25 ms·
Your best passive income? (2014)
This post gave me the motivation to give it another try: https://medium.com/business-startup-development-and-more/e0937c7f0951
Previous years:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6661536
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4639271
- burning 13y agoanyone?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- xiphias 13y agoBitcoin :-)
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- goldenkey 13y agoFacebook Stock. Now do you realize how stupid you sound?
- phlo 13y agoHe may be mining Bitcoin. If you're able to issue Facebook stock, let's talk :)
- drdaeman 13y agoIs mining Bitcoin still proficient (except for ASIC makers, huh)?
- paps 13y agoMining scrypt coins is proficient. I make $400/month with 2 machines I built 6 months ago.
- gremlinsinc 13y ago$400 a month for 2 machines? You should be making a lot more... I just got started a month ago as a hobby, using MiddleCoin pool which converts/paysout in Bitcoin, --w/ 1 high-end gfx card(7950), I'm earning 200/month. I just reinvested 700 to start building out my rig, which will have 5x R9 270's and a hashrate of 2250 per machine. I currently make .0125 per khs per day. So this one machine will be worth $28/day. I do wish I'd held onto my dogecoins though, I would've made a LOT more if I hadn't kept pumping/dumping.
- driverdan 13y agoMust be low end video cards. Two 290x GPUs will earn more than that.
- drdaeman 13y agoIs that number before or after deducing electricity costs?
- nikolak 13y agoThe money spent mining bitcoin for electricity and hardware could have been used to buy stocks. It's not really different, for both mining bitcoins and investing in stocks you need to spend some money. You aren't issuing anything for free.
- runn1ng 13y agoIt will sound banal, but Bitcoins I bought year-and-something ago.
- kintamanimatt 13y agoThat's not strictly speaking passive income, but capital gains.
- etherael 13y agoThat depends, he might be day trading with a bot, that's (largely) passive.
- kintamanimatt 13y agoThat would indeed be passive income but OP appears to have bought the coins a year ago and has kept them as a speculative investment. Seeing as the wheel of fortune has landed on Tuesday, OP has made a capital gain! :-)
- etherael 13y agoI mined a bunch of coins two years ago but now I mine scrypt altcoins which turn a better profit with GPUs than btc. I also run day trading bots which trade with my cryptocurrency portfolio in general, including bitcoin, litecoin, ad et al. So at least one person is definitely getting passive income this way, and I'm almost sure I'm not alone.
- gknoy 13y agoPlease forgive my ignorance, but how do alternative coins work? Who uses them? I've only recently noticed Bitcoins being relatively widely usable, so how does the process work with alternative mineable coins? Do you convert them to dollars at some point or just mine and trade them for good/services?
- johnydepp 13y agoAn IOS game I made 1 year back.. :) https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/royal-cribbage-lite/id591048477?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/royal-cribbage-lite/id591048...
- dangrossman 13y agoNot much has changed since the last thread. Improvely (https://www.improvely.com https://www.improvely.com) is still in the 5-digit monthly RR range and growing, and I do no outbound marketing other than some PPC ads that don't need much active management. Everything that can be automated has been automated (onboarding, lifecycle mails, dunning mails for billing issues, etc), leaving me free to spend all my time on support and improving the product. Two things that fit the "passive" mentality that have been picking up steam recently: 1) I offer an affiliate program with a revenue share commission (upfront bonus plus 10% of the referred customer's payments for a year). A couple of my best customers have become my best affiliates, recommending the product on industry blogs they write for regularly. It doesn't get better than having excited customers marketing your product for you. In the early days the affiliate program wasn't doing much at all, now it's a meaningful contributor to subscriber growth. 2) I've been running Improvely long enough now (just over a year) that some of the clients are growing their businesses significantly. I've got quite a few marketing agencies on board, and they're picking up new clients and adding them to their accounts. As their business grows, and their usage grows, they upgrade to plans with higher usage limits. Same customer base, higher revenue per customer. In the beginning, a new customer was worth $30ish per month. Today that's over $70/m per customer on average.
- sawyer1708 13y agoThat's great Dan. I have a couple of questions. Do you have an in house affiliate program that you use or a third party one? How did you get affiliates interested (other than existing customers)?
- dangrossman 13y agoIt's run through ShareASale [1]. They take care of tracking sales, cutting checks, sending 1099s at the end of the year, and all the other boring parts of running an affiliate program. As for getting affiliates interested, there's a link to the program in the footer of the site and a link within the app for existing customers. When I come across a site that seems like it'd be a good fit for some kind of partnership, I just send a brief e-mail and see if there's any interest. 1: https://www.shareasale.com https://www.shareasale.com
- mhoad 13y agoJust in the middle of getting this up (was a way of teaching myself Rails) that works as an Affiliate style site for gadgets and cool gift ideas. http://fmhgifts.com/ http://fmhgifts.com/
- nader 13y agopretty cool. how do you syndicate products? through amazon's API or by hand?
- mhoad 13y agoCurrently by hand but literally every single aspect of that site is entirely outsourcable to college students who would cost me much less than the cash that an affiliate site with even relatively low traffic would expect to make organically. Once I have 200 or so products up there I will do some much more interesting stuff with it.
- atmosx 13y agoI like the design and the idea is smart, but are you planning to monetize this?
- mhoad 13y agoOnly makes money via Amazon affiliate links which aren't a horrible gig if you get even semi decent traffic.
- drewolbrich 13y agoMy iOS app that teaches you what a tesseract is and lets you manipulate it in 3D and 4D. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-fourth-dimension/id504201783?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-fourth-dimension/id50420... It blows my mind that people still find out about this app and happily buy it every day even though it occupies such a small geeky niche.
- SimHacker 13y agoI'm really looking forward to your next iOS app, Fiasco -- it looks awesome. I hope you don't get sued for Scrabble kicking Tetris in the face, or by Stanslaw Lem's estate!
- midas007 13y agoSeems to violate the premise of "the dumber the app, the more popular it will be." Awesome.
- johnydepp 13y ago"The dumber the app..." works almost everytime. I launched a conceptually great app which was a complete failure: https://itunes.apple.com/in/app/gravity-byte/id504372023?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/in/app/gravity-byte/id504372023?mt=... Then launched a card game which is a decent success..
- TruthSHIFT 13y agoGravity Byte may be a great app. But, it does not make a great first impression. You may want to try to give the app a more cohesive art direction. For example, in the app screenshots, I see 4 different fonts. Also, the game graphics don't really grab my attention. Keep in mind that most people are judging your app almost entirely by the screenshots.
- evilduck 13y agoYou could probably turn that around rather easily by paying a good designer or graphic artist to produce some professional looking assets and reskinning the game.
- nader 13y agoIncome is often called passive but essentially there is always something you need to do, monitor, improve or change in order to keep cash flow steady. If you don't, your income will decrease over time until reaching zero. It is surely easier to maintain "passive income" than to start from scratch.
- mattgibson 13y agoI understand 'passive' to mean 'charging more than once for the same piece of work'.
- colinbartlett 13y agoI interpret "passive" to mean "not directly trading time for money".
- viach 13y agoI've got a job where i do almost nothing. It's my passive income.
- recentdarkness 13y agowally is that you? SCNR
- ozh 13y agoDo some freelancing during office hours & double the income.
- viach 13y agoThis would not be passive.
- knob 13y agoYou have to think bigger man. Outsource the outsourcement... Interact with top-level outsourcer once per week... he interacts with low-level outsourcer daily. Profit.
- viach 13y agoYes, but how i would outsource interacting to still do nothing?
- kintamanimatt 13y agoHave a Perl script written to handle it.
- chaz 13y agoRelevant: "Man reportedly outsources his own job to China, watches cat videos" http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jan/17/business/la-fi-mo-man-outsourced-job-to-china-20130117 http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jan/17/business/la-fi-mo-ma...
- marban 13y agoIf you're looking for some dropshipping insights (which the OP's link suggests), here's a nice story: http://www.ecommercefuel.com/selling-an-ecommerce-store/ http://www.ecommercefuel.com/selling-an-ecommerce-store/
- _delirium 13y agoThat one's interesting, but leans more towards the "part-time small business" side than the "passive" side imo. Manning a phone line 4 hours/day M-F in particular makes it at least a part-time job, since you can't do that and also be traveling, holding another job, or studying full-time.
- jbrooksuk 13y agoNothing as of yet. I used to receive donations from my blog and some Windows programs I've written: http://www.softpedia.com/developer/James-Brooks-12392.html http://www.softpedia.com/developer/James-Brooks-12392.html but that seems to have dried up. I probably generated £100~ from all donations. I'm now working on several iOS (http://james.brooks.so/contare-my-first-ios-app/ http://james.brooks.so/contare-my-first-ios-app/) applications (paid) however I do intend to offer free versions with iAds. I've also got an Android app on the Play Store that's made me a few quid; https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jbrooksuk.xcrate&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jbrooksuk.... Apart from my iOS applications now, I intend to develop some SaaS apps that I can use to generate some more income.
