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How much money are you earning from your software products?
- peacemaker 13y agoRight now only about $300 a month but it is fairly passive. I also do freelance work and sell other products. I recently started using Google AdWords as so far I've done very little marketing. Hopefully AdWords can improve that number into something far more impressive. I'm also building a couple of other websites which I think have potential to make a lot of money but they will take a while longer yet. It's my ultimate goal to build a sustainable living from software products online. I think it's a realistic, yet very difficult goal but I'm enjoying the challenge!
- svs108 13y agoCan you share what kind of product this is?
- peacemaker 13y agoIt's a few products actually, mainly aimed at small businesses who need web software. My main product is http://paymentsplugin.com http://paymentsplugin.com which gets most of the sales. I enjoy putting products together though, some hit, others miss. It's good practice on the sales and marketing side of things too as I'm mostly a developer.
- svs108 13y agoWell, that looks interesting :). Thanks for the share. And yeah, putting products out is definitely the best way to learn for me too.
- dbond 13y agoInteresting product, how well is selling through envato working for you? I've looked at it before but the rates seemed a little too much for new members.
- peacemaker 13y agoIt's a tough trade-off really. Envato have millions of members so I get regular sales but the commission rates are very unfavorable. I'm working on moving some of my more popular products from Envato marketplaces and onto my own websites. It's a slow process though as I want to keep the benefits of the traffic from Envato throughout. Plus I'm still learning with regards to internet marketing and can't hope to attract the types of traffic Envato can bring me.
- euroclydon 13y agoI make $300-$500/mo. with http://www.makecupcakewrappers.com http://www.makecupcakewrappers.com I started it three years ago with a single web page and an email-me-when-it's-ready form. I barely got enough emails (50-60) in the first couple months to justify moving forward. But I did, with three designs and a simple design-by-form interface. Fast forward to today and I have dozens of templates and a custom drag and drop interface done in canvas. I have a pretty good conversion rate given that I only get ~90 uniques per day.
- simondlr 13y agoClever little niche! Well done.
- KevinUK 13y agoIt's interesting that you have adwords on your homepage. Does it bring in any revenue? To me it detracts from the overall look of the site. I just Googled custom cupcake design and you are 4th, maybe there just aren't that many people after the service?
- euroclydon 13y agoI plastered them all over the site in an experiment to see if I could move to 100% ad based monitization since so many visitors are just looking for free printables, but they only make like $50/mo. So I need to remove them. I just haven't gotten around to it yet. The whole site is just a playground at this point since the search volume indicates I'm close to maxing out the potential revenue. My next move is to package the technology as Custom Designed Printable X for your business and sell it along with a setup and maintenance fee.
- simondlr 13y agoI created http://www.twimemachine.com http://www.twimemachine.com. Costs only about $6 a month to run (S3 static costs). And I make between $70 - $100 a month from just the one ad box on it. Pocket money that usually goes into buying some more Bitcoin.
- ericthegoodking 13y agonice! thanks for sharing
- visualR 13y ago$2000/mo on a Mac app
- ericthegoodking 13y agois your app, desktop only? do you mind sharing what it does and how you market it?
- visualR 13y agodesktop only marketed through the Mac App Store and mac update
- QuantumDoja 13y agoHi, Can you tell us what it is?
- cashmonkey85 13y agoVector graphics app http://vectorpaint.yaks.co.nz http://vectorpaint.yaks.co.nz Calculated revenue would be $200 a week selling a small upgrade but leave it free at the moment.
- gesman 13y ago- Just sold my wordpress plugin business for $4k. - Run hosting company that just became slightly profitable. ~$110/mo fully passive affiliate commissions for referrals to recurring membership businesses. - Looking to enter into personal development niche.
- imdsm 13y agoHow long have you been running the hosting company? What level of input does it require from you?
- gesman 13y agoI basically started it to get away from Hostgator which along with other providers started to oversell anything under the sun and presented gradually degraded speed and quality of service. So I got dedicated server to myself and fully configured it for hosting needs including automated iptables-based firewall protection and malware protection. Then i sent emails to my past web. dev clients out of which a few signed up. Right off the bat I started to offer malware protection for which site5 charges $30+/mo (10 sites max) and thevault.com charges $40/mo (1 site). I offer everything for $25/mo, unlimited sites, no BS, firewall, complete malware detection/protection, daily account-wide, off-site (off-continent actually) backups for which I renting specialized service in another country. Originally I was hoping to just cover my costs but it started to become profitable already - so I plan to boost this side of effort. People do see value in this where they feel protected and having fast service without doing anything.
