic to the site - when traffic comes then I get good conversion and a full course, but if not, not. I keep it going mainly because the feedback is very encouraging, (people really do get a buzz out of learning this stuff!). It requires only a small bit of work each week to keep ticking over, but honestly it doesn't make enough to justify that if money was the only issue.
  • smu 13y ago
    Seems like you have an extra dot in your link. Should it be: http://grep101.com http://grep101.com?
    • snori74 13y ago
      Yup, fixed now. Thanks - maybe I need a coffee.
  • iDemonix 13y ago
    Nice site, I work as a Systems and Network Engineer and have been wanting to do something like this for some time. I've had similar things for PHP before that got great feedback but I did it for free. My main worry is how much content I produce and how to value it. Do you ever get requests for refunds? Have you had anyone unhappy with the course etc? Have you done any marketing at all? Or have you just dropped your link in a few places?
• jsleuth 13y ago
  Been earning a couple hundred per year with a time-tracking/report-generating site for therapists-in-training. I think one of the big downfalls of the concept was that I chose too small of a niche to serve (marriage and family therapists in training in the US). The most tangible benefit from building the service was the coding knowledge gained which serves my freelance work very well. http://www.therapyhourstracker.com/ http://www.therapyhourstracker.com/
  • tankbot 13y ago
    You should consider expanding this to include other types of therapy workers. I know from doing tech work amongst mental health professionals that most are required to log x amount of hours doing y before they can obtain licensing as a z. Since you have the platform and domain knowledge you should be able to add features to widen your target demographic.
    • jsleuth 13y ago
      Thanks, that's a great idea.
• olofsj 13y ago
  A small single-page info-site I made in a day or two some time ago started picking up traffic and now makes around $500/month from adsense ads. Quite nice for the work put into it, but of course if you take into account all my sites and apps that made nothing it's not much for the total effort. But now that it's getting traffic I have some ideas for building it out into a larger site, but I haven't found the time yet.
  • autotravis 13y ago
    What is the site?
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• IgorPartola 13y ago
  Meta note: please don't be shy to share links to what it is that's generating your income. I hate reading things like "I have this simple app that's making me $X/month" and not be able to see the context. Who knows, maybe I'll find it useful and pay for it too.
• jarofgreen 13y ago
  In the UK I started and ran a site listing tech events: https://opentechcalendar.co.uk/index.php https://opentechcalendar.co.uk/index.php It's just had it's first birthday and is doing well. This was done in a "maybe-a-bit-to-lean" fashion. There was a previous facility run by a local meetup that suddenly stopped, so I knew there was demand before I started. The first version was a MediaWiki site with a hacked open source calendar plugin that took 4 days from buying the domain to public launch. This was then later replaced with custom software. This now picks up a small amount from direct sponsorship (as in, I directly approach ppl and don't use something like Google AdWords). It took a bit to write, but I've realised the specific niche functionality could serve others and I'm currently working on turning this into a platform for any area. It's early days for that, but it works and it's up at http://ican.hasacalendar.co.uk/ http://ican.hasacalendar.co.uk/ (I also have some recurring income supporting a freelance contract I did which now takes a couple of days per month but I don't think that's what most ppl here are interested in.)
• IgorPartola 13y ago
  I net roughly $230/month from a rental property I own. I have a realtor I trust manage it for a "first month + 5% of rent" fee. The property is located in a market where rent is much higher than the mortgage (about 150%), so I end up making a profit while building equity into a house at a low interest rate. Not exciting, but it is a viable model and management fees seem very reasonable for the amount of work the realtor does.
  • tocomment 13y ago
    Make sure you're accounting for vacant months, and for maintenance.
    • IgorPartola 13y ago
      I am. So far, just as pure passive income it has been a loss (not by much, but still). I do like the idea of building equity into the house though. It is cheap enough that I can continue carrying it even during the vacant months and I do believe the prices in that market will stay stead or rise somewhat slowly over the years. In the wosrst case, it can be a nice retirement home.
• thibaut_barrere 13y ago
  I just crossed 500$/mo with https://www.wisecashhq.com https://www.wisecashhq.com (cash flow forecasting for freelancers and small businesses, launched officially 2.5 months ago). This is far away from passive income since I'm actively working on it (I'm bootstrapping it + consulting/freelancing the other days).