- tempestn 13y agoSearchTempest.com got to the point where it was my main gig about 5 years ago, although it's since leveled off. Like anything, you end up being pretty active if you want to continue making that "passive" income. :)
- Zaheer 13y agoI've used this on multiple occasions! Awesome site! Do you mind revealing how much it was generating?
- tempestn 13y agoI'd rather not get into specifics, but between SearchTempest and AutoTempest, we've bootstrapped up to a team of four. My goal isn't really to get huge or make a pile of money though; mostly just want to keep it going and being as useful as possible, while keeping up with the times. (We really need to get the sites working better on mobile devices; getting ready to release a fully responsive AutoTempest soon...)
- LaurentGh 13y agoI'll try to start an ecommerce for France, following the other ones who specialize themselves in just one kind of well made product, like socks (www.archiduchesse.com), or underpants (www.leslipfrancais.fr). Coming soon ;)
- kelu124 13y agoExcellent, I had heard about leslipfrancais, but not the socks one =)
- guard-of-terra 13y agoOwning a flat in Moscow and renting it out? Easily 1000$/mo. You can live in Thailand on that money.
- midas007 13y agoHigh-end flats in Oslo rent out pretty well IIRC. Just have to front some cash to buy the pad.
- guard-of-terra 13y agoA lot of people inherited flats from after soviet union times (where you lived in, you now owned after filling some papers) plus some people bought them when prices were affordable (if you had influx of hard cash) plus people tend to buy flats because rent market is unreasonable.
- marvin 13y agoUntil housing prices fall 1% before inflation and wipe out your gains for the year.
- guard-of-terra 13y agoIt's a long position that pays dividends. Why care about volatility?
- marvin 13y agoIt's fallaious to not consider the market value of your assets as well as any income streams. In fact, this example is even worse because it also doesn't consider the cost of capital and fluctiations in the income. For the specific example of buying apartments in Oslo to rent out, sensible analysis will show that this gives a worse risk-adjusted return than other options (e.g. the stock market). But hey, go right ahead. It's not my money ;)
- guard-of-terra 13y ago
- sirbrad 13y agoI created and sold Stickonspy (http://stickonspy.com http://stickonspy.com) just after mid last year. The initial month I launched it did pretty well as the NSA news was still a pretty big deal. All in all it's made me < £1k but it's been great fun to build and ship a product from scratch. I've shipped to around 12 countries too which is cool. I also spent no money on marketing. I'd say my time - which was evenings after work - investment was around 3-4 days initially and then fulfilling orders is simply writing a customers address and posting the stickers - which if the demand was bigger I'd probably outsource. It's been great. I've learnt a shit tonne & the conversations it started has given me an idea for a similar product which I'll be focusing on very soon!
- arms 13y agoI like this - it made me chuckle :) Can I ask who you used to print the stickers?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- yitchelle 13y agoGreat idea. Just wondering that if you didn't spend any money on marketing, how did you get the word out, SEO?
- sirbrad 13y agoI started out by merely tweeting a link to the site and asking my friends to do the same. I did publish HN but it got took down pretty sharpish. My main win was cold-emailing tech blogs. I got featured on BoingBoing - http://boingboing.net/2013/08/12/stickonspy-sticker-reminder-t.html http://boingboing.net/2013/08/12/stickonspy-sticker-reminder... - through emailing and also managed to sell directly to Cory ;).
- qzervaas 13y agoI made this PHP library about 5 years ago: http://zervaas.biz/escapianet/ http://zervaas.biz/escapianet/ Probably make 2-3 sales/yr which is always a nice surprise. It comes up first when you Google "escapianet php" I also wrote a PHP book in 2007. I still get royalty cheques, although they've almost approached 0 - the last quarter was about $30 ;) Most of my income now is from app sales.
- dejv 13y agoI had created http://notationtraining.com http://notationtraining.com in 2010 when I was learning how to play piano. I did update this project few times, but otherwise it is completely on its own. It makes only about 300 USD/month but I am quite happy with it as I am not doing anything to promote it or anything else.
- zrail 13y agoMy book "Mastering Modern Payments: Using Stripe with Rails" continues to sell well, in the $2k range per month. It's not exactly passive, though, as I write blog posts and develop other related content in the same theme. https://www.petekeen.net/mastering-modern-payments https://www.petekeen.net/mastering-modern-payments
- jbrooksuk 13y agoEver thought about rewriting parts of the book to work with other languages, as a separate product?
- zrail 13y agoYep. Language and payment processor variants are something that I've thought about a lot and will probably start working on at some point. Edit: autocorrect correction
- noir_lord 13y agoPHP would be a natural fit (Symfony2 or Laravel 4 (I'd vote for Laravel 4 as that is a rapidly growing market that is still relatively "poor" in learning material). Also if you did happen to do it for Laravel 4, I'd buy it ;).
- zrail 13y agoWow, I just took a look at the docs for Laravel. I had no idea it was that sophisticated. Thanks for the tip, I'll look into it some more.
- noir_lord 13y agoIt's a truly excellent framework that pulls in the best in breed from the others but then puts a layer over the top that allows you to get things done (in a well engineered and testable manner). The framework creator (Taylor Otwell) has an excellent book on leanpub and there is an amazing video guide site (laracasts.com) which is better than I have seen for anything (check out the free vids for an idea of quality).
- cdaven 13y agoI have a quite simple web site with some calculators for taxes and stuff, that I originally built in 2007. The Google AdSense and affiliate income has grown from about $1000 per year to almost $1000 per month. It is "passive" in the sense that I respond to the occasional e-mail (once a month), update the data once a year, and add another calculator when I feel like it. A few years back, I was in the same position with another (online casual gaming) website, that I sold for 2.5x the yearly revenue. Looking back, I should probably have kept that site as well. Pro tip: quality content beats SEO in the long run. Be the tortoise.
- TeeWEE 13y agoCan you tell me which site it is?
- cdaven 13y agoSure, but the site is in Swedish: http://rakna.net http://rakna.net
- javindo 13y agoAh I actually ended up using that a few months ago when trying to determine cost of living between various European countries. I was pretty shocked and saddened (as a naive university student) when I realised the full extent of taxation in the UK for graduate job salaries but soon realised it was still less than those of Europe, especially the nordic countries.
- lucaspiller 13y agoAny reason why you haven't done an English version?
- freehunter 13y agoIt looks like it has some Sweden-specific stuff, and adding in English-speaking countries would require knowledge of their tax systems. I suppose you could do an English version for English-speaking people living in Sweden who don't speak Swedish, but it would likely be a tiny niche market.
- kirk21 13y ago1) Selling Elon Musk t-shirts: http://www.zazzle.com/elonmuskspaceman http://www.zazzle.com/elonmuskspaceman Did not make that much but was great fun. 2) Helping my artistic friends selling their products. If you want to sell designer products, you can sign up here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1dmyfzRwBbpcKAyRplHs0i2RMqsCykRdZ7oJnBvZh2ZA/viewform https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1dmyfzRwBbpcKAyRplHs0i2RMqsC...
- knorc 13y agoI'm a huge fan of Elon Musk, but I must say I don't like the designs very much. I you can't make better designs, you should think of having shirts with quotes like “If something is important enough, even if the odds are against you, you should still do it.”or "I'll put a man on Mars in 10 years. Maybe 20 years worst case. Otherwise I won't be able to go there." (can't find the exact quote!)
- heumn 13y agoMy app and side project "lolipop". An "instagram for gifs and funny images"-niche app. 100k + downloads. Gotten hugely popular in Norway. Released a revamped iOS 7 version to the US last week (?). Things are going slow over there. Not even reached 1000 downloads. Traffic always spike during 23:00 - 03:00 when kids should be sleeping... 99% of users lurk and browse reddit/9gag/imgur some contribute (no account needed for browsing). Link for the lazy: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lolipop-funny-images-gifs/id523423502?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lolipop-funny-images-gifs/id...
- jbrooksuk 13y agoHow does this generate income?
