19 ms·

What was your best passive income in 2014?

• TamDenholm 12y ago
  Its not yet passive because i choose to spend most of my time on it to make it better, but i bought a cleaning business 10 months ago. I recently took a consulting contract for some additional money for expansion and it does run by itself (in the capable hands of my biz manager), however there are more optimisations i wish to make to it. Its the hardest thing i've ever done, but its at a stage where if i wanted to, i could simply take any time i wanted off and all i'd need to do is spend 15 mins a week entering payroll. I've written about it before, if you want to look through my history.
  • mseebach 12y ago
    Start blogging about it, there's got to be a good handful of stories and advice in that throw-away "Its the hardest thing i've ever done". When you're at a 100-odd pages, make it an ebook for more passive income :) Mind sharing what the cleaning company is? You appear to be in the UK, and I will soon be in the market for a cleaner.
    • eminkel 12y ago
      I plan to launch another cleaning business, utilizing what I learned in my launch 3 months ago and write an e-book, and of course sell it for passive income. :)
  • eminkel 12y ago
    Excellent, I just started a cleaning business less than 3 months ago.
    • seandhi 12y ago
      I'm actually considering starting a cleaning business, and I'd love to get your perspective. I'm a full time software consultant, and I'm looking for a way to get some semi-passive income flowing. Anyway, if you have time, please reach out to me at sean.d.hi at gmail dot com.
      • eminkel 12y ago
        Sent you an email.
• martianmartin 12y ago
  hopefully the idea that i'm working on right now...:)
  • borplk 12y ago
    well what is it?
• parfe 12y ago
  Bought a house 12 months ago which included a great tenant. Rent checks showed up early every month for the last year. So far the house has been such little work I sometimes feel confused then surprised by his hand written envelopes addressed to me in the mailbox.
  • danielweber 12y ago
    Keep the rent low. A great tenant is awesome.
    • computerbob 12y ago
      Don't know who downvoted you but I absolutely agree. I have a few homes that I help rent with and having a good tenant is high above and away better than having a bad tenant pay more money. Just the cost alone in time is worth giving a good tenant cheaper rent.
      • phkahler 12y ago
        I think the normal reasoning is that higher rent filters out the bad tenants (statistically). But once you have a good tenant then you probably don't want to raise the rent unless they move out and you're seeking a new one.
        • rail2rail 12y ago
          ... or your fixed costs increase.
        • mjwhansen 12y ago
          Another way to screen out bad tenants is to offer zero deposit for high credit score applicants. Several large apartment buildings in my city (DC) do this, and the buildings are full of professionals.
          • aestra 12y ago
• dpweb 12y ago
  Websites. Totally autopilot. Only $300/mo. so its nothing compared to my regular income/job, but its a car payment - and it does beat working.
  • mikaelj 12y ago
    What sort of websites?
    • dpweb 12y ago
      Blogs mostly, and ideas I come up with like http://codeht.ml http://codeht.ml although I don't put ads on all of em. Would love any marketing ideas, as I don't know how to spread the word quickly and effectively.
      • MobileAppVault 12y ago
        Can you post a link from some of your blogs? thx :)
      • amalag 12y ago
        That codeht.ml is a great idea and execution. Congrats.
      • vschiavoni 12y ago
        How do you monetize this codeht.ml ?
  • ernopp 12y ago
    just from ads?
    • dpweb 12y ago
      yea, adsense only
      • johnward 12y ago
• ghhutch 12y ago
  Built an e-commerce site, pro bono, for an acquaintance and get a profit share each pay period. Occasionally I monitor, upgrade, enhance, and fix it up which results in more income. Great Situation!
  • Yardlink 12y ago
    Take great care to sign contracts for anything significant you expect to get. I did something like this once and after spending a long time enhancing it, suddenly the acquantance decided he didn't need to share the profit anymore.
    • damian2000 12y ago
      Although you'd expect being the dev and possibly admin, you hold some control over the other party?
      • coev 12y ago
        Better to have more than vague threats on your side, like having the law and vague threats on your side.
        • LyndsySimon 12y ago
          I hear that "very specific threats" is also a workable model.
• stupejr 12y ago
  Very proud of this, my first passive income ever: developed an add-on for a popular video game and it's been making me $60/mo. edit: to mention that it bounces around between $1.50 a day to $2.50 a day based on usage
  • deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  • Lockyy 12y ago
    I'm really interested in how you managed to monetise your addons. I've made some fairly popular addons in the past but I'd always considered them just free things I throw out into the world.