• derwiki 13y ago
  I get about $100/month from: * Lending out my cameras/lenses * The cut that CameraLends takes off other transactions * Affiliate marketing for my side project CameraLends.com
• ankit70 13y ago
  For me, it's around $200 from Affiliate Marketing. My blog (http://ankitkumar.in http://ankitkumar.in) has couple of articles with affiliate links in them.
• gravitronic 13y ago
  Last year I made a decent DJ application for Android. I probably invested a few thousand hours into it & the framework I built it on that could compile to Android, Blackberry Playbook, and HP Touchpad. I grossed just under $10k between sales on the three platforms, and advertising on Android. That works out to a few dollars per hour, last year. This year, I don't have time to work on it further but between advertising and sales I'm still making ~400-600 USD/month. For 0 hours investment. I love the long tail.
  • jtheory 13y ago
    :) It's not 0 hours investment, just 0 hours investment this year. All of that work last year was investment that's now paying off, bit by bit. Your hourly rate from last year will look slightly better now if you add in this year's earnings...though it's still a rough game to play. Good luck!
  • pa5tabear 13y ago
    When you say a few thousand hours, do you really mean it? Working 9-5 for a year is only 2000 hours...
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• jakobe 13y ago
  I make around $2000/month from two Mac apps (database tools). Revenue is falling as multiple competitors cloned my profitable app, so I have to do more client work again :(
  • zura 13y ago
    How the selling compares on Mac App Store vs outside?
    • jakobe 13y ago
      It varies month to month, but around 70-80% of my revenue is from MAS. Additionally, selling on MAS is so much easier. I don't really have a good reason why I'm even selling it outside MAS.
  • konradb 13y ago
    Is there any way you find to guard against competitors cloning your app? Do you have any recourse?
    • jakobe 13y ago
      There's pretty much nothing I can do. One competitor even made an icon almost identical to mine. I contacted Apple, but all they did was forward my complaint to the competitor. The competitor first sent me a threatening email, but then they changed their icon. I think the best way to guard against competitors is to improve your product. The first one and a half years I was always far ahead of my competition. Since about a year I haven't had time for any significant new features, so my competitors have catched up. Some competing apps now have more features, some are a lot cheaper... Unfortunately the next logical steps for improving my app are so much work that I don't know if they would pay off.
• mVChr 13y ago
  Small stakes, but completely passive. About ~$500/mo from Adsense on what are essentially niche long-tail SEO targeted yellow-page-like regional sites for very specific verticals. Not a lot of money, but I haven't touched them since 2007 (when they were averaging closer to $800/mo). Initial investment was mostly time doing research, implementing, and SEO stuff. Also experimenting: abandoning failed sites or improving ones with potential. Now the successful ones are completely passive sources of income and the only expenses are hosting and domain renewal. Right now I'm working on a more substantial side-project that will provide an actual service that hopefully people will actually want to use and subscribe to for their businesses. It will require more maintenance and time and monetary investment, but in the long run should be much more satisfying and potentially bring in more income.
• veb 13y ago
  I run a Facebook fan page for a TV show, and use Teespring (http://www.teespring.com http://www.teespring.com) to monetize the page. Every few months I do a sale, which nets around $4,000 USD.
  • rfnslyr 13y ago
    Isn't that illegal, making money off someone elses product? How many subs do you have?
    • veb 13y ago
      Hopefully not. :-) I have 345,000.
  • timhargis 13y ago
    I just got Don Wilsons "FB Ads Cracked" program. Have you seen this?
• snoonan 13y ago
  Interesting point against recurring revenue for some products: We increased overall sales by charging a fixed price for permanent access vs. recurring billing. The lifetime value of the customer turned out to be less in the recurring model. It took us about 2 years to discover this. Just something to keep an eye on.
  • jdlshore 13y ago
    Very interesting. I've gotten a decent number of requests for a la carte purchases on my site, so I'm strongly considering doing it. (It's a big change, though, which is why I've held off.) Can you say more? I'm particularly interested in how you set your prices, whether you kept the recurring model alongside the permanent model, and how you saw customer behavior change. Thanks!