- heumn 13y agoUsers get a "pro account", much like the Twitter Verified badge (called lolipop AWESOME) for a week if they "Download a free app". Those pays everything from 20 cent to couple of bucks per download. App runs barely any hosting cost, and this generates a nice little passive income. I have an admin panel to turn on more ads, but as of now I would rather grow with as little intrusive ads as possible. When, and if I turn on more intrusive ads, users can purchase a "pro badge" to get rid of ads. (turned off now). Best side effect is that I have gotten a LOT better at obj-c development since I started playing with it, and now run a small mobile development company that actually pays the bills. Learn while you play :)
- xsNzgw8 13y agohttp://pressbulgaria.com http://pressbulgaria.com - it is a SaaS for sending press release to the media. This tool gives the citizens a lot of power to ring the alarm on certain problems. Also my customers use it as channel for promoting books, exhibition, events, etc We have a tor hidden service for anonymous submissions. We offer free service for whistleblowers, that want to stay anonymous (and can't pay us).
- dotemacs 13y agoGreat idea! What percentage are paid users versus free anonymous submissions? How long have you been in business? What are you profits like? Thanks
- namigop 13y agoI started wcfstorm (http://www.wcfstorm.com http://www.wcfstorm.com) about 4 years ago. I started out with just 1 product and has now added 2 more. The income is pretty nice. It usually exceeds my monthly salary. I love it when some stackoverflow users recommend it to others when a question gets posted about WCF testing.
- ryanlitalien 13y agoGreat product! I used it a ton when I was .NET programming. I used wcfstorm to load test our API to show response time degradation.
- vrikis 13y agoI know this isn't entirely passive, but I occasionally rent my spare room on AirBnB. I'm quite clear that it's a basic room and if they use the kitchen etc. they need to clean up after themselves - this isn't a hotel I'm running... So there's basically no work to do other than cleaning the bedsheets, which I do as part of cleaning my bedsheets anyway... I do this for a maximum of 1week/month, which gets me roughly £4000/year and since it's tax exempt in Scotland (under lodger laws), it's the easiest money I've ever made.
- illegalsmile 13y agoSounds like it's treating you well but have you had problems or do you price it so you generally price-out those that might less than savory characters?
- vrikis 13y agoI live in a city that lacks hotels and doesn't have any tourism, so the only people contacting me are people who work in our local industry (offshore oil production), and just need a place to stay while they are doing training, etc. I've never had any problems, and like I said that has kept work for me really low. In terms of pricing, I just priced it by what I thought was fair. I do refuse people though, since like I said I wouldn't host for more than a week or so per month (I don't want this turning into a job, but it's the easiest money anyone can make if they have a spare room).
- TeeWEE 13y agoI created the app 3dweapons for Android about 2 1/2 years ago. (http://www.3dweapons.net http://www.3dweapons.net) The free version was downloaded >1.7 million times. The paid version around 8k times. I added adds from multiple sources (mopub, admob etc) and in app purchases. For the paid app: In the top months (2 years ago) I made around 800 euro. But it dropped to 90 euro per month currently. For in app purchases: I am making 30 euro per month currently. For ads: Making about 200 euro per month currently.
- swah 13y agoOh man, you should be making more money. Great fun app!
- probablyfiction 13y agoDo you have a way to tell how many of your paid installs are legitimate?
- lucaspiller 13y agoSee how much Google sends you every month?
- TeeWEE 13y agoYou are referring to the pirated versions of my app? Actually i dont have hard figures. Initially I was not aware of pirated versions. I even had my app translated to chinese because I thought it would be a huge market. But after I did that, i noticed Google Play is not active there, and all paid apps are free in china.... Pirated versions. I tried to prevent pirated versions of my app by performing code obfuscation, but probably it was still easy to crack.
- emielvl 13y agoSo another 3 months to buy a Motorola Xoom ;-) Are you planning an iOS version?
- TeeWEE 13y ago
- meerita 13y agoReading all the comments made me think the only passive income I ever had was my blog. Trough my blog I've got all the consulting opportunities and made quite a lot.
- galfarragem 13y ago50€/month with adsense and amazon affiliates. It demands from me 5 minutes each day (or 4-5 hours each month, so it is not exactly passive...). It's a niche blog about architectural models: http://archimodels.info http://archimodels.info that I started as a hobby to learn about web development. I know that i'm near the bottom in the hierarchy of passive income but anyway I'm leaving my 2 cents. Tips: - I agree with cdaven. Good content is better than SEO, but you only take the fruits 1-2 years later. Use your expertise. It is much easier/faster/more rewarding if you blog about something you are an expert. - Adsense is ugly but is the fastest way to monetise a blog. I was making 15€/month before adsense and now I have slightly less traffic. Text ads or images ads? If you have an text intensive blog go for image ads and for an image intensive blog go for text ads.
- scotty79 13y agoFew bitcoin Antminers. They are paying as much as I'll be earning at my new job I'm starting with the beginning of the February. I basically cloned myself in terms of income by buying them. They should pay for themselves in 3-4 months. I'm not sure if that's passive income or capital gain though.
- odonnellryan 13y agoHow many do you own?
- scotty79 13y agoCurrently 5. They should have decent output even after they paid for themselves.
- ye 13y agoYeah, but miners get obsolete very quickly, since the difficulty is growing exponentially.
- scotty79 13y agoDifficulty growth seems to be sort of correlated and lag a bit exponential growth of bitcoin price. http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/419/is-there-empirical-data-about-a-relationship-between-bitcoin-price-and-difficult http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/419/is-there-empi...
- gremlinsinc 13y agoI'm currently building out a Altcoin(scrypt) mining setup, I started w/ 1 7950 @ $8/day. I'm reinvesting this week on 3x R9 270s, with a goal of buying new hardware w/ all my earnings for 2 months. Doing a calculation using a loop, and tallying up daily earnings, and subtracting new hardware when x = cost of new gfx card, I calculated in 90 days I'd be earning 120 per day passively. I'm also wanting to sell 'shovels' so to speak, pre-made rigs, and mining contracts. Eventually I'll diversify some and get an asic when I can afford it.
- cerberusss 13y agoBought the app Sleep Cycle Calculator from its previous owner. Completely redid the interface for iOS 7, and I'm now finishing up a version with a custom UIView. I paid a designer to completely redo the interface, but then iOS 7 happened. Lost a lot of customers with the transition, because I had to throw away the new design and start again. http://appstore.com/sleepcyclecalculatorwakinguprefreshed http://appstore.com/sleepcyclecalculatorwakinguprefreshed
- jbrooksuk 13y agoWhere do you buy these kind of apps from?
- cerberusss 13y agoBought mine on Apptopia. As far as I can see, it's the (only?) most reliable and most solid market place.
- mokkol 13y agoIm currently building a client proposal service specially for designers: http://nusii.com http://nusii.com Not getting much passive income yet but I hope 2014 will be our year :-)
- northband 13y agoCool app - good luck mokkol - that's my approach - micro business apps.
- vcherubini 13y agoI wrote a book titled "Expert PHP Deployments" on how to deploy any PHP application using Vagrant, Capistrano, and Phing. http://growingsoftware.org/expert-php-deployments/ http://growingsoftware.org/expert-php-deployments/ It hasn't made me rich, but it usually sells about a copy a day. I love that it's entirely passive. I wrote it, published it, and it just sits there on my website making money. It's also been a good way to build a list of people who would be interested in other things I make. PS. Use coupon code "hn" for $2 off if you're interested.
- eo34 13y agoA few years ago, I wanted to build an oscilloscope in my pocket, so I went ahead and did it. Then I wanted a spectrum analyzer, and then an equalizer. 1) oScope — an oscilloscope in your pocket. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/oscope/id344345859?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/oscope/id344345859?mt=8 2) Octave — a real-time audio analyzer. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/octave-an-rta-for-the-iphone/id386083594?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/octave-an-rta-for-the-iphone... 3) Fourier — a spectrum analyzer. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fourier/id386084557?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fourier/id386084557?mt=8 I built all of these for fun in college, and I've occasionally updated them afterwards. The only thing I do now is answer a few emails a week. I've since gone back to grad school, but the yearly income has not changed, and approaches my stipend (low 5-digit). What's been really neat is how people have found unexpected ways to use the apps. Sound engineers for halls and communities use Octave to set up the sound for concerts. Teachers use oScope to help kids understand how sound is composed of moving pressure waves of air, and how pitch is the frequency of these waves. Also, oScope had a tiny cameo in the show Homeland, as a "fancy science-looking analyzer tool for spying on people" (uncredited, unfortunately).
- astral303 13y agoHere's a perspective from the other side: I purchased Octave and having used it, and asked for a small feature (single-tap to pause). You told me that you don't have much time and will work on this feature when you have time. I understand that, but it's disappointing from the consumer point of view. I wish I knew that before I dropped $5. Basically, it sucks to be stuck on the "passive" receiving end of a passive income project. Though actually, it's Apple's fault for not letting me trial software. But I'm glad to hear these projects are working out and wish you continued luck!
- struppi 13y agoCome on, you spent $5 for an app. For a working app! This is a pretty low price. Actually, it's basically nothing. Of course you can't get support and are not entitled to feature requests at such a low price tag!