- robotmay 13y agoCurrently https://www.photographer.io https://www.photographer.io is costing me about £100 a month to run, as its income is only via referrals to Digital Ocean until I add a subscription model. I've been holding off for a few months as I don't feel happy charging for something which I still feel is incomplete; at what point do other people feel happy charging users for their products? I'm thinking of offering early adopters a significant discount for helping pay for the costs whilst the site develops, as it's nowhere near the point where I'd be happy charging a similar amount to Flickr/500px yet. However the popularity of the project has helped me out personally; I've been offered a number of jobs due to my increased visibility as a developer.
- benjamincburns 13y ago> I don't feel happy charging for something which I still feel is incomplete If you're like me, you'll never feel like it's complete. But, is it useful? I'd suggest charging now or very soon. Early adopters who are willing to use an incomplete service want that service to grow and be around. Charging them a nominal fee increases the changes of that happening.
- robotmay 13y agoI hope it's useful! It seems to have a small number of dedicated users right now, a number of whom have said they'd like to support the site. I think I'm going to aim to get subscriptions in within the next month. I must admit that one reason why I've been putting it off is having to finish setting up the business side of things. I probably can't put off figuring out my accounting much longer :D
- w0rd-driven 13y agoIt feels like I've seen photographer.io for a while now. It isn't my bag but I'm honestly surprised you aren't making anything yet. It seems long overdue, honestly. I think the other advice is perfect and to some users, they may not see value until you put a price on it you can live with.
- jonasvp 13y agoMy side project http://www.browser-details.com http://www.browser-details.com is doing about $100/month right now. I haven't started to do any marketing yet as I want to give it a small makeover before. It started as a tool for my company so I know there's a need for it - not sure yet how to best market it, though.
- discreditable 13y agoJust a little note, your browser-dection page seems to be missing its Windows 8.1 icon (the icon image 404s).
- jonasvp 13y agoWow, thanks - I'll get that fixed up.
- theycallmemorty 13y agoThat is an incredible idea.
- raelmiu 13y agoI'm losing about $200 a month so far on https://blankpage.io https://blankpage.io, the subscription model took longer than calculated to implement.
- jtheory 13y agoCuriosity -- what are your costs? $200 seems quite high to be solely your hosting.
- raelmiu 13y agoChose bad backend provider. Thought I'd use Parse.com for a quick start. Ended up rewriting the whole thing to plain node. But until I have time to write it all, parse is cashing in on me. After that, It'd probably go down to around 30 bucks.
- aturek 13y agoNoticed a minor bug: clicking "sign up and write" and then the "X" on the popup still has the spinner going on the signup button
- raelmiu 13y agoThanks Aturek!
- Everlag 13y agoVisiting in chrome and firefox yields me an issue with your certificate and a large warning about how your site is potentially unsafe. That may be an issue with your certificate. It also may be a reason for poor returns if this has been going on for a long term.
- tjdetwiler 13y agoDitto, definitely makes the site feel less "legitimate".
- sumang 13y agoMaking 500 Euro per month and after expenses I am making 450 euro . My first customer and 110 customers in beta list which I am going to starting releasing beta next week . here is the product . http://bit.ly/HDcvfA http://bit.ly/HDcvfA
- ericthegoodking 13y agoThis is inspirational! are you working on it alone or do you have a "team"?
- sumang 13y agogot 2 freelancers , but as a founder , I am alone. I am a 2 time failed entrepreneur and both times Investors rejected my startup just bcoz I am a single founder, but still fighting alone to show what a one person can do :)
- dannowatts 13y agohave a few side projects. here's a fun one: http://ShouldIDrinkThisFuckingBeer.com http://ShouldIDrinkThisFuckingBeer.com it is making absolutely zero money (yet), but the engagement on the site is INSANE. also, the site itself, and the people who come to it (and email/tweet/blog/instagram/vine/smoke signals/carrier pigeon/etc about it) are passionate and willing to support craft beer. besides the benefit of interacting with super cool, kick-ass people who love craft beer, i've also been in touch with some breweries who are wanting to partner on a multitude of things, and i've been invited to come brew a batch at a few of them, with the head brewers! so to summarize: • making no money on this side project. • not losing any money on this side project. • over 75 million hits since launch, over 1 million people and over 50 million suggestions every month. • fuckloads of fun interacting with the craft beer lovers and the craft beer world. • the amount of engagement the site has will help support the next phase which will make money :) • ... • profit!!