  • baconstrp 12y ago
    i smell Dota2
  • medecau 12y ago
    Can you go into detail? What kind of plugin is it? How do you monetize it?
• easyname 12y ago
  I had a motorcycle which I had bought for 126K INR. I was not using it much except to commute from home to office. I was going to sell the bike, then suddenly this idea clicked. It took few hours to make and host indiarider.com(people can take the bike on rent). Its been two months now, I have made 15K till now, 7K last week.
  • instakill 12y ago
    That's cool, but how do you deal with speeding fines?
    • easyname 12y ago
      I am based in India. There is not much infrastructure to check the speed. You will find traffic police with such equipment only in cities. That too if you are lucky.
    • MidnightRaver 12y ago
      You do realise INR == Indian rupees, right?
      • dpcx 12y ago
        They don't have speeding fines in India?
        • sanketdasgupta 12y ago
          Unless there's actually a cop watching the streets, NO.
      • sanketdasgupta 12y ago
        That's what he means....
    • MidnightRaver 12y ago
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdHkRkwJvww https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdHkRkwJvww
• senko 12y ago
  Embeddable shared whiteboard (jQuery plugin + backend service): https://awwapp.com/plugin/ https://awwapp.com/plugin/ Around $500/mo at the moment, with very little marketing and sales effort. Putting more effort into sales now, aiming to have it cover one full-time person on the project in the next few months.
• marktangotango 12y ago
  I have a house my sister and her partner rent. Some may say never do business with family, but we've been doing it for a few years now, and they've never missed a payment. I pay down about $1k every 4 months in principal.
• MobileAppVault 12y ago
  Built an iPhone app which is still featured by Apple in the new selfie category. 90$/mo with no marketing costs. :) The app called Picr. https://itunes.apple.com/app/picr-everyday-photo-reminder/id778479025 https://itunes.apple.com/app/picr-everyday-photo-reminder/id...
  • cageface 12y ago
    Congratulations! Sad though that even a featured app only pulls in $90/month. My own iPhone photo app, Liquid Lens: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/liquid-lens-real-time-psychedelic/id465231902?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/liquid-lens-real-time-psyche... actually briefly cracked the top 200 photo apps this month and pulls in more than $90 but is still only in the coffee money income bracket. After four years of the indie iOS thing I'm tooling back up to do web dev again.
    • MobileAppVault 12y ago
      Yes, I guessed it will be more. :( How much do you get with the free version of Liquid Lens?
      • cageface 12y ago
        I was hoping that the free version + IAP would generate significantly more revenue than the paid version, since I've read so many articles claiming that freemium is the future of the app store. So far this hasn't been true though. Currently IAP revenue from the free version tends to be about 1/3 the revenue of the paid version even though free app downloads outnumber paid by at least 10 to 1 on most days. It does seem like IAP has been ticking up a bit over the last few weeks though. Maybe people have to play with the app for a while before they're willing to pay for it? Personally I'd prefer to just do paid apps, since adding IAP + store transactions adds a fair bit of work.
        • MobileAppVault 12y ago
          Thanks for sharing your knowledge :) I think... IAP are good because you can show your potential customers how good your app is.
• hughes 12y ago
  A good mix of ETF funds from Vanguard Canada. It has been a very good year for equities, and all I had to do was literally not touch what I had bought.
  • richardlblair 12y ago
    It's been a strong year for equities. When I was looking the other day at vanguards list they all seemed really strong. I purchased one in January and it's been doing pretty good. Hopefully the second half of the year is just as good.
• fabiendem 12y ago
  Not proud of it, but around $500/mo thanks to 3 white label dating websites. Easy money, no maintenance needed for 2 years now... Could make much more with some time invested in it!
  • maxlamb81 12y ago
    What dating niches did you come up with? Why do you say you are not proud of it?
    • johnward 12y ago
      I'd imagine it's more about the stigma behind these dating sites. Fake profiles etc.
    • chatmasta 12y ago
      One of my buddies a few years back was banking ~100k/mo profit with Chatroulette bots who told guys jerking off to "find me on adultfriendfinder!" That was all in affiliate revenue. At some point you have to wonder when it moves from ethically wrong, to you're an idiot if you don't do it.
      • tomjen3 12y ago
        Well if the guys were willing to pay and adult friend finder were willing to give him the affiliate fees then I really can't see that it is morally wrong. I can see it being pretty awesome.