- rk0567 13y ago$100+/mo (through adsense and affiliate programs) from http://assembleyourpc.net http://assembleyourpc.net - a simple tool for assembling pc online. I spend 1-2 hours per month on some tweaks/updates.
- starik36 13y agoA stupid app, called That's Not Funny, that I wrote in 2008 or so to teach myself Android programming (when v1 came out) continues to make around $40 a month from ads. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vbrad.android.notfunny&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vbrad.andr... I wrote it, released it, then to my surprise, it got a pretty massive amount of downloads. Over the years, I've updated it to new versions of the OS, but very minimal work. Not a lot of money, but it wasn't a whole lot of effort either. It covers the internet bill.
- unlimit 13y agoI made a very simple word jumble app, I get some dollars a month from ads. The one thing that blows my mind is that people still download it, how do they ever find it? :-) https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=in.seventy9.jumblebox https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=in.seventy9.ju...
- hanspeide 13y agoFor comparison: I made an app called Joke Effects (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ctrlplusz.jokeeffects https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ctrlplusz....), in early 2011. The free version has around 70 000 downloads, and has made me about 25$ - in total. Paid version (0.99$) has sold about 200 copies.
- starik36 13y agoThat's a pretty nice app. I think with these simple apps you have to be at the right time in the right place. When I wrote That's Not Funny, there was only one Android phone on the market (HTC G1) and the App Store was fairly tiny. So the app made a bigger splash.
- napolux 13y agoI have 2 iOS apps that are selling something like 5 copies per day each. One is an iOS text clipboard manager (with iCloud sync) https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/copycopy-clipboard-manager/id725292832 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/copycopy-clipboard-manager/i... The other one, for the lazy students in the italian market, is a database you can use also offline of recaps from books you study in school, with in app purchases.. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/iriassunti-riassunti-di-italiano/id574956492 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/iriassunti-riassunti-di-ital... They are both in the 4/5 star ratings
- yummyfajitas 13y agoI make some passive income off affiliate link blogs. Not a lot, varies widely per month. I've been making extra cash lately by running bandit algorithms to optimize the click through rate, basically choosing the optimal call to action. I've got a wordpress plugin which does that automatically which I've just made public: http://bayesianwitch.com/wordpress/index.html http://bayesianwitch.com/wordpress/index.html
- tarball 13y agoAt first I started with a Blogspot with a bunch of cat gifs and a couple of Google ads. Once I earned enough money to buy a domain name for this project, I bought http://catgifpage.com http://catgifpage.com and designed a cheap-but-fun interface for the visitors I targeted. As I am more a “dog” person, I decided one year (and about 1000€) later to open http://doggifpage.com http://doggifpage.com. It increased a bit my incomes but not so much. As you may know, the Internet loves cats, cats and cats! In 2013, I earned almost 4000€ for about 10 fun hours of gif gathering! I have some plans for 2014 but I want to keep this project fun and certainly not time-consuming.
- hrnnnnnn 13y agoYou got the copyright holders' permission to use those gifs, I take it?
- bpierre 13y agoI’m genuinely interested: do you have any example of a GIF/LOL website which owns the rights on the published content?
- cinitriqs 13y agoLol, touché! and how about google? does google have permission to show gifs jpegs/whatever video/.. online when people do a search on any term in particular? Guess there are loopholes for big companies only ;) You either have no money to pay for a lawyer and go bust or you buy all the lawyers so that no-one will be left to sue you... sort of kind of... doesn't make sense but you catch my drift right? :D
- hrnnnnnn 13y agoNo. I just think it's unethical to make money from someone else's work without compensating them. "But everyone else is doing it" is the kind of reasoning small children use.
- bpierre 13y ago
- erikb 13y agoWhy does everybody list books, webapps and mobile apps as passive income? I hope you created them yourself. Then they are not passive income but a product. Like every product they have a lifetime, then you need a new product. Therefore you actually have a first or second active business and not a passive income. "Passive income" is rent for condos you own, or having shares in your friend's profitable business that yields dividends etc. or did I completely misunderstand the meaning of that word?
- lucaspiller 13y agoI think in the tech circle, passive income is used to refer to something you could ignore for 6 weeks and it would still be earning you money. Most of the 'work' people put in seems to be increasing revenue rather than maintaining it, although yes I agree it isn't completely passive. The same could be said about your condos too though, they'll need to refurbished every few years. Unless you are outsourcing everything, you'll need to do some management of that yourself.
- erikb 13y agoLook, I understand how people use the phrase "passive income", but it's really not correct. Like "object" or "unit test" "passive income" is a term with a meaning. It has advantages for you to understand the difference between "unit test" and "regression test". It also has advantages to understand the difference between "active income", "passive income", and "portfolio income". For once you can speak with professionals without misunderstandings, and you can think about a topic in a different way. When you understand what "passive income" means you will see, that you actually really like "passive income" from a tax paying point of view, even if you have to work as hard for it as you would for your "active income" (e.g., salary). The thing is, though, that often if you have to work hard for something that is considered "passive income", then you are probably doing something wrong or it's actually your "active income". [1] http://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/passiveincome.asp http://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/passiveincome.asp [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_income http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_income
- axefrog 13y ago
- acconrad 13y agoI bring in 5-7k a year DJing and personal training. They're technically "work" but I'm literally getting paid to live out my hobbies I already do for myself, which to me is passive income. I would, however, like to turn a programming side project into something that's passive income.
- stevekemp 13y agoDitto for me. I shoot hookers for money, photographically. The kind of mid/high-end ladies that have their own sites and galleries. They're a hard market to get into, but frequently one girl will know another five or ten, and personal recommendations go a long way. Those girls, and retired people who want pictures of their cats/dogs are the only consistent group of people who seem willing to pay for portraits/photographs.
- delpino73 13y agoI run a couple of language learning sites. Doesn't make me rich but pays the rent. :) https://www.antosch-and-lin.com/ https://www.antosch-and-lin.com/
- nkuttler 13y agoOh well, it's hardly an income but I created a rhyming dictionary years ago where one adsense container pays for all my personal hosting bills. http://rhymebox.com/ http://rhymebox.com/ http://rhymebox.de/ http://rhymebox.de/
- alain34 13y agohttps://www.bankaccountchecker.com https://www.bankaccountchecker.com enable the validation of UK bank account (web app and API). It is not making loads of money but I get enough traffic to pay for summer holiday. I often get request for the logic behind the API. the sort code file is also selling well. I have created another saas service at http://www.conceptuel.co.uk/burnDown/ http://www.conceptuel.co.uk/burnDown/ but there is not enough demand to make it a profitable passive income.
- gearoidoc 13y agoHipster CEO - a tech startup sim. 6.5k downloads at $2.99 in the past 3 months. www.hipsterCEO.com
- liamgooding 13y agoAwesome I'm glad you're making OK money for this. Bought it and thought it was fun to have a laugh at myself for a bit and the stereotypes in the industry. Went through a phase of constantly crashing though but seems OK now
- gearoidoc 13y agoThanks, dude. Yeah I was (pretty obviously) learning as I went on the iOS front so I encountered a lot of newbie bugs. I'm still working away on it though so hope to provide you with good value for money!
- rajeevk 13y agoMy first Android app: Scratchpad https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.avabodh.scratchpad https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.avabodh.sc... I made it to learn Android development. It took me total of 5 days: 2 days to learn basic android stuff then next two days to develop this app and on last day creating dev account and publishing on Android store. After publishing I forgot the password of signing key I used, so I never updated this app except for a description change. Initially there was almost no revenue but it increased over the time as the download count increased. After two year(of publishing), it is giving me around $70/per month through ads (admob).
- easy_rider 13y agoI have great expectations of my DogeCoins!
- joliss 13y agoMy free-to-play Solitaire web app, at http://www.solitr.com/ http://www.solitr.com/. It's making a bit over $1,000 in monthly ad revenue. Traffic is at ~3k dailies. I did this as a weekend project 2 years ago, and at some point migrated my blog to it to pick up DomainRank. Other than that I've mostly left it alone.
- glanch 13y agoThat's impressive. How do people find your site? It isn't on the first page of google results for 'solitaire'.
- nicholas73 13y agoHey joliss, I'd like to ask how you pick up your traffic? I've got a similar project as yours, and it has the same problem - it's a remake of a popular game with lots of high ranking webapps on Google. None of the SEO and social media did the trick for me. I even built a plug-in widget. So far a handful of links send most of my traffic, and I don't get in a month what you get in a day. My project is: http://sudokuisland.com http://sudokuisland.com How would you go about it? Thanks.