- dlsx 13y agoJust don't input Keystone Ice ;)
- dannowatts 13y agoFUCK NO!! :)
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- bascule 13y agoIt told me to go fuck myself when I put in Mephistopheles Stout by Avery. I think it's broken
- dannowatts 13y agowell... did you? if not, go ahead, then report back. but really, it's not an exhaustive list as there are HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of beers and new ones getting all of the time, so I'll make sure to add it. and like it says on the site, shoot an email if you've got suggestion ;)
- habosa 13y agoZero now. Was a time when I was making $100/mo from ads on my free Android app (took the ads off, now it's just free as in free) and I sold another Android app for $2.5k. Those were my first two software projects ever so it was some awesome feedback, convinced me to get a CS degree.
- KevinUK 13y agoI make on average £330 a month from a WordPress plugin https://www.getmecooking.com/wordpress-recipe-plugin https://www.getmecooking.com/wordpress-recipe-plugin The idea was to get content for the main website so that it would make money. I've got over 2000 recipes now but traffic is still under 1000 hits a day so I've still not tried to monetise the main website. I've now started to develop a job recruitment website as I can see that earning money a lot easier. Other sites in the niche have 10 job postings a day each and charge on average my prices which would mean £1000 a day. I just need to solve the recruiter / applicant traffic problem... http://www.platejobs.com/ http://www.platejobs.com/
- icehawk219 13y agoSo far $0/mo off Neutrino (https://getneutrino.com https://getneutrino.com) as I'm still getting up and going. I built it for myself to help keep track of my own side projects and then decided to embrace the idea of "sell your by-products". I'm now getting a crash course on marketing and sales.
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- dangrossman 13y agoImprovely (https://www.improvely.com https://www.improvely.com) passed $10k/mo RR not too long ago and is about a year old. I run several other SaaS sites with a couple thousand a month in revenue each. It's enough that I never regret turning down the standing job offers I had at the end of college 3 years ago. Nothing really compared to the short-lived but very successful WordPress plugins I used to build and sell. A few days' work could turn into the equivalent of a year's salary. One had over $250,000 in sales in 18 months before I sold rights to it for another $90,000 to another company. I don't work with WordPress much anymore, and don't have much motivation to force myself back into that ecosystem to sell more plugins. It just wasn't as fun as running live services that handle lots of users and lots of data.
- Omnipresent 13y agoHow do you decided on which product to build and the market to target?
- peacemaker 13y agoHey Dan, I'm selling Wordpress plugins right now with nothing near the same success as you. Do you think it's a market that is too saturated to achieve the level of sales you saw? I'd also love to hear how you managed to attract the number of users to your website that gave you over $250k in sales? It's something I'm having trouble with right now and any pointers would be greatly appreciated!
- dangrossman 13y ago> Do you think it's a market that is too saturated to achieve the level of sales you saw? Not at all. There are thousands of plugins, but there are 72 million WordPress sites.
- peacemaker 13y agoTrue. My thoughts too which is why I got into doing this about 6 months ago but since I've only had limited success I've had a few doubts recently. I wish I could find a really good online marketing guide. One aimed at developers would be perfect. It seems there is no shortage of "learn programming" resources out there but marketing courses always seem so scammy.
- huhtenberg 13y agoCarmack, Romero and two other guys were making $60K a month from Commander Keen in its shareware format. That's after Apogee's 60% cut. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commander_Keen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commander_Keen [1] http://www.amazon.com/Masters-Doom-Created-Transformed-Culture/dp/0812972155 http://www.amazon.com/Masters-Doom-Created-Transformed-Cultu... - highly recommended, really good read
- ctek 13y agoPageBlox (https://www.pageblox.com/ https://www.pageblox.com/) earns about $300 a month and is growing steadily... The hardest part has been SEO and marketing, something I am still quite new at.
- crazygringo 13y agoAround $150-300/mo. with http://testyourvocab.com http://testyourvocab.com from Google AdSense. Tells you the size of your English vocabulary. And it was HN which popularized it in the first place!
- vojant 13y agoI really like testyourvocab.com. I use it from time to time to check my progress.
- clearfont 13y agojust checked out your site, i think its decent it would be great if you made it easier to tick the words, its difficult to pin point and click too many check boxes
- samweinberg 13y agoYou can use tab + space instead of clicking.
- rejectpenguin 13y agoCool site. I wonder if you would make more on AdSense if your advertisement was above the fold.
- bensmiley 13y agoI make around $600 per month on http://www.binpress.com http://www.binpress.com. I sell 6 software components for iOS. Most of them were component that I had already developed for other projects. I just tidied them up and made them available for purchase. The income's very passive - max 2 hours a week. Here's a link to my profile: http://www.binpress.com/profile/ben-smiley/14290 http://www.binpress.com/profile/ben-smiley/14290
- mdolon 13y agoGreat job with the site, it looks very clean!