    • fabiendem 12y ago
      I have targeted some very specific jobs which are usually known as "sexy". I am not proud of it because I don't think it's very ethic, I can't imagine putting this on my resume and technically the challenge is nonexistent (a simple html page with some css, few hours of marketing) Though the service is real and people don't pay for nothing, at least it's legal...
      • chatmasta 12y ago
• dpcx 12y ago
  Dividends on stocks. I've never had an idea good enough to make an app out of, or build a company around. So instead, I started investing a small amount of my paycheck in to my brokerage account. Buying lots of stock in Dividend Kings[1], I've earned $25 this year, with another $20 through October. It's not a lot, but I'm fully thinking long-term. 1: http://long-term-investments.blogspot.com/2013/02/15-Best-Dividend-Kings-To-Buy-Now.html http://long-term-investments.blogspot.com/2013/02/15-Best-Di...
  • vetler 12y ago
    Have you compared this to just putting the money in a high-interest savings account?
    • artie_effim 12y ago
      a what? do you think it is 1985?
      • _delirium 12y ago
        2000 or 2007 would've been okay too (rates around 5-6%): http://www.pfstuff.com/savings/#historical http://www.pfstuff.com/savings/#historical
      • vetler 12y ago
        Yeah, maybe it wasn't a great question. I can get 3.5% where I live, though. Mutual funds may be a much better option, though.
    • eli 12y ago
      What counts as high-interest these days? Half a percent?
      • what_ever 12y ago
        http://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/banking/nerdwallets-top-high-yield-online-savings-accounts/ http://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/banking/nerdwallets-top-high-... Getting $25/year would need around $3000 in the account. Although it might not increase much over the years.
• aroch 12y ago
  "Administrating" a few servers that are rented out (ie, running apt-get every week and fixing the occasional symlink the tenants break). -$2000/m in power/space/bandwidth in costs +$4000/m in fees Banking a little under ~$1700 after I account for taxes for what amounts to an hour of effort a month.
  • chatmasta 12y ago
    Are you leasing your own collocated hardware or are small businesses paying you on retainer as a server admin?
    • aroch 12y ago
      Leasing my own collocated hardware that was originally purchased for a different task but were no longer in use
      • chatmasta 12y ago
        Nice. So if it's going so well, why don't you just buy some more servers and lease them out as well?
        • aroch 12y ago
          Work really doesn't scale linearly with servers with this type of business. I've known my current tenants for quite some time and they aren't "needy" or problem users, which makes my job easier. I'd also either need to purchase a new cabinet or move into a cage -- which is not really an upfront cost (or the headache of contract negotiations) I want to take on for a hobby business. In either case, I'd have to start running my own switches (and god forbid router) and while I roughly know how to administer both, those are better left until I have more time to devote. On the flip side, I have toyed with racking up a few 6U blade servers (~50 blades total) and renting those out as unmanaged, 0-support servers. The problem here is its a race to the bottom with blades and I'm no Softlayer or OVH and can't buy these things at hefty discount. I have worked out the math and after the first 3months, if I sell at least 60% of the blades I'll be paid off and the margins are significantly higher than my current servers.
• gtheme 12y ago
  My passive income, Ghost Theme marketplace http://www.gtheme.io/ http://www.gtheme.io/ Revenue around 100 USD per month. Running for half year need more marketing for better revenue. Ghost blog is the next big thing in blogging space.
  • chatmasta 12y ago
    Nice. Staying ahead of the curve like this is the right move. That's gonna pay off when 10x as many people are using Ghost and your site is already ranked at the top of the search results. Similarly, if you're building a content site, the time to do it is right when the hype around your topic gets started. Think upcoming movie releases, video games, elections, etc. Build out the content around the hype, then when the time comes you're at the top and nobody's gonna knock you off. I know quite a few people banking some serious coin from this strategy alone.
    • gtheme 12y ago
      Thanks for the advice. We already built some contents around Ghost blog. :)
• vilius 12y ago
  $5k per month for 18 months in a row. Made a portfolio website for my girlfriend. Got positive feedback, refactored into Wordpress theme and published on ThemeForest. Not 100% passive as I spend 3-4 hours per week for answering support emails. ThemeForest is a perfect place for passive income if you are a website developer. At first it challenges your skills as you need to create the concept, design it and code it. Then it challenges your business, marketing and support skills. You become a one man factory and learn a lot.