- joliss 13y agoI'm getting organic search traffic for niche keywords, like 'free solitaire online'. http://sudokuisland.com http://sudokuisland.com seems to have a decent amount of keywords already, but perhaps you can think of more. Organic search is probably the only way to get traffic at the scale you need for an ad-monetized game. My plan is to improve the PageRank and DomainRank, and eventually to make the product better (since Google presumably picks up on that through bounce rates, time on site, sharing). So that'd be the general strategy I recommend. Another metric you can optimize is the number of times a first-time visitor returns, because it acts as a multiplier on your traffic. Say you get 100 organic first-time visitors per day, if each visitor returns 5 times, you'll have 600 total visits per day.
- paperwork 13y agoYou make a grand for 3 thousand daily visitors? That's much higher than I expected! Is it normal to earn over a thousand dollars a month for a few thousand daily visitors?
- firstplanthendo 13y agoSomewhat different area, but earns me around $300 a month- Churning credit cards for rewards. So called “award/travel hacking”. 2 new credit cards per calendar quarter, conservatively estimate each signup bonus is worth $600 (if you know how to redeem them, usually that means for travel). Have to live in the U.S. and have good credit to do it, but I’ve been at it for a few years now and haven’t paid for airfares or barely any lodging costs on almost all my travel. Working on an online class that teaches how to do it, looking to sell that for some “real” passive income.
- philiphodgen 13y agoHow do you decide when to cancel a credit card? Or do you keep every credit card you sign up for?
- Qworg 13y agoDoesn't this destroy your good credit? I've always wanted to do this, but that worry always crops up.
- simonhamp 13y agoI run Built With Bootstrap (http://builtwithbootstrap.com http://builtwithbootstrap.com). It's making 4 figures a month at the moment. It's mostly passive income as I spend no more than a few hours per week actually working on the site. Though I spend considerably more monitoring the stats and feeds etc etc My biggest win with this site is the extremely low cost to run it - something I want to talk about more if anyone's interested. My only real regular cost is the domain name! Pretty phenomenal for a site that continues to attract thousands of visitors per day :) a model I'm proud of and hopefully can continue! But of course, all standing on the shoulders of giants! Many thanks has to go to far more talented people than me... both for the site's foundations and it's popularity.
- galfarragem 13y agoI use also tumblr platform (very underrated IMHO). If you can adapt your website/blog to it you get a decent free hosting. However if your blog depends on SEO I would not recommend it (unless you develop a custom theme and really know what you are doing).
- simonhamp 13y agoI totally agree that Tumblr is underrated. It's by no means perfect for SEO, but I haven't found it a problem. Would certainly be nice to have a little more control over certain bits, but it hasn't been detrimental to mine, now PageRank 7 (if that still means anything?)
- galfarragem 13y agoOnce I made the experience, two blogs, one on wordpress, one on tumblr, as similar as they can be, same posts, etc. After few days the wordpress one was in first page of google, the tumblr one still very difficult to find. Anyway to cut costs I kept the tumblr one. Nowadays (2,5 years later) my blog is pagerank 4 (good rank for the traffic I have) and reasonable SEO. Even not being perfect like you say I would also recommend tumblr. (http://archimodels.info http://archimodels.info)
- 13y ago
- harvestmoon 13y agoI wrote a book on adult ADHD. I published it 3.5 years ago, and it brought in $75 last month. It used to bring in more, but some people wrote very negative reviews which were upvoted, so its sales dropped. I don't feel too bad because many people who read it say it is unusually helpful and accessible.
- asnark 13y agoSounds interesting. Link to book?
- harvestmoon 13y agoSure! http://www.amazon.com/Adult-ADHD-What-Need-Know-ebook/dp/B003NX7KYK/ http://www.amazon.com/Adult-ADHD-What-Need-Know-ebook/dp/B00...
- dataminded 13y agolink?
- podviaznikov 13y agoMy gf did couple of CSS animations(icons, js components etc) over the years. Then we published them to Envato marketplace and got some monthly income around 100USD per month. See link (referral): http://themeforest.net/item/animated-404-or-maintainance-page/5957991?ref=aleksandrovamaryna http://themeforest.net/item/animated-404-or-maintainance-pag...
- taigeair 13y agoCurrent passive income for me - blog and niche sites with articles (ads e.g. http://www.flagshipstorelondon.com/ http://www.flagshipstorelondon.com/), e-commerce business (sales), ETFs (investments), and teaching a skill. Flagship stores - I went around taking pictures of the best of the best stores for the top retail brands in London and made a directory. Created page on Blogger. Ecommerce business is my best passive income. It's a physical product I really wanted so I made it. It's a map of London but made in the historic style. http://www.wellingtonstravel.com http://www.wellingtonstravel.com I still need to spend time on it because I am customer service, legal, accounting, finance, marketing, IT, R&D, and operations. I have outsourced manufacturing and fulfillment to someone I found on https://sortedlocal.com/ https://sortedlocal.com/ and Amazon's FBA. It's great because it's more money and something I'm passionate about but it definitely takes 5-7 hours a week. The teaching one is interesting in particular because it leverages your strengths, improves your communication, and is probably something you really enjoy since you took the time to get good at it (i.e. sailing, swimming, kettlebell workouts, or even English). I wrote a post about teaching English (http://www.taigeair.com/websites-to-help-you-teach-english-online/ http://www.taigeair.com/websites-to-help-you-teach-english-o...) for people who complained they couldn't find a job so did nothing all day, but they could be teaching a special skill which is what I did when I became unemployed. I learned code, created a few websites, interviewed, and taught swimming. And rental income is good but definitely, not very passive... Lastly, I'm developing a really cool website for helping people sleep which I can see being profitable. I'd like to hear how much time you spent or are spending on these side projects. Also I heard babies are a time and money sink. So I'd be interested in hearing about people doing side projects/passive income with kids.
- jayvanguard 13y ago> http://www.wellingtonstravel.com http://www.wellingtonstravel.com You made that? Beautiful map! You should do those for more cities.
- taigeair 13y agoThanks! I had a business partner who is an architect and she did most of the artwork but we designed it together. It took us 3 years and was kind of a hobby. Now it's quite time consuming to do VAT tax every 3 months and keep records. BTW physical products are so much more work than anything I did on the web. I'm hoping to do a world map next though.
- weavie 13y agoI wrote a trading simulator app for iOS. It's not a huge earner, but does give me some pocket money. It's not exactly passive either since I still develop on it, but I would probably be doing it anyway - the fact people buy it is just a bonus. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/spoof-trader-trading-simulator/id560758114?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/spoof-trader-trading-simulat...
- bernatfp 13y agoAt the moment I only have a source of passive income, which is through mining Litecoin with a couple miners I have.
- frankydp 13y agoI have been running a simple career site for Marines for the last 2 years, and have now slowly grown to capture about half the Marine Corps monthly. It slowly drags in $400 a month and has been creeping up to the 5k mailing list mark. I work on it about a day a month, if that.
- taigeair 13y agoLink?
- frankydp 13y agohttp://www.killfoot.com http://www.killfoot.com Also what kind of map-making are you working on in the travel space?
- taigeair 13y agoHow much time did that take to build and maintain?
- frankydp 13y agoIt went through a couple iterations, and settled on this one. Technically it only took a couple hours to make, and I spend about 2 hours a month actually providing the service. But, as with any side project I tinker with it a couple times a month.
- taigeair 13y agoI guess the articles take some time too. I find blogs and websites aren't that bad. It's physical products that are the worst!!! But also really inherently rewarding :)
- knorc 13y agoA website promoting ebooks about seduction : http://www.ebookseduction.com/ http://www.ebookseduction.com/ (in french, english version coming soon) It's not a big business but it is good pocket money considering it takes me few hours of work per month.
- ingm4r 13y agothat can also be read as ebook seduction.
- peacemaker 13y agoI make about $400 a month quite passively by selling software with Envato. Just the occasional comment and email which takes 5 - 10 minutes a day at most. I also sell a beginners book on creating and selling WordPress plugins which only sells one or two a week. I have a bunch of cool stuff out there but my biggest weakness is marketing. I can never seem to drive enough targeted traffic to my projects.
- pcharles 13y agowhere can we find the book?
- peacemaker 13y agoIt's here: http://creatingplugins.com/book http://creatingplugins.com/book Like I said, it's mainly for beginners but I'm working on another one (using LeanPub they're awesome!) which will be much more in-depth.
- foxhop 13y agomost of the comments relate more to residual income not passive income. I think passive income is mostly a fallacy and the only thing that comes to mind is saving accounts and bonds.
- blakerson 13y agoThe Music Virtual University (http://www.musivu.co http://www.musivu.co) does four-figure sales+RR monthly, a year after starting and just working nights/weekends.