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- bemmu 13y agoFan of the Week plugin for Facebook pages. It chooses one fan each week and highlights them, kind of like an employee of the month. http://www.fanpageapps.com/ http://www.fanpageapps.com/ Last month made $474.85 from premium upgrades, $152.53 from ads. The servers cost $144.63. The app has been added to 601,409 Facebook pages so far. For each of these pages I do a weekly dance with FB to look at their feed, see if access tokens are still valid for automatic posting etc., so it makes for a pretty interesting server usage pattern. http://i.imgur.com/Q1WylAY.png http://i.imgur.com/Q1WylAY.png
- zupitor 13y agoWorked on VineTube(https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.appsinthe.apps.vinetube https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.appsinthe....). It was turning in $2000/mo in revenue before we sold it for $7000.
- thenduks 13y agoBugrocket (https://bugrocket.com https://bugrocket.com, since March 2011, bug tracking for small dev teams) is subscription-based and grows slowly, currently around $500/month in revenue. CourseCraft (https://coursecraft.net https://coursecraft.net, since December 2012, e-course creator tools + we handle transactions for 5%-9% of sales) is a lot less consistent but growing faster, currently $300-$400/month in revenue.
- hdragomir 13y agoEven though http://hdragomir.github.io/facetogif/ http://hdragomir.github.io/facetogif/ it gave me around 120$ from donations.
- AVTizzle 13y agoSimpleCrew (http://www.SimpleCrew.com http://www.SimpleCrew.com - a mobile photo app for businesses, real estate investors, marketing street teams, etc...) is earning $1,600/mo RR right now... ~35 customers averaging just under $50/mo per customer. The number isn't enough to support us in the US yet, but it excites us regardless because of its implications. Between the revenue and usage (weekly photo totals are consistently up and to the right) we believe we're on a reliable path to financial sustainability with this one: Assuming ARPU stays at $50, we're earning 6 figures per founder (ignoring costs, just revenue) at just 333 customers, and we'll reach 7-figure earnings at 1,666 customers. Those numbers are completely doable! God bless the economics of monthly recurring revenue, and DHH for spelling it out so clearly in his Startup School '08 presi (on YouTube). I can say without irony that that video has deeply influenced the course of my life.
- jonathanwallace 13y agoWatch out for patents in the US. I worked on a similar MVP for a client a few years ago and he did some patent research and did not move forward because of what he found.
- jamesmcbennett 13y agoGood work dude!
- girasquid 13y agoBeathound (http://beathound.com http://beathound.com) is making between $50 and $100 a month in affiliate revenue from the various music stores. I'm working on rolling out some new features that will increase that.
- hobo_mark 13y agoInteresting! Plenty of room to grow considering it's iTunes-only and (anectodally) most people I know don't use iTunes... What music stores do you support? I've seen lastfm has 7digital, amazon, itunes and juno but I've never used any of them.
- girasquid 13y agoRight now it's iTunes only, but I'm doing a lot of research into what to support next. Some of that research has led to new projects (http://magic-playlist.com http://magic-playlist.com puts music recommendations into your Rdio or Last.fm account), but all of them contribute to the overall ecosystem. I'm hoping to eventually support everything.
- waleedka 13y agoSymphony makes $2500/month (http://www.symphonytools.com http://www.symphonytools.com). Launched 4 months ago. Back in December, my co-founder and I spent 3 weeks brainstorming and wrote 25 business plans for 25 ideas. And then chose this one. Started building it in January. It's written in Python. Hosting costs about $700/month on Google App Engine. It doesn't cover our costs yet, but it's growing. Hardest challenge so far has been to find ways to let the world know about it.
- heliodor 13y agoWhy are you still on GAE if it costs that much? I learned Django and migrated my projects off GAE a year ago. It was rather painless to learn the bits of Django needed to replace GAE, and looking back it was a great move.
- waleedka 13y agoI think of it as paying a little extra to outsource the boring parts of my job to Google. I don't worry about sharding, load balancing, replication, ...etc. I've done those in the past, and it wasn't that exciting. I like spending my time on code, and it lets me build things faster. App Engine has it's disadvantages as well. At one point I used typhoonae (open source framework that let's you run you GAE apps on EC2) and was about to switch, and then decided against it.
- jay_kyburz 13y agoHow many users do you have for $700 a month on GAE?. My game Neptune's Pride that also makes about $2500 a month and has about 1000 - 1500 DAU only costs around $100 a month.
- waleedka 13y agoOnly about 200 DAU (3K MAU), some are paying and the rest are on a 30-day free trial. But we do a lot of processing for each user. For example, we have a unified inbox for all your mentions and messages from all your social networks, so we pull a lot of posts on a regular basis. Our database has 3.7M records, and a total size of 15GB (8GB for data + 7GB indexes). I expect the cost per user to go down as the percent of paying to trial users goes up. Trial users stay for 30 days, and then most of them stop. But paying users continue using it much longer. Also, there is a lot of room for optimization, which I'll get around to doing later, once the key features are in place.