  • johnward 12y ago
    Is this all from a single theme? What percentage are you at? I've contemplated converting some of my custom WP themes to sell on ThemeForest but I didn't think it would be worth the time. edit: I often wonder if it would be worth it to try to compete with theme clubs. They seem to make a killing on recurring revenue and release a couple of themes a year.
    • chatmasta 12y ago
      Theme clubs? Are those the places where you pay a subscription fee to be in a limited club of people that get a new theme every couple weeks? In general people spend a lot of money on themes. I think you might be better off competing with themeforest or more likely, any of the number of bootstrap theme website popping up.
      • johnward 12y ago
        There a few but elegantthemes.com is one that comes to mind. You pay yearly to access to a bunch of quality themes. They pay out 50% commissions (and on renewals too) to affiliates but they have 200k+ plus users. They have to bring in a couple million a year. I believe they started out at much lower prices and started raising it as they released more and more themes.
    • vilius 12y ago
      Yes, it's from single theme. I'm currently at the highest rate of 70%. There are a couple of high-selling authors on TF that established their theme clubs. They build up customer base using TF and then invite people to subscribe for a yearly fee to get access to all of their themes plus the ones to be released. I guess after you reach certain amount of customers such model is much more profitable. Eg. http://www.themezilla.com/ http://www.themezilla.com/ and here's a link to their TF profile http://themeforest.net/user/OrmanClark http://themeforest.net/user/OrmanClark
• gavinballard 12y ago
  I make about $200/m in affiliate revenue from Shopify (http://www.shopify.com/?ref=disco http://www.shopify.com/?ref=disco) <= Yes, that's an affiliate link.
  • fiatjaf 12y ago
    From where do you get your affiliates?
    • gavinballard 12y ago
      I sell a framework for Shopify theme development (http://bootstrapforshopify.com http://bootstrapforshopify.com). It's free to use on sites that have been set up with my affiliate link.
• tjsix 12y ago
  Not entirely passive due to a small amount of support emails each month, but bringing in roughly $1600-$2500/mo (slower in summer) for niche WordPress themes. That's with virtually no marketing or advertising other than a $5/day adwords budget.
  • rolfvandekrol 12y ago
    $5/day adwords budget is not 'virtually no marketing or advertising'. That is about the sales of a slow month over the year.
    • dabent 12y ago
      $5/day x 30 days is $150, not $1500.
      • seanwalker08 12y ago
        He said "over the year" so its $5/day X 30 X 12 I believe. I could be wrong though.
    • sejje 12y ago
      No, it's not, but he didn't say it wasn't--the "virtually no" refers to what he does other than paying that $5/day.
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
• gaadd33 12y ago
  XOM and AGNC dividends
• jhwhite 12y ago
  Other than stocks and mutual funds I've only got one source of passive income. I made a Pathfinder Ability Score Calculator last year and it got picked up by d20. There's an ad on it so I get revenue from it. Right now only about $40-50/month but it's been steadily increasing since I put it up a year ago. A friend was going to sell me his hosting business but that fell through. That would have added about $100/month.
• rachelandrew 12y ago
  I keep meaning to write up complete figures but I launched my self-published ebook The Profitable Side Project Handbook in January http://rachelandrew.co.uk/books/the-profitable-side-project http://rachelandrew.co.uk/books/the-profitable-side-project Sales from that are well over 10K USD at this point. A lot of that was over the launch week, I've not had a huge amount of time to devote to marketing it over the last couple of months as our main business (which was a side project until it took off) has kept me busy, so it really is passive income at this point.
  • lijjumathew 12y ago
    Great work. For writing books do you use any book editor software of just MS Word ? I am in the process of writing a book and couldn't find a good editor/software. Thanks
    • rachelandrew 12y ago
      I start out in Scrivener and end up in HTML. Scrivener is great for the actual writing process, although it takes a bit of learning to get used to. I wrote up on my blog about creating the various versions http://rachelandrew.co.uk/archives/2014/01/07/html-epub-mobi-pdf-wtf-creating-an-ebook/ http://rachelandrew.co.uk/archives/2014/01/07/html-epub-mobi... I've also recently presented on how to build books in CSS and HTML and the slides and various useful resources are here: http://rachelandrew.co.uk/presentations/css-books http://rachelandrew.co.uk/presentations/css-books
      • lijjumathew 12y ago
        Thanks for the info.
    • shawnbaden 12y ago
      I believe Tim Ferriss said he wrote his first book entirely in Evernote but now raves (with others) about Scrivener. Keep up the good work.