- quaffapint 13y agoCreated a PHP ad server 'mySimpleAds' at http://www.clippersoft.net http://www.clippersoft.net and continue to maintain support it. Brings in some money monthly to help with credit card bills. I get some referals from SO and the like, but also spend $ on Adwords. Last year created a hosted SAAS version at http://mysimpleads.com http://mysimpleads.com, but hasn't really taken off. As always with my products - marketing and getting more people to see them is always a big problem. Once they use them, customers like them - it's getting them to the site to even see them. I'm in the process of re-writing mySimpleAds and adding in a bunch of stuff, but I don't know if it will still be stuck in neutral and not bring in the folks. I'll also plan to write more products, figuring maybe that will bring people in.
- parax 13y agoI wrote a sci-fi short novel that received a good feedback (surprisingly not at Amazon, where nobody has reviewed it). It's placed at the iBookstore and the Kindle store, and it sells some units from time to time: http://www.amazon.com/value-memories-Carlos-Paramio-Danta-ebook/dp/B009SHVSZ2 http://www.amazon.com/value-memories-Carlos-Paramio-Danta-eb... https://itunes.apple.com/en/book/the-value-of-memories/id573698565?mt=11 https://itunes.apple.com/en/book/the-value-of-memories/id573...
- mattmaroon 13y agoAre you just doing the 35% rate on Amazon since you're below $2.99?
- parax 13y agoI don't have many options there :) And the iBookstore retains 30%.
- r4pha 13y agoI'm making negative 15 USD/month hosting two side projects: http://srctree.net http://srctree.net - A pastebin with version control http://blocksim.net http://blocksim.net - A poor man's online simulink-like thingy I am aware that there is a _lot_ of room for improvement in both services, but the fact that nobody uses it at all is not very motivational.
- simonhamp 13y agoSorry to hear they're not a great success. They look good though! I've noticed both of those sites use Bootstrap? If you want, submit them to http://builtwithbootstrap.com/submit http://builtwithbootstrap.com/submit and I'll publish them tomorrow, see if you get any more action on there.
- r4pha 13y agoThanks! They were indeed built with bootstrap. I'll submit them right away. :)
- simonhamp 13y agoDone and ready to go :) let me know how it goes!
- r4pha 13y agoThanks a ton! It already has 3 notes :) If you're interested, I'll e-mail you some analytics as soon I have them. Let me know if there's any way I can buy you a beer.
- simonhamp 13y agoNo problem :) glad you're already seeing some results! By all means send me your analytics. Would be nice to see the impact BWB was able to give you Don't worry about the beer :) be sure to submit any other sites you publish that use Bootstrap in the future. Happy to promote them :)
- elliottkember 13y agoRunning Hammer for Mac (hammerformac.com), our web-development OSX app. On a good day we might hit $100+ profit (after Apple's cut). Some days we don't get anything. It's rewarding to know that people are using it.
- snide 13y agoHammer is a nice, well designed product, kudos to you and congrats on it. I was actually surprised it doesn't net you a larger income. Do you think you guys are missing on marketing, or that you're hitting a niche that's too small (frontend osx owning developers that can code, but not enough to set up small dev environments)? I'll admit that I'm mostly a frotnend dev / designer myself, but since I have enough ability to set up things like git, bower and grunt myself hammer seems to aim at a skill curve just lower than myself. That said I bet I'm underestimating the amount of people that still use php includes for simple static sites. My guess might be that their might be more in the Windows world, though that could be a prejudice. Good luck on your work and continue building cool software!
- elliottkember 13y agoHey, that's a really nice comment! Thank you so much for your feedback. I'd love to make more on Hammer. We make okay money on Hammer and don't have to work on it too much. I think there's a few reasons we don't make more. For one, I don't know that there's big money in developer tools, especially given the vast number of free tools as you've said. We are planning a few extra pay-monthly features which might be really nice, mainly new features for hammr.co. Recurring subscriptions are a better long-term model. We're also integrating with our hosting platform Forge (getforge.com) which you might've seen. Super-fast static hosting. That's the hosting provider we use for the Hammer and Anvil sites. > hammer seems to aim at a skill curve just lower than myself A lot of people feel this way. I personally think Hammer's great no matter what skill level you are. We're trying to keep it zero-configuration; a very simple, consistent tool. Not too many clever tags to remember, and less support and maintenance on our end. > My guess might be that their might be more in the Windows world, though that could be a prejudice. A Hammer gem sure would be nice! ;)
- leoplct 13y agoI made -20$/month hosting http://uk.zapping.io http://uk.zapping.io
- driverdan 13y agoI'm currently earning around $45-60 a day mining cryptocurrencies with a little over $5000 in hardware. Once setup it's completely passive. Edit: ROI could be improved a bit on this too since I intentionally bought hardware that was good to experiment with rather than optimizing ROI.
- mikeyouse 13y agoIs that net of energy costs?
- driverdan 13y agoEnergy costs about $6 a day.
- GameOfTrolls 13y agoAre you moving away from BitCoin and into others? or vice versa. I'm curious about the trending of BTC mining.
- arca_vorago 13y agoAsic/FPGA's? Or just GPU/CPU? Which currencies? I was one of those that mined a few blocks of bc and spent it all before it was worth anything, and then thought that fpga's and asics took it out of my price range. Have considered trying my hand at it again.
- driverdan 13y agoGPUs mining scrypt. It's more profitable than using ASICs to mine Bitcoin.
- Jack000 13y agohow long would that be sustainable for, given the periodic difficulty increase in the various cryptocurrencies?
- driverdan 13y ago
- NateG 13y agoI created a web game called Pit of War (http://www.pitofwar.com http://www.pitofwar.com) about three years ago and it has been generating enough monthly income to pay all my bills and affords me the ability to travel and live anywhere I like. It isn't completely passive but that is because I choose to add new features and updates. It is a niche game but the Internet is a big place with lots of people. :) Books like The Long Tail and The Curve have taught me that you don't need to have the #1 product in an industry to make a good living.
- seestheday 13y agoHow do monetize? Selling in game items? Advertising?
- NateG 13y agoThe game has two currencies. Hard currency (Trophies) that are mainly bought with real money and soft currency (Gold) which are found in game. It is a fairly standard practice for those familiar with Free-2-Play (F2P) games. It was difficult to balance things so paying players and free players could compete on level footing but after three years I feel I've found a nice balance and if judging from player feedback the majority also feels the same. The game's forum uses advertising but the income is negligible, maybe around $10 per month. This is likely due to the fact that it is the same eyeballs looking at the ads and it is not a high traffic forum.
- earlz 13y agoMy first source of passive income came this year. It's an app for rooting (and then fixing some problems on) a modem used for U-Verse(https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.earlz.nvg510fixer https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.earlz.nvg5...). I've only made a handful of $100 bills with it, but the extra income is welcome. The amount of work I've actually had to do was really quite little. I had to do initial development, and then fix some bugs. Then, it just sat there and brought in $5-20 a day. Eventually AT&T patched the original exploit I used for root access so I had to do research and development to find a new one and implement it, which took about 2 weeks or so. And since then, it's just been sitting there bringing in bits of money. I plan on adding some often requested features over the next month though Also, I provided the app only for convenience. The information on how to root the modem for free is published freely on my blog, I just provide the app because I know that the steps required are too complicated for many people
- dpiers 13y agoI made 10.35 BTC from mining dogecoins for the last month.
- MasterScrat 13y agoThat's impressive... What was the hardware cost?
- dpiers 13y agoI am using my gaming PC that I built years ago and a $1079/mo dual hexacore dual Tesla M2090 server from Softlayer. Fortunately I have a $1k/mo Softlayer credit, so my hardware costs were approximately $79. My rent includes electricity, so my electricity costs were $0.
- kirk21 13y agoDon't people abuse the 'electricity is in the rent' fact? Or is it a (shared) tragedy of the commons problem?
- ZanderEarth32 13y agoI've got an iOS app that I'm lucky if I get a sale or two a day. It was really more of a project to teach myself how to build iOS apps and be an accompaniment to an ebook my GF wrote that sells fairly well. I guess technically it hasn't 'made' any money since we're still in the red when factoring in the cost of the icon design, Apple dev account, etc. I'm currently working on an app that is aimed at kids that should encourage them to write more and be creative. Hoping to get more traction with that.