    • snoonan 13y ago
      I'm reluctant to give harder details since I am in what could be a "passive income" niche, but I will try. We originally set our monthly prices in line with comparably similar produces - about $20/mo, with discounts to purchase 6 & 12 months in advances. The final fixed cost (lifetime access) account ended up costing less than a 12 month discounted subscription. The feedback was that a) some people bought precisely because they didn't have a recurring bill hitting their account, even a small one. b) some people found the fixed price too expensive to buy and were disappointed they couldn't buy it. c) The ones that did buy the fixed price were happy with their purchases. Overall, however, we ended up with fewer total buyers each paying above the average lifetime value of the monthly buyers. When we offered BOTH subscription AND fixed price access for individual units for a period of time, people tended to buy the lowest cost subscription instead of the lowest cost unit. They shopped on price. They were not as happy with their purchases in either case, though more so for the cheapest subscription. In the end, it was counterintuitive to what is commonly considered "good business" to have recurring revenue from customers. We still think there's a place for monthly recurring billing somewhere, but we don't have the catalog or products to support a mix. It would be great to provide Level 1 at a fixed price and Level 2 at a lower monthly fee because we know they are the "stick with it" customers and so will likely have a better lifetime value. Sorry to be vague here. The numbers vary over the years, but started about $2500/mo and grew to about 10k/mo over about 6 years. It is for a learning endeavor that people SHOULD commit a year+ to learning, but tend to quit for very human reasons. We think people who make commitments are happier because a) that cool TED talk about irrevocable choices that everyone talks about and b) Committing to putting in the time on our product DOES result in a new skill set, so it has tangible personal improvement if it is used as directed.
• JeremyMorgan 13y ago
  I pull in anywhere from $400-$600 in adsense off my blog, it's not exactly passive because I have to contribute content to it. But I originally only put AS on there to cover hosting costs (and other servers for dev, etc) but now it's starting to get closer to "income". I'm still putting it into things like Raspberry Pis, Arduinos, Parallellas etc for stuff to write about on the blog. I use that money to try out other services as well, it's nowhere near what I'd call a "business" at this point.
  • tokenizer 13y ago
    That sounds really cool you should provide me (us) link. For niche blogs that do well like yours; What year did you start? How was growth? Posting frequency? Thanks for any insights. I'm really curious because I'm slowly starting to realize I can maybe earn some beer money by being an active part of the community for a hobby of mine. Your case is a perfect example, as you do adsense, have a similar niche (newish tech) and seem like you started our of fun/love of your hobby. Cheers
    • justadude 13y ago
      Might be this one? http://www.jeremymorgan.com/ http://www.jeremymorgan.com/
• mgz 13y ago
  Couple hundred dollars from running ads on http://standartgost.ru http://standartgost.ru
  • Eduard 13y ago
    What's it about (cannot read cyrillic)?
• abemassry 13y ago
  $2.50/month from https://wsend.net https://wsend.net I'm working on growing it and developing add ons that use it as a backend. No day to day work, 1 hour of server maintenance a month approx.
• TamDenholm 13y ago
  Bit late to the boat but: Around $700/mo from a themeforest account. And the more interesting story, about £4.5k/mo from a cleaning business that i bought. I will at some point write the story up, but the TL:DR is: Spotted vastly under valued cleaning business with complete staff. Turnover of previous owner £190k a year. Profit of previous owner £18k. Yup, £18k.... Bought it for £13.5k. Still in the early stages and still changing things but the previous owner was/is in massive debt, little free time to put into the business, did EVERYTHING on paper/fax/phone and had enormous monthly costs. Theres a much longer story to this but i'll write it up in a few months when its a bit more proven.
  • aarondf 13y ago
    I'd love to hear more about it when/if you get around to writing it up!
  • ioddly 13y ago
    Cleaning. Like house cleaning, dry cleaning? I'm intrigued.
    • TamDenholm 13y ago
      House cleaning primarily, yup. 104 clients, 10 of them are offices, 9 cleaners.
  • kbelbina 13y ago
    Would love to read the story. Buying and modernizing traditional businesses (cleaners, laundromats, etc) is something that I think is really interesting.
  • kngspook 13y ago
    Also very interested in this story... Where would you put it up once you write it? (So I can start monitoring...)
  • TamDenholm 13y ago
    Hey all, i realise i'm much too late to this but if anyone checks, i setup a mailchimp list i'll blast out when i make a proper write up of my story: http://eepurl.com/FNvPr http://eepurl.com/FNvPr
• anonymous1983 13y ago
  I gross approximately 75k a month in RR, split between my business partner and I. 60k from IPhone apps and 15k from Android apps.