- tcopeland 13y agoAbout $15 a month from a military reading list site (http://militaryprofessionalreadinglists.com http://militaryprofessionalreadinglists.com). That's $14 affiliate, $1 from ads. It's on a $40/month Rackspace VPS, so it's halfway to covering its costs.
- gadders 13y agoFascinating site! I'll have a good look through the book lists :-)
- christiangenco 13y agoWow - you must have hefty server requirements. I'm running http://dbinbox.com http://dbinbox.com (which handles ~10,000 file uploads/month) on a $8/month VPS.
- virtuz 13y agoMaybe move over to Ramnode, for which you'll pay something like $30 per year, or DigitalOcean, which costs $5 per month.
- lemonberry 13y agoI love these posts. They are super inspirational. I'm a relatively new developer and have some saas ideas geared towards restaurants and bars. I'm hoping 18 years of domain knowledge and great customer service skills will trump any lack in developer skills that I have. Congratulations to everyone that's found success doing this. And a huge go for it to those of you on the fence of writing your own product.
- w0rd-driven 13y agoIf you have customer service skills that rival development work, there's a lot of people who are precisely flipped, myself included. I would suggest finding a Yin to your Yang, but only if you felt inclined. Its not to stick you with the customer facing parts only. It could be a mentor/partnership where you build that up in someone while they mentor/partner your developer chops. This may be unmanageable and hard to find the right fit where you aren't the one giving more than taking. I just think there's some pretty high value in domain knowledge and customer service skills that if you have deficiencies that eventually halt progress, finding someone to throw you over a wall is a definite advantage. I just got a flash of coop games like splinter cell and the analogy seems way too spot on. Co-founders should help you reach places neither of you could alone in a "single player game". Now if I could just remember this when the time comes to put myself on the market, so to speak :>.
- lemonberry 13y agoThanks for the comment. I think there's a lot of truth to what you have to say. At this point it's about building up enough trust with someone that I'd want to take them on as a partner. And vice versa as well.
- chrisa 13y ago$400/month from "Play Piano HD" iPad app: http://mobilesort.com/play_piano.html http://mobilesort.com/play_piano.html I've tried a few other apps, but they haven't done very well - this one is consistently in the top 100 iPad music category. I think having a very clear message and value proposition is important, especially for small apps (impulse buys).
- cyrilg 13y agoFyrebox (http://www.fyrebox.co http://www.fyrebox.co) makes $250/month, 5000 users, 1% conversion rate to paying customers that pay $5/month, launched in June
- ericthegoodking 13y agonice clean design! I like your front page.
- mmorey 13y ago$1000 to $2000 per month (winter vs summer) from Buoy Explorer iPhone app [1][2]. I plan on releasing an update for iOS 7 in the near future. The backstory on why and how I created it is available on my blog[3]. [1] http://buoyexplorer.com/ http://buoyexplorer.com/ [2] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/buoy-explorer-noaa-marine/id593296099?mt=8&at=10l6oV https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/buoy-explorer-noaa-marine/id... [3] http://matthewmorey.com/buoy-explorer/ http://matthewmorey.com/buoy-explorer/
- jay_kyburz 13y agoNeptune's Pride 2, an online strategy game is only doing $2500 a month. http://triton.ironhelmet.com http://triton.ironhelmet.com I'm looking for remote work if you're hiring.
- middayc 13y agoAll your games look awesome. In general I saw your (well I didn't know they were "yours") games many times as they are the type of projects I am (falsely) imagining I would try to make some day. I think it's much harder to survive from gamedev than more boring SaaS projects. Besides being much more hit-driven and unpredictable you also usually need to pay for art and other resources. (I signed up to 2 of them)
- QuantumDoja 13y agoHi, How are you making money form this? ~ curious
- jay_kyburz 13y agoI sell premium accounts that let you create your own private games with custom settings.
- scoj 13y agoSharpPLM (document and quote management for small/med manufacturing companies) is still pretty early but I make $200/month. I feel like I am still figuring out product/market fit.
- amarghose 13y agoHow early are you if you don't mind me asking? Are your secondary plans ready to go? (I assume you only have your current customers on the lowest plan based on your revenue)
- scoj 13y agoI'm pretty early since I only work on it part-time and I'm learning marketing/sales at the same time as this. I want to get a few more customers to prove out the product fit before putting a bunch of resources into adwords, etc.
- amarghose 13y agoHow are you marketing it/planning to market it?