- sovok 13y agoA silly project for playing with Unicode (sıɥʇ ǝʞıl) and ASCII Art. About 900 visits per day, 10€ per month income. Almost pays for the server. http://lunicode.com http://lunicode.com
- vuzum 13y agoLet's see. There's a few somewhat passive channels for us. We just launched our product Blogvio (http://www.blogvio.com http://www.blogvio.com) which is yet break even. Right now we're only partnering with platforms to white label our Editor and widgets, but we'll soon release a pricing plan for all users of the website. Our 2008 marketplace Flabell (http://www.flabell.com http://www.flabell.com) (flash products... I know) is still going strong, although we too think Flash is dead. People still buy those components, so we still provide support for them. We stopped advertising though a few years back. :-) Same goes for our Flash Components on ActiveDen, these still sell a couple of hundreds every month. So it's still passive income after 6yrs+. :)
- Judson 13y agoI may have posted about this before, but http://askjud.com http://askjud.com, a simple trick that you can play on your friends makes around $300/mo. Its hosted on github, and costs $8/yr for the domain name.
- ElongatedTowel 13y agoHow does something like this make so much money? If a friend send me the link I would demand reparations.
- Kluny 13y agoThe help link is dead.
- donniefitz2 13y agoI spent 10 minutes creating this coffee mug and I've made about $80 selling them over the past year on Zazzle. I plan to add more soon. http://www.zazzle.com/go_away_im_coding_coffee_mug-168224001705050233 http://www.zazzle.com/go_away_im_coding_coffee_mug-168224001...
- davidpaulkrug 13y agoI recently started a jobs site that makes about 10 dollars a day in affiliate revenue and adsense. Rolling out a network of them. http://phjobs.org http://phjobs.org
- mmayberry 13y agoI own/operate a luxury resale business that specializes in high end womens fashion, art, cars, and collectibles. My only time expense is picking up the items... everything else I have automated. On a good month I can clear $10K+ and on a bad month $2-3K. I do all this without any advertising and the primary selling point of my business is thats its discreet and anonymous.
- jbrooksuk 13y agoHow does this work? Are you scraping other sites, then ordering them to yourself or something?
- mmayberry 13y agonope. its all based on repeat and referral. My first customer wanted to sell a pair of $1200 shoes but didn't know how so I put them on eBay for her. That one pair turned into two which then became her entire closet. She then referred me to a friend who did the same and thats been the foundation of my business ever since. 100% repeat and referral. I avoid unsolicited inquires as much as possible because they typically arent worth the headache. I even fire customers that make my business hard using the 80/20 theory.
- leoplct 13y agoMay you write down the link?
- elbear 13y agoAt the end of 2013 I launched http://www.comedylib.com/ http://www.comedylib.com/. It's a site with curated Youtube videos of comedians, comedy shows and comedy movies. I built this out of my passion for comedy and because I wanted to have only comedy videos in one place and not the mix that Youtube offers. It's not making any money yet, but I haven't put much effort into promoting it so far.
- easymovet 13y agohttp://PrimalPal.net http://PrimalPal.net 5 $digits/mo
- relaxman 13y agoLooks great !!!
- sgribley 13y agoI'm going to toss this out there - I've considered building an affiliate site in the porn space. I've looked at a couple API's and it looks easy. However, I have never built anything in this space - I just hear that there's money to be made so have been tempted. Let the flogging begin!
- sgribley 13y agoOh - if anyone has any info on this please email me via my profile. I'm open to reason not to do it as well as I don't have my heart set on it, more of a curiosity than anything.
- liamgooding 13y agoWas easy money around 2002-2004. You'd get like 200:1 conversion of an OK paysite with either a 35% lifetime revshare of sometimes random promotions (usually to kickstart a new site) would offer $250 upfront PPS. Niche sites (gay, extreme fetish) would convert TGP traffic as good as 75:1 and honestly were the best place to be (to many fanboy affiliates saturating the market with mainstream "teen amateur" sites). 2005-2008, TGP's totally died to Tubes. And Tubes generally killed the value in hosted galleries (a key marketing tool for affiliates alongside TGPs). Last I heard of old contacts, they'd either tried to move up the food chain intro production (which mostly moved to eastern europe), moved into niche tube sites, or sold up (as I did) and went into mainstream web. Actually, probably the most money I made was from sale of site network and domain portfolio.
- sgribley 13y agoI'm considering creating chatroom site. Not my own chatrooms but using API of others. Seems like those may still be in vogue. Have you had any luck with them? I'm certain I can create a site in an evening, then I just need to see how to drive traffic to it.
- liamgooding 13y agoMost guys used to say don't bother making a paysite (same applies for camsites) until you can drive 10,000 a day to it from your own network. Paid seeding traffic is just too expensive. So general roadmap was usually build up a network of very niche TGP sites (later, Tube sites) and only push around to your own network (so no external crap or popups) until you get a soid audience of bookmarkers (daily returners) and once you're confident you can start producing 10,000+ outclicks a day, THEN add your own paid stuff on top. Trying to push payments really early just makes people hit the close tab... adult is all about getting bookmarkers Basically, the "retention" in the Pirate Metrics funnel. Facebook didn't want to put on ads until they'd build years of loyalty and bookmarkers. Once you're totally bought into the service, (one hopes) that you wont mind the new paid ads that start appearing.
- ankit70 13y agoI make around $200/month from my crappy articles at http://ankitkumar.in http://ankitkumar.in and affiliate marketing.
- LeVertGarcon 13y agoI see affiliate marketing mentioned often in the comments. I don't know anything about getting started - do you have an easy way for me to get started other than just Googling it?
- jesalg 13y agoNot nearly as successful as some of the other guys here but I have couple of avenues for passive income: 1) I make a few bucks a month off my reddit client: http://www.ruddl.com http://www.ruddl.com - I pay $0 for hosting on Heroku so I'm more or less net positive. 2) I also make a few bucks off my blog in tips: http://jes.al/blog/ http://jes.al/blog/ I'm working on ideas for a SaaS product or even a book to add to that list.
- yozhik 13y agohttp://www.dicerealm.com http://www.dicerealm.com makes me minus $5 per month, but it was mostly an experiment to validate some of the advice from Start Small Stay Small (http://www.amazon.com/Start-Small-Stay-Developers-Launching-ebook/dp/B003YH9MMI http://www.amazon.com/Start-Small-Stay-Developers-Launching-...), which is a fantastic book.
- nonsens3 13y agoI have just released http://selfstream.io http://selfstream.io - a platform for event organizers to host and live stream their events. Right now making a negative $25 for hosting, without counting a small ad campaign on Google Adwords.
- than 13y agoThe Random Amazon Product Generator brings in enough for a small book purchase every few weeks. It's still mostly for my own amusement. (http://thanland.com/projects/random-amazon/ http://thanland.com/projects/random-amazon/)
- yitchelle 13y agogreat idea. How did you go about marketing this?
- qeorge 13y agoMaking $2-300/month off Android apps (AdMob). Despite best efforts, this is dominated by a soundboard app. Not what I expected, but we'll take it! Internet yellow pages, www.ablocal.com, doing quite well. Can't disclose metrics, but it makes more than you probably would guess. Domain sales - again can't disclose specifics, but in the $xx,xxx range this year from domains. Not a huge portfolio, but some good ones. And we just launched Gold Plugins (last Friday), a membership club for our premium WordPress plugins. Hoping it will become a good vehicle, although we do pride ourselves on awesome support, so not that passive. Previously, we were selling these plugins separately, for about $1k/month. No stats on the membership system yet. Gold Plugins: http://goldplugins.com/ http://goldplugins.com/ I have some others, but nothing that's making enough money to be interesting! I'll add more if I think of them; we have a bunch of random properties.
- jjrumi 13y agoI don't want to ask too much but, could you elaborate more on the ablocal.com site? It's hard to see the value against other services: Google's, Yelp, etc.
- gmays 13y agoFor me it's still residential real estate. Between 2010 and 2012 or so I picked up some condos here in San Diego at short sale for about 1/3 of what their price was a few years earlier. I get about 1.5% of their purchase price every month in rent. At the same time, the property values have appreciated so the rents are starting to increase as well. The longest I've had any of them vacant was about two weeks and that was only during the time I was replacing carpet, appliances, furnace, painting walls, fixing stuff, etc. To make it completely passive I have a property manager (I live in the area, but I value my time). That along with HOA fees and real estate taxes eat into my bottom line, but combined it's only about 1/5 of the monthly rent. These properties allowed me to quit my job, self-fund my company, and I'm actually putting money away every month. Go figure. I'm not a real estate expert, but if you have any basic questions feel free to get in touch (contact info is in my profile). As background, I bought my first house at 21 and owned 5 homes by the time I was 27 (I'm 29 now). I was in the military until a few months ago, so I didn't make a whole lot, but I'm pretty good with money and invested wisely. I didn't grow up with much, so I learned what not to do with money. I'm also pretty deliberate about how I spend my money, which is different than being frugal.
- graham1776 13y agoWhere did you get your equity? Do have debt on any of them? I want to follow this plan too, but don't have the equity for down payments...