  • kristianp 13y ago
    That sounds great! Can you expand on that? For instance, did you develop the apps, how many apps, what niche? Were you first-to-market?
    • anonymous1983 13y ago
      I don't want to reveal the apps that I make, but I can answer your questions. I did develop the apps. There are 4 main apps that bring in all of the revenue. The apps are gaming and entertainment categories. None of the apps were first to market, but most of them did provide a much better experience than what was available at the time.
• handzhiev 13y ago
  $4 - $5k monthly from PHP apps for webmasters and premium Wordpress plugins (the latter works better recently). This is far from passive though as it requires constant updating and support. We have a bunch of content sites but they barely bring $200 - $300 from adsense and affiliate (used to be 10x a while ago).
• jonstjohn 13y ago
  About $100/month on http://www.climbingweather.com http://www.climbingweather.com It was ad-free for years, finally put some ads up last year and now it's covering my expenses. Haven't done much development in a couple years, but working on an updated Android app. A bit skeptical that I'll make much money from it, debating pay-app vs ads vs free-free. Now trying to pick up some real advertisers (currently adsense).
  • hanley 13y ago
    Why would someone use this instead of Weather Underground, Weather.com, WeatherSpark, Forecast.io, etc.? It doesn't seem very specific to climbing and there doesn't seem to be much room for growth since Mountain Project is already the go-to site for route and community information.
    • jonstjohn 13y ago
      I think the main benefit of ClimbingWeather.com is ability to quickly find climbing areas. Looking for the forecast for Indian Creek, Joshua Tree, the Gunks, Cathedral Spires? You don't need to find the nearest town or hope the forecast is right (maybe you'll find it is 10 degrees difference due to elevation). Agreed that the growth potential might be somewhat limited, but there is still a small and solid audience that likes the format.
• benhebert 13y ago
  I earn 1,500 - 2,000 a month off of niche websites. Nothing fancy.
  • Omnipresent 13y ago
    would like to find out more
    • cotsog 13y ago
      http://benhebert.com/profitable-niche-site-two-months/ http://benhebert.com/profitable-niche-site-two-months/
• kephra 13y ago
  - I'm doing between l$20k and l$30k per month on commissions on vendor systems that rent out shoutcast servers to musicians and DJs in Secondlife. oups thats only us$80-$120, but its game money, that I can drop into tipjars, if I like music, or use it pay graphic designers. - I'm doing Linux maintenance for a dozen servers (Debian, Linux Container, Nagios, Make+M4 as management - hey puppet, chef and cfenginer are for quiche eaters) for Euro600/year each, basically for doing backup, apt-get, and having a nagios screen open. - I have sold the 3rd w3dig.com installation, with an Euro1000 anual maintenance contract recently. This will hopefully become my next 'big' software. - I still have 22 XML::Edifact customers, who pay Euro1000 twice a year for maintenance update, when the next UN/EDIFACT standard is published. A semi-passive income that requires a week work twice a year, and payed my lifestyle, free software experiments, slack, and procrastination for a 3rd of my life so far. Not bad for a software I published under GPL 15 years ago.
• mhartl 13y ago
  The Ruby on Rails Tutorial (http://railstutorial.org/ http://railstutorial.org/), conceived as a 4-Hour Workweek–style product business, makes low five figures per month, requiring just about the proverbial four hours of work per week (mostly minor book updates and customer service emails). New editions are a lot of work (e.g., ~2 months full-time to redo the screencasts), but the new sales cycle typically yields a mid-five-figure income spike the month of the launch. I'm currently working on a project designed to help make Rails Tutorial–type stories more common among hackers. Stay tuned...
  • emilioolivares 13y ago
    Super interested in what you're building, huge fan (but not a customer) of your tutorial and story. If you could offer a SquareSpace type of solution for selling screencasts including international billing, account management, it would be killer! Where do I sign up for the mail list? :)
    • mhartl 13y ago
      Glad to hear it. :-) I'm working on a publishing platform that makes it easy to produce and sell Rails Tutorial–style products. If you'd like to get involved, just send me an email (address in profile) and I'll add you to the notification list for the private beta.
  • krstck 13y ago
    Just wanted to reach out and say that using your tutorial, I taught myself what I needed to know to talk myself into my current job. Thank you!