- scoj 13y agoYou must have just hit my site? I noticed someone was on it from Palo Alto. Anyway, I'm mostly doing calling and emailing of networks and local businesses. Why do you ask? If you're interested in more info, drop me a line scott@companyname.com.
- pchaso 13y agoWell here is my journey. A few months ago, I built a vertical jobs board platform, free for developers and paid by companies announcing their job offers (yes another one). The numbers: I launched during summer and have made around $200. Have 1125 developers subscribed to daily alerts Have processed around 1500 applications for 81 jobs posted (most of them through 100% discount tickets given away) The idea was not very well thought, but something simple to start with. I used it to start gaining experience and also to start building a reusable code base (mailing, billing, etc) that would let me move faster with future products, not expecting to make any money at all from it. As a single founder/developer/designer/sysadmin/marketer/support guy etc, I found it very hard to accomplish, but very rewarding once it was launched. I built a few sites: for django jobs: http://djangojobbers.com http://djangojobbers.com for ruby on rails jobs: http://railsjobbers.com http://railsjobbers.com I also have boards for javascript, php, java, android or ios, but with not a lot of subscribers, so they are free for publishers for now. The links are http://php.jobbersnet.com http://php.jobbersnet.com, http://ios.jobbersnet.com http://ios.jobbersnet.com, etc Now I am getting ready to launch a new thing (identee.com) to help low level users increase their security by storing their usernames & passwords encrypted in the cloud.
- cheapsteak 13y agoIs there a way to filter notifications by location? I don't want to get notified of openings in Berlin and Amsterdam when I'm in Toronto
- pchaso 13y agoIt is not the first time I hear that. For now its not possible. I am currently very busy trying to launch my new project, but as soon as I have some spare time to dedicate I will try to build this feature. Thanks for your feedback.
- cpher 13y agoThat's funny, for a few years, I had gisjobbers.com registered but never got around to building the site. I think I got the idea from an open source "jobbers" codebase. Was this your inspiration too?
- amac 13y agoHuman Software (http://usehuman.com http://usehuman.com) - $250 monthly revenue, not enough to be profitable but folks like my app (Prospect) and it's enjoyable to run a small SAAS company.
- dennisgorelik 13y agohttp://www.postjobfree.com http://www.postjobfree.com ~$19K/month revenue -- mostly premium subscriptions from recruiters for job advertising and resume contacts, but also job alerts, revenue from sending job applications to job network and AdSense (in declining revenue order). If it looks inspiring, keep in mind that: 1) It's revenue, not profit. 2) PostJobFree took about 4 years part-time + 2 years full-time. 3) I'm not doing it alone. 4) I still would be better off financially if I just worked as a programmer for hire. Startups are tough.
- alandarev 13y agoThat is fascinating. A year ago I had a talk with a friend about doing exactly same, but in Russia. Though I had strong concerns on how will the job-sites react on us automating the process and potentially spamming their boards. I am curious, on how are you posting the jobs? Have you made an agreement with these websites, are they willing to provide an API at some cost? Or, simply, pretending being a human and submitting form POST requests? Great job on the service, not only it looks promising, but is essentially improving lives of many people.
- amplification 13y agoAfter doing a lot of listening in forums, on my email list, etc... I launched http://jfdi.bz http://jfdi.bz as a response to a common pain I kept seeing: there's so many people building products by themselves (alone in their basements). They want a social connection with other folks who are doing the same thing (more here: http://jfdi.bz/guide.pdf http://jfdi.bz/guide.pdf) Did a small launch in August. It's now just over $1,000/month in revenue. I use WPEngine to host the site. It's built mostly on the open source BuddyPress platform.
- alandarev 13y ago> Registration will be open until Friday, November 6th. Uh? Is it Friday today? I am unsure whether I shall hurry, or the site wasn't updated for years.
- andersthue 13y agoI make around 2-3000$ from my TSR product suite : http://www.tsr-soft.com http://www.tsr-soft.com Started 3 years ago, have one part time employee working on these besides me. I only work part time one them too. I have dialed up the revenue after I attended a conference resently by turning more 'pro'
- cleverfoo 13y agoScanii.com (https://scanii.com https://scanii.com) practical API for malware/virus detection. Low thousands/month and growing quickly, profitable from the beginning and we effectively spend $0 in marketing. Honestly, there hasn't been an easier time to do a startup or side project - I know that's cliché but it isn't. If you know how to consume cloud services you can keep your operating costs amazingly low.
- antisuji 13y agoAbout $350 in the first month of Double Dynamo (http://doubledynamo.com/ http://doubledynamo.com/), a memory and rhythm game for iOS. I haven't put significant work into viral features, which could probably substantially increase installs, but at this point I've put the project on the back burner.