    • ivan_ah 12y ago
• ph4 12y ago
  About $75-$100 a month from a simple AdSense site that ranks highly for some key terms. Pretty lame.
  • bengali3 12y ago
    I'm not sure why i'm not even doing this. (i'm at 0 passive right now) It's not lame at all. How many hours of maintenance does it require per month? Whats the content like? blog/photo/aggregator?
    • ph4 12y ago
      I wrote all the content myself, which took maybe 20-30 hours. The theme is a profession in the veterinary field, so it offers advice to prospective students and people interested in the career (schooling, salary, etc.) It requires zero maintenance. I haven't touched it or written anything new in a couple years.
• c0nsumer 12y ago
  I host a forum and website for a state-wide non-profit that I volunteer for in exchange for a single sidebar Adsense ad on the main page and in the footer on the forum. It's a hobby of mine, but the $300-$400 (gross) covers my expenses. Self-supporting hobbies are nice.
• bengarvey 12y ago
  About $50-$100/month on http://kidsdungeonadventure.com http://kidsdungeonadventure.com a role playing game for pre-school age kids.
  • Poiesis 12y ago
    Yes! Thanks for posting this. I had read about it years ago and had been looking for it again for some time now.
  • rail2rail 12y ago
    Bought!
  • erikb 12y ago
    It should have a youtube video of some kind.
  • theycallmemorty 12y ago
    This looks like a ton of fun. Think a bright 3-year-old could play or should I wait a year?
    • bengarvey 12y ago
      Some definitely have with three year olds. It depends on the kid.
• baudehlo 12y ago
  I started EmailItIn[1] to allow people to email files to Google Drive, then added DropBox and SkyDrive/OneDrive support. Premium accounts bring in about $200/m right now, and it's steadily rising. Support is low - though it took a while to build the initial technology. I get a lot of traction from realtors and lawyers. I've tried paid advertising but the conversions are too low to make it worth it. Initial goal was "vacation money", and it's currently on track to hit that level next year. 1: https://emailitin.com/ https://emailitin.com/
  • baudehlo 12y ago
    I forgot to add - my next project is likely to be re-writing DVDSpanner (an application that automatically distributes and writes files across multiple disks) to support the latest OSX versions. I will be making that a paid app. I was inspired by the recent story about VirtualHostX.
  • eob 12y ago
    Without paid advertising, how do you advertise the service? I've created a micro-service like this in the past, and where I really fell short was getting the right people on the site. AdWord conversions were also too low in my case.
    • baudehlo 12y ago
      I worked hard to get onto the front page of google for "email to google drive", and I have a few links from other places that drive a bit of traffic. I experimented with adwords and stumbleupon but nothing caused enough conversions to be worth it. Every now and then I turn adwords back on to play with keywords a bit, but it's just not worth it at the low price point.
  • christiangenco 12y ago
    What do you charge for premium accounts? I can't find pricing on your site. I've had a similar service, http://dbinbox.com/ http://dbinbox.com/, slowly growing with entirely free plans for the last ~year and a half up to ~25k users and am about to add premium plans.
• jawns 12y ago
  I am the author of two books: "Experimenting With Babies: 50 Amazing Science Projects You Can Perform on Your Kid" (http://www.experimentingwithbabies.com http://www.experimentingwithbabies.com), which came out in October, and "Correlated: Surprising Connections Between Seemingly Unrelated Things" (http://www.correlated.org http://www.correlated.org), which came out earlier this month. One thing I didn't realize when I started pitching the first book was that there would be "passive income" in addition to the book advance and royalties. For instance, I've had three foreign-rights deals for "Experimenting With Babies," and the only additional work I had to do was put my signature on some paperwork. And I have Amazon referral links on both websites, pointing to each book on Amazon. Those links generate a monthly average of about $40 in commissions per month, although my monthly high has been as much as $630.
  • thumbtackthief 12y ago
    I bought your book for my scientist lady-friend! It's awesome! Nice work!
  • lijjumathew 12y ago
    Great work. For writing books do you use any book editor/software of just MS Word ? I am in the process of writing a book and couldn't find a good editor/software. Thanks
    • jawns 12y ago
      For "Experimenting With Babies," I used Google Drive for rought-draft stuff, then switched to OpenOffice. By the time you're passing it back and forth with your editor, you'll need to be using something that's compatible with Word, because that's what your editor will be using (assuming you're working with a traditional publisher). For "Correlated," I used a lot of natural-language generation, so I suppose you could say that my editor was Sublime Text, at least for the drafts. Then ported into Word format.