• ChrisNorstrom 13y ago
  This is one of the greatest motivations for young and budding entrepreneurs. Even more so than aspiring speeches or conference talks. I'd like to thank everyone that posted links and revealed your numbers. People usually don't do that because it invites competition but it's amazing to see how nice and inviting the HN community is. I'm also AMAZED at the familiar faces. I've seen and bought a lot of code from some of you guys without realizing many of you visit HN. Here's my crap: http://dayonepp.com http://dayonepp.com - Maybe $100/month (down season) then I think $500/month (up season) NOT passive. Lots of work. I handle fulfillment. http://affordabl.es http://affordabl.es - $0, just launched http://residentevilradio.com http://residentevilradio.com - $0, (ran Amazon affiliate links) http://timeforzen.com http://timeforzen.com - $0, needs redesign, will monetize later this year. BTW, where's http://CandyJapan.com http://CandyJapan.com guy? Last I heard he told us his project was successful at around $3,500/month in revenue.
  • kehers 13y ago
    This may be off topic but I'd love to where you registered your domain affordabl.es. Last I tried registering a .es tld, I got some "Syria residents/biz" restrictions.
    • ChrisNorstrom 13y ago
      lol NameCheap: http://www.namecheap.com/?aff=56383 http://www.namecheap.com/?aff=56383 They're great. I'm switching over to them from 1and1. I own about 65 domains.
• morphar 13y ago
  I have a simple IP lookup site (http://showip.net http://showip.net) that I created many years ago. I created it because I needed it (but mainly too learn at that point ;) Since then it has gotten better and better indexing on Google until it reached a steady level at around 100.000 - 130.000 visitors / month. The ads has been fluctuating quite a bit, but overall it has been going steadily up. Currently I earn somewhere between $250 - $500 / month. I haven't done much but a bit of tweaking now and then since the initial version, though I have had plenty of plans... I have changed the GEO IP location DB a couple of times, but the only major change was a rewrite from PHP/MySQL to Node.js and a GEO IP database directly in NginX.
• ompemi 13y ago
  Around $5K/mo for few android apps, being 60/40 between paid and inapp + paid versus ads.
• acconrad 13y ago
  Since this thread didn't specify that the recurring income has to come solely from technology, I make $400-$1k/mo DJing. Technically it's work because it's not passive, but it is recurring and it is a hobby that requires little to no work - I have a LOT of fun doing it and it pays well by the hour. I'm only posting this because I think it's important to also point out that you can turn hobbies into passive, recurring income and that is a surefire way to getting the most out of your passive income.
• prepaidcc 13y ago
  Created http://www.canadaprepaidcreditcard.com http://www.canadaprepaidcreditcard.com in June last year. Traffic has grown steadily to 3000+ unique / month. A large Canadian daily newspaper included link to site in a story on prepaid credit cards which spiked traffic for a week. Otherwise traffic is almost all organic search. Adsense revenue grew steadily and is up to $120+ / month. I have one affiliate ($35 per sign-up) that has paid once. Have to look into this some more. Created http://www.australiaprepaidcreditcard.com http://www.australiaprepaidcreditcard.com, http://www.usprepaidcreditcard.com http://www.usprepaidcreditcard.com and http://www.ukprepaidcreditcard.co.uk http://www.ukprepaidcreditcard.co.uk sites recently. So far only UK site is following steady growth pattern. Apparently no one is interested in Australian cards and US has trillions of similar sites so mine is drowned in search. I did Canada site card research myself. But didn't have time for Australia, UK and US site research. So I created 3 Fiverr jobs with template Excel workbook asking person to search internet and fill with as many cards as they could find. I got 4 people per card so between them I got good detail though had to clean it up and fill in the blanks. Sites requires minimal ongoing maintenance. Actually I have had customers and several card companies contact me to make corrections and updates.
• MrBigJoe 13y ago
  I make roughly £60 a month from http://www.phonecompare.co.uk http://www.phonecompare.co.uk It's written in PHP/MySQL using Symfony 2 and hosted on a UK based VPS. It's only been online for a short period and I'm working on it all of the time to increase what it's making so we'll see how it goes. At the moment it's pretty bare and doesn't have a huge amount of value so it's not doing very well in the search engines, but I'll keep plugging away and give it a reasonable chance to see what its potential is like. I'd like to add a comparison feature which will allow people to compare the specs of the handsets against each other which will hopefully give it a bit more of an edge.