- gmays 13y agoOf the 5 homes, I have mortgages on the 2 most expensive ones (we live in one of them). The other 3 I bought more or less cash. The first condo I bought by selling most of my stock investments. After buying the condo I started investing again. The following year I took out a HELOC out the next condo, sold all my stocks again and bought the next one cash. I did the same for the one after that. I've since paid off the HELOCs.
- Jack000 13y agoMy family owns several rental properties as well. It's a part time job to manage all of them, though it gets easier once you have 3~4, at which point they share the same resource pool for repairs and such. some observations - don't cheap out and buy in a bad neighbourhood. We did this once, and with the turnover/repair costs it made a loss. - choose tenants carefully (you can say no). Families with income are best. - know when to evict people. Rent for long enough and you'll certainly get a pathological renter.
- iluvmylife 13y agoI made a super simple paid Android app with a list of interesting Physics Puzzles (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.boredominnovations.physicspuzzles https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.boredominn...). Took a month to make and now it is completely passive. Brings in some spare change with zero maintenance (~$50/month). I built this in 2011 to learn app development (its a webapp built using PhoneGap). Took about a month of evening/weekend work to push out, and most of that time was consumed by collecting and creating interesting puzzles. It was featured on Google Play's Top Paid Educational Games leaderboard for a while, and that contributed to a spike in income. That apart, I haven't done/don't know of any viable means to promote it.
- mephju 13y agoI spent more than some time to create a Shopify admin app for Android, https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.shopify.admin https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.shopify.ad.... It's up and running and generates already some money each month (60$ - 100$). Zero marketing, just Google Play. I wanted the app to be so much better than it is right now but unfortunately Shopify will release their own Android app soon which will render my app useless. It's quite devastating. So I consider this endeavor a failure. Now I am on the lookout for a new project idea. I think I will stay in the ecommerce realm since I like it very much and think it's easier to make money with merchants than with ordinary consumers. In case anyone would like to team up, my email is in my profile ;)
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- smartician 13y agoEarning low three figures with my Android apps[1]. Haven't touched them since August, so I guess that counts as passive income. It's even still building momemtum[2], so maybe if I had spent some money on marketing it would have grown faster? [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Smartician https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Smartician [2] https://fbcdn-sphotos-h-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-prn1/t1/1545771_10151836107067014_2000335479_n.jpg https://fbcdn-sphotos-h-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-prn1/t1/15...
- AJay17 13y agoNot much to mine, but they seem to be doing pretty well. http://www.thingsunder15.com http://www.thingsunder15.com and http://www.myfancysauce.com http://www.myfancysauce.com
- tokhi 13y agoHow they earn money? by advertisements?
- nickfox 13y agoI have been working on my Google Map Gps Cell Phone Tracker for several years now. Recently, I updated the project to include tracking for Android, IOS, Windows Phone and Java Me/J2ME phones. The project allows you to track a phone periodically (every 1, 5 or however number of minutes) and display them in real time on Google maps. You can also save routes and display them later. I use google adsense on my website and also on youtube. I have been averaging about $600 per month in revenue. Now that I have done this update (which took a few months), I suspect that my adsense income is going to increase dramatically. If you want to learn more about my project, here is the landing page: http://www.websmithing.com/gps-tracker/ http://www.websmithing.com/gps-tracker/ I'm 53 now and I've been a software contractor for the past 17 years. Because of the economy and my age, I was having an increasingly difficult time getting contracts. It's hard to compete with young programmers who can work a lot faster than you and at a much cheaper rate. So I decided it was time to step out on my own. It has been very challenging, a little frightening (ok, a lot frightening), but I am making slow progress. Today, I was very happy to find out that my project was nominated for "Project of the Month" on Sourceforge. It's been downloaded about 8000 times in the past 4 days and has gotten 24 5-star reviews. If you have an account with Sourceforge and have the time to look at my project, would you please vote for me if you feel it's worth it? https://sourceforge.net/p/potm/discussion/vote/thread/7d522915/?limit=25#b8f0 https://sourceforge.net/p/potm/discussion/vote/thread/7d5229... Thank you. I appreciate the help and let me know if you have any questions.
- mpermar 13y agoCongrats on the brave move to launching your own projects. On a side note, if I were you I would move the project from SourceForge to github. There is barely anyone using sf.net these days and github social features might also help your project to get noticed.
- nickfox 13y agoHey, thanks for your comment. I use SF as a distribution channel. I use github every day and love it: https://github.com/nickfox/GpsTracker https://github.com/nickfox/GpsTracker
- aoakenfo 13y agoI make $0.70 cents (1 sale) every month from my iOS puzzle game: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/simpl/id672601351?ls=1&mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/simpl/id672601351?ls=1&mt=8 In a few months I'll be able to buy myself a coffee! =)
- icefox 13y agoYou should go to a coffee shop, and buy people a coffee in trade for looking at your entry in itunes, see what they think and if they can describe what the game does. You probably want to re-word the description as I am only guessing at how it works and I still don't know. A trailer on youtube wouldn't hurt either, though the name makes it hard to search for...
- someotheridiot 13y agoRebrickable (http://rebrickable.com http://rebrickable.com) shows you what you can build with your existing LEGO collection, including hundreds of fan contributed designs. Not truly passive as I work on it every day.
- kelu124 13y agoI've had www.rickshawart.org for a now.. two years. Not making a lot of money, still a no-loss project, and a ethical, profit-sharing one =) The structure is a tad special in that we have no fixed costs (apart from the hosting part). Any feedback of course is appreciated - that's really niche, and we're wondering how to move forward when our product is that special.
- kachhalimbu 13y agoThis is really cool idea. Kudos to you.
- kelu124 13y agoThanks !
- yasith 13y agoI have an Android app that's use to find local bus times for my area. It makes around 150$ per month after optimizing AbMob ads. It generated around 50$ per month at first.
- rmc 13y agoMade some custom maps based on OpenStreetMap designed for reading on the Kindle. Have made about ~€100 so far, but there's a lot more I could do. http://www.kindle-maps.com/ http://www.kindle-maps.com/ The books themselves: http://www.amazon.co.uk/s?_encoding=UTF8&search-alias=digital-text&field-author=Rory%20McCann http://www.amazon.co.uk/s?_encoding=UTF8&search-alias=digita...
- ivanyv 13y ago12 years ago I started a vertical social network for schools. We tried to hustle and visited schools one by one to sign them up. It crashed. Hard. Over time it evolved into a simple school directory, and after 3 years or so, it started making consistently about $300/month on AdSense. Revenue continued to rise (slowly), and now somedays it breaks $200/day. In the last 10 years I've spent like a week at most on the site. Weren't it for years of stupid decisions (and a family, the one best decision ever though), I could almost live comfortably off of that. Motivated by breaking $100/day a few months ago and now $200, I'm using it as a sort of template to launch other sites. By this time next year I might actually break $10,000/month and then finally relax :)
- ericthegoodking 13y agoHow do you bring traffic to your site?
- ivanyv 13y agoAt first I did lots of SEO, good page titles, meta tags, links from other sites. It brought modest traffic. Since then I haven't done much but the traffic keeps growing. Part of the explanation is that is has a pretty long tail.
- ericthegoodking 13y agoInteresting, is your product like a "yellow books" for schools?
- jenno 13y agoI have a few things going on. 1. Income from ~5 non-fiction Kindle books for sale on Amazon. Around $100 a month, though at one point when I was more heavily marketing them it went up to $900-$1000. Would be great to spend more time on this and automate a system where I have a couple of assistants doing this for me around the clock (marketing and book creation). 2. Income from a single Youtube video which links to a simple blog (about solar power) with Adsense ads. I get about 50 cents to a dollar a day from this. 3. I used to work for a jewelry firm doing SEO, going into their office on weekdays. Had to quit later, so I asked if I could do the work from home and send a work log each week. They pay me $300 per week for simple social media and blog posts. I pay a girl in Pakistan (who has good English skills) $70 per week to do the work for me. She's very good and I'm thankful to have her. They have no clue. Feel free to PM me if you'd like to speak about these things / wanna brainstorm.
- TaffeyLewis 13y agoPretty cool list, and all three look like things you could expand your earnings on with some moderate extra work. Just out of curiosity, What subjects do your non fiction books cover?
- jophde 13y agoI make about $300-$500 a month on my Android app Valet. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.valetapp https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.valetapp
- 0800899g 13y agoYour best passive income
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- kirk21 13y agoConnecting product designers and entrepreneurs. Not really passive since we review the products and contact the designers. Link: http://www.scscale.com/post/74753106293/new-business-ideas http://www.scscale.com/post/74753106293/new-business-ideas
- rms 13y agohttp://getkratom.com http://getkratom.com still, but as it has grown passive income has become a solid 20 hour a week grind.