- Zaheer 13y agoWow that's great for just the first month! How did you initially market the app?
- donniefitz2 13y agoI'm making zero dollars right now with http://togspots.com http://togspots.com. It's a SaaS where photographers can add and find photography locations. I'm working on setting up a subscription that would allow users to save private spots and a few other features. The biggest issue is getting more locations. Currently I require users to add 1 location before they can search which is working well so far.
- nonsens3 13y agoI lose about $15 from http://selfstream.io http://selfstream.io . I havent't launched yet as I have been waiting for Paymill to activate my payments processing account for over a month now.
- marveller 13y agoFreemium (http://StockPhotos.io http://StockPhotos.io) photo sharing site. Earns probably around $15/mo from Google Adsense and was made to use as a free image bookmark manager.
- ismaelc 13y agoHave you guys considered turning this into an API? I know of a successful wallpaper API that's making decent profit
- reiz 13y agoI am running http://www.versioneye.com http://www.versioneye.com. Currently don't earn much with it. Most people are using it for open source projects. Still thinking about how to monetise it right. Any ideas?
- w0rd-driven 13y agoAs it is, I find it hard. If you stick to bundler/npm/etc would there be benefit it not only notifications but an automatic update feature? Tie it to git where possible to have a "newest" branch that keeps this out of master and/or tie it with the likes of Travis CI to make sure things didn't break. There's almost too many moving parts but I see high value in keeping a project on the latest dependencies without much involvement from myself. Its not foolproof though and may be too error prone to pull anything off without pulling your hair out.
- reiz 13y agoThanks for your feedback. I know what you mean. VersionEye has already a pretty good GitHub integration. Currently we are working on automated change logs. And I want to work together with TravisCI and CodeShip to run tests against newest versions. I think together with automated testing it can be very valuable. I maintain a couple open source projects by myself. And I don't release new versions just for fun. Releasing a new version is a lot of work. If I do it than there is always a very good reason for it. For example BugFixes, SecurityFixes, New Features or Speed & Memory Optimisation. And I think if somebody else is releasing a new version of an open source project he has the same reasons. And that are all good reasons for me to update. That's why I started VersionEye.
- patio11 13y agoBingo Card Creator will probably come in at about $30k profit for the year, which is a disappointment, but not enough of one to justify working on it. (Sales are down due to Google sending less organic and AdWords traffic, though costs are down impressively too, due to less AdWords.) I don't talk numbers about Appointment Reminder, but suffice it to say that it's both modestly successful and on the Long Slow SaaS Ramp of Death. I get about $1.5k in monthly royalties from book sales and in residual sales of the course on Lifecycle emails that I did last year. Hoping to launch another project like that in the near future and plow some of the profits back into AR - people are expensive.
- bch 13y agoYour candor in matters of business is _incredibly_ refreshing. Thank you.
- jasonkester 13y ago" Long Slow SaaS Ramp of Death" I've always liked that term (which I presume you used ironically). It's the most pessimistic way one could possibly describe the state of "If I don't ever touch anything from here on out, I'm still pretty much set for life." I assume it was a Venture Capitalist who coined it, since VCs don't like profitable companies that get slightly more profitable month after month. People, however, pretty much universally would think that was a rather nice predicament to be in. Congrats on the Ramping!
- patio11 13y agoThe first time I heard it was Gail Goodman's eponymous talk at BoS 2012. It refers to the unlikelihood that you'll have a hockey stick revenue curve. Most SaaS businesses add recurring revenue fairly slowly and steadily, over time, and take a long while until they get to the "totally milk it!" part of the model.
- jasonkester 13y agoIndeed, but to a one man shop, being stuck in the flat part of the curve at, say, $2k/month in profit and growing by $100/month/month is a completely different thing to a 10 man shop at the same place. One venture is about to fold. The other can safely quit its day job and start entrepreneuring full time without having to worry about starving in the immediate future.
- daflip 13y agoLaunched my first SaaS app a little over 2 years ago. Monthly recurring revenue is currently a little over $4000. 506 paying customers to date, growing around 1.5 paying customers per day and working off ~2.7% conversion rate (freemium business model). Single person "team".
- abraham 13y ago$250-350/month from App.net for an extension I spend very little time on anymore. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/succynct/hngjfhijhmcechdkbgopbgghajokogdi https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/succynct/hngjfhijh... I just launched a new App.net project that I'm hoping will bring in a lot more. https://polls.abrah.am https://polls.abrah.am
- dooyogi 13y agoI make about 100 Euro/mo with PhotoSlim (http://photoslimhq.com http://photoslimhq.com), a simple windows software to reduce the size of pictures. I built it although there are lot's of apps for image resizing. But they all had either too many options or were too complicated. So i tried to build the simplest possible solution for this problem. I didn't really believe, that anyone would buy it, since there are a lot of free alternatives. So I am quite happy with the outcome.