• emilioolivares 13y ago
  This thread is full of HN gold! Thanks everyone for sharing. I make about $450 dlls per month offering cheap cpanel hosting @ http://www.simplehosting.co http://www.simplehosting.co. Interestingly most of my clients are in emerging markets, such as Latin America, Indonesia, and Vietnam. It's not totally passive as I have to do support and other admin stuff, but it's not bad. Cheers!
• appbot 13y ago
  I currently make betweet $3k and 4k a month from http://stuartkhall.com/posts/an-app-store-experiment http://stuartkhall.com/posts/an-app-store-experiment and http://appbot.co http://appbot.co
• callmeed 13y ago
  I have 2 companies in the professional photography space: http://bigfolio.com http://bigfolio.com and http://aphotofolio.com http://aphotofolio.com. The first serves wedding and portrait photogs and the second high-end editorial, commercial, fashion. We provide website designs and a custom CMS for managing galleries. We get a setup fee (though that is going away soon) and monthly hosting. They aren't exactly equal but each is making in the low six figures per month. On the wedding side we also have http://nextproof.com http://nextproof.com which is sort of a "shopify for wedding photos". It makes around $30k/month in subscription + transaction fees. On the commercial photo side, we have http://editdrop.com http://editdrop.com which is a feedback/collaboration tool for photographers and their clients. It makes about $2k/month at the moment since we haven't done much marketing yet. Overall, I'm bearish on the professional photo space so we are actively looking into other verticals and doing a lot of customer dev/research. My wife and I also run http://cheergram.com http://cheergram.com in our spare time. Right now we are making a few hundred bucks a month in sales but we did almost $3k in Instagram Christmas cards last year between thanksgiving and Christmas. I'm hoping we can top that this holiday season.
  • sashagim 13y ago
    That's very impressive - both in terms of revenues, and product development! Are you doing all the design and development work yourself?
    • callmeed 13y ago
      We have employees and stuff
• wielebny 13y ago
  About 400EUR monthly from running game servers on open-source game.
  • andypants 13y ago
    How do game servers make money? Advertisements in the game?
    • wielebny 13y ago
      It's free-to-play with paid additions, 'premium accounts', etc.
• Shpigford 13y ago
  Making around $5000/mo between http://popsurvey.com http://popsurvey.com and http://temper.io http://temper.io (recently launched). But that's rising a bit more rapidly now: http://joshpigford.com/kill-the-free-how-to-increase-revenue-by-40-percent http://joshpigford.com/kill-the-free-how-to-increase-revenue... Slow, but steady, growth. Definitely a prime example of the "Long, Slow, SaaS Ramp of Death." http://businessofsoftware.org/2012/10/gail-goodman-the-long-slow-saas-ramp-of-death/ http://businessofsoftware.org/2012/10/gail-goodman-the-long-...
• darkcatstudios 13y ago
  I WAS taking around £1000 PM through an online printing service which i sold off about 3 years back as i hadnt got time to put the effort into it that it involved. I am now looking at re-launching that as the new owner disolved it and let the domain lapse (www.a2prints.co.uk) (i didnt sell the IP) As you'll see the site is very dated now so im in the middle of a compete rebuild, hope to launch again in a few weeks. Currently adwords is basically paying for itself, but the bounce rate is understandably very high due to the very dated nature of the site. Should turn around £7k pm after relaunch with a realistic initial estimate of 10 1-print jobs per day.
• egomaksab 13y ago
  4 figure each month, Breeze (http://breeze.pm http://breeze.pm), it's a project management app (Basecamp and Trello mashup).
  • marco-fiset 13y ago
    The thing with saying "4 figures" is that it can be anywhere between 1000 and 9999, and that is a way too big range to even give us an idea.
• domrdy 13y ago
  I feel a little bit ashamed to post this but whatever. I used to write bots for a popular online game that would harvest materials and sell stuff in the games auction house. At first I only wanted to automate some tedious, boring tasks in the game, but over time I got really good at it to the point where I wouldnt have to touch my guy for days. Anyway, there where lots of bots on my servers and we would all undercut each other to a point where our materials where worth almost nothing. Around this time the company released an API where you could pull auction house data for your server. I wrote some scripts that would pull the data, store them in redis and crunch some numbers that I would later feed to my bots, to gain some advantage. Basically, I was able to withhold my stock when the price reached a certain threshold and buyout all of my competitions stock at super low prices. By that time I had already "scaled up" and ran several instances on various servers, all full automated by some python scripts. I wrote a web socket based web interface that allowed me to see my bots log messages in real time from work. I set up alerts when game masters messaged so I was able to answer them to prove that I was not a bot, all remotely. It was so much fun. At the end of each month I would sell the in-game currency to some chinese companies, the last few months I made between 300-500 € / month, double that amount around christmas. One day, the bann hammer (rightfully so!) hit me hard and I lost all my accounts. It still was a fun experience that introduced me to several new technologies.
• kbart 13y ago
  Nothing, 0 ;( But after seeing so many success stories here, I hope one day to overcome that internal brake inside me that prevents from trying.
  • sixdimensional 13y ago
    Ditto! You can do it, just smart small, try it out and start with something that has almost no impact on your life if you fail. In fact, I like the saying "fail, and fail often" - it means you learn a lot!
• galfarragem 13y ago
  $15/m with amazon affiliate links in a niche blog: http://www.archimodels.info http://www.archimodels.info (7.5k visits month). Unfortunately I didn't start the blog thinking about monetizing it. It's a very bad market (architectural students and teachers). Hopefully I can get $30 for 5h work every month (10min x 30days). It's just a hobby that allowed me to learn about web development (that's not my work field).
• doktorn 13y ago
  Me and my business partner make about $500/month from a simple iPhone app. (http://varkar.knappra.se/index_en.htm http://varkar.knappra.se/index_en.htm)
• mapster 13y ago
  $200-500/mo from ecommerce selling digital goods I create. http://mapsalesdirect.com http://mapsalesdirect.com
• rk0567 13y ago
  $500-$1000 per month from my blog [0], Railyo [1] and from another website [2] from Adsense, Direct Fees and Affiliate programs. I spend 2-6 hours a month. [0] http://blog.sudobits.com http://blog.sudobits.com - I blog about free and open source softwares, tools, news and so. [1] http://railyo.com http://railyo.com - Job board for Rails freelancers. [2] http://assembleyourpc.net http://assembleyourpc.net - A simple tool for building pc online.
• jsleuth 13y ago
  I made a few cents selling google ads next to a version of the bubblebreaker game I built. Seems to be hard to make money on games... http://games.jeffslutz.com/bubblebreaker/ http://games.jeffslutz.com/bubblebreaker/
• marco1 13y ago
  I make about $15.00 per month with a free Android app [1], although it has 900,000+ downloads and 500,000+ active installations. Seems I have to rethink my monetization strategy ;) [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.marcow.birthdaylist https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.marcow.bir...
• britcanpakus 13y ago
  There are some interesting lessons with my pay-what-you-want approach, although I haven't quite nailed it down. I run a DC-based service called Linktank [http://dc.linktank.com http://dc.linktank.com] that offers limited access to registered users and full access to PWYW subscribers: http://dc.linktank.com/subscribe http://dc.linktank.com/subscribe After launching my subscription service this past August, I have about a 6% conversion from freemium registrants, although that has been picking up steadily this month and will continue to rise in October. Users have an option to pay $3, $5, $7, $9. Most users choose $3 but slightly less than that choose $7. On average, I am getting about $5.25 per user. I'm generating about $1,400 from subscriptions alone but that number is increasing by a hundred or so every week. I started this service as an email roundup. That list has now grown to about 23K subscribers and I'm now monetizing with subscriptions, advertising, and job postings. What do you think of my approach? Where am I leaving money on the table? What are some missing opportunities?
• llogiq 13y ago
  Whenever I hear an evangelist (and I label everyone dealing in absolutes like 'is X worth it?' without at least asking 'what?' and 'for whom?' evangelist), my gut reaction is to dismiss everything without even reading it. I work in an unconventional setting, where my code runs for a potetially long time and where failure means trying again. This has led me to use a lot of assert statements, both in a pre-/postcondition/invariant checking and in a more general assumption checking style. I still use unit tests, but only to exercise portions of the code quickly - the tests are often devoid of assertions. I find that this style gives me the best test coverage + internal code documentation for the time invested.