- palidanx 13y agoMenutail (https://www.menutail.com https://www.menutail.com) which generates about $300/month at the moment. The site is kind of niche as it used to generate nutrition facts labels for food packages. I mainly get new e-mail clients from cold e-mailing contacts from the farmer's market database courtesy of data.gov.
- michaelcindric 13y agoWe are currently making a few hundred a month on Doccy (http://doccyapp.com http://doccyapp.com) its not something you go looking for but once you do it makes sense to use it. Its also only a few months old
- redact207 13y agoI make exactly $0 pm on www.mixthread.com that I haven't launched. It took me 8 months part time to develop but have been waiting to graduate so I can devote time to running it like a business.
- zrail 13y agoMastering Modern Payments[1] has earned more than $14k in revenue since I launched it in the middle of August. Real ongoing costs are $5/mo for the VM that the sales application sits on, and that's basically it. I figured that I broke even for time-spent when it hit $7k. [1]: https://www.petekeen.net/mastering-modern-payments https://www.petekeen.net/mastering-modern-payments
- rbritton 13y ago4-5k/mo from iOS apps and occasional contract work
- rk0567 13y ago$100/mo from http://assembleyourpc.net http://assembleyourpc.net - a simple tool for assembling pc online.
- alandarev 13y agoI bet you could easily increase the revenue by simply localizing the currency. As I have no clue of the current currency being used, it drows the pricing feature useless to me :(
- rk0567 13y agoThanks! Actually, the prices are lot different in some countries, so it gets little tricky, but I'm working on it.
- mhoad 13y agoI literally just launched http://fmhgifts.com http://fmhgifts.com last week so it's a bit early to say but I have heard rumours of similar websites making several thousand a month.
- msurguy 13y agoMaking around 500$/month from a carbon ad on my http://bootsnipp.com http://bootsnipp.com (free Bootstrap snippets), plus a couple hundred from affiliate income that I link to from the site... Time spent originally was 4 days. Released a new improved version of the site two weeks ago (the rewrite took about 60-80 hours total but has bigger potential for the site). Now thinking of selling templates or skins on the site too - that would be a whole lot more $ than the ad...
- hcho 13y agoI think you site is the second best thing that happened to design challenged after bootstrap. Thanks for all the work. I have a feeling that if you set up an online course which teaches how to design using bootstrap, it could sell pretty well.
- msurguy 13y agoThanks for the warm feedback =) I will be speaking about Bootstrap at Socal Code Camp this Saturday, maybe will do a quick poll about what people would pay for, course or videos or skins/templates, etc :)
- throwaway697596 13y agoSorry about the throwaway account. Would rather not link the numbers to the site at this point. Revenue about $60k/month; fairly even mix of affiliate programs (mostly a couple big ones) and advertising (mostly adsense/ad exchange). Earnings before taxes and my draw ~ $500k/year. Have tried out many alternate ad networks and exchanges, and the only other one I've found worth taking space from google so far is AOL's new Advertising.com. Individual relationships and niche affiliates can be worthwhile too, but come with more overhead. I'd generally rather optimize UX and try to attract more users than worry about managing a bunch of advertiser relationships. For a larger or smaller site that would probably change though.
- ericthegoodking 13y agoVery inspirational! I have got few questions (1) From your own experience what marketing strategy would you recommend that has worked for your software products? (2) How did you come up with the idea? (3) Are you working alone? Thanks.
- CliffyA 13y ago$0 a month on http://numberduck.com http://numberduck.com Hopefully that's because I'm competing against some established and open source projects, so anything with a lesser feature set isn't good enough for people to pay. Now I'm slogging away on features to be the best, then hopefully the sales will follow.
- ericthegoodking 13y agoThis is a good idea.I would actually use it if i was working in a large firm where excel is used for everything.
- boca 13y agoEarned $1 from http://gyaansharing.appspot.com http://gyaansharing.appspot.com because of Disqus ads. It has been used by less than 10 people, mostly friends, till now and it's been a while since anyone posted anything.
- nerdben 13y agoMaking about 500EUR/mo from selling motivational posters at http://squaredo.com http://squaredo.com - primarily to startups
- christiangenco 13y agoI made $5K in a month with http://textbooksplease.com http://textbooksplease.com (textbook search engine for college students) after spending ~$4K on advertising, but textbook buying only happens twice a year. Re-investing all profit into advertising.
- ukashkartim 13y agoi earn about 2000 aobut the software about ukash sell it my site http://www.ukashkartim.com http://www.ukashkartim.com