      • lijjumathew 12y ago
        Thanks for the info.
• chrisa 12y ago
  $500/month from "Play Piano HD" iPad app: http://mobilesort.com/play_piano.html http://mobilesort.com/play_piano.html I built it two years ago, and have only had to do minor bug fixes to keep it up to date. It stays on the top iPad music charts in at least a couple of countries, so it does ok without any marketing.
  • tomjen3 12y ago
    You could than likely charge significantly more for it if you positioned it as a way to learn to play the piano - ten bucks (or twenty) is much, much cheaper than a teacher.
• fookyong 12y ago
  $1000 a month on book sales. I was surprised since I'm a software guy I didn't write the book to make money, I just did it for something to do. Although my software business makes much more money, I was surprised at how truly "zero maintenance" book sales are. My software I'm constantly fixing, tweaking and improving (which I enjoy). The book is just "out there" and is priced at $30 per copy. I sell > 1 per day. The book: http://www.growthhackinghandbook.com http://www.growthhackinghandbook.com
  • drzaiusapelord 12y ago
    What marketing do you do? I think I an write a decent book on a technical subject, but my big worry is I'll spend hundreds of hours on it and it'll just be another entry on Amazon.
    • michaelbuckbee 12y ago
      Checkout Nathan Barry's Authority: http://nathanbarry.com/authority/ http://nathanbarry.com/authority/ I know a couple different people that swear by it.
    • kehers 12y ago
      Ya. I worry about this too.
  • punjsingh 12y ago
    I had seen your food website long time ago. That was very well done site.
• jadc 12y ago
  I have a few rentals properties which each brings in around $300/month after all expenses (including property management so I don't have to do anything). Each property price is around 56-60k so if you get a mortgage you only need to put down around 20% of that. It's a pretty good ROI of ~30%. Email in my profile if you are interested in details.
  • scott_karana 12y ago
    How do you handle property management?
• gaeappthrowaway 12y ago
  I have an AppEngine app that brings in $7k/mo with very little work, with about $2k/mo in server costs. Roughly 50 users paying between $30/mo and $500/mo There's about 10 minutes of support work per day, but besides corporate customers occasionally needing some phone salesmanship and some manual tweaking, everything else is automated.
  • MobileAppVault 12y ago
    Sounds good! Congratulations! Can you share a link?
    • gaeappthrowaway 12y ago
      Not comfortable sharing a link in the context of talking about the revenue (hence the throwaway), but it's an analytics API.
  • bru 12y ago
    Nice. Link, details?
  • timjahn 12y ago
    Can you talk more about what the app is and what it does? Curious.
    • gaeappthrowaway 12y ago
      I wouldn't be on a throwaway account if I felt comfortable mentioning its name. But, basically, it's an analytics API.
  • nicholas73 12y ago
    I love App Engine, but why use it in this case? You've got a lot of background processes, but few concurrent users. Couldn't you use a regular server, since you don't have to worry about a spike in traffic?
    • 12y ago
• stevoski 12y ago
  I have an app in the Mac App Store. It is a simple app, I do no work on it, receive no support emails, it has been there for three years, and I get around 50 Euros per month.
  • ariejan 12y ago
    Link? Details?
    • stevoski 12y ago
      http://pokerzebra.com/ http://pokerzebra.com/
      • michaelbuckbee 12y ago
        You would probably double your revenue if you just displayed images of cards above the input line. You could even make it something you could disable in preferences, but I'm pretty confident that the improvement in the screenshots, etc. would help sales quite a bit.
• v512 12y ago
  I get it around $200 per month (overall about $2500 till date) through my WordPress Genesis child Theme which I spent designing hardly 2-3 days.
• Cthulhu_ 12y ago
  About $30 a month off of AdWords for a fansite I run; it covers about 2/3rds (if that) of the server costs, so I'm content with that. I could earn more if I placed more ads, better ads, worked actively on the site / promoted it, but it's a fansite, and I think it'd be unfair for the people that actually spend obsessive hours writing content for it - if I were to make big money off of it, or would sell it (it's probably worth a few thousand due to content + google rankings), I'd have a massive headache and drama trying to distribute said money. Effort is relatively low, a few weeks of on and off work to get it online, styling, moving servers a couple of times, etc. I need to move servers again I think, or at least upgrade all the software, it's kinda wonky for some people at times.
• snoonan 12y ago
  between $3000- and $18,000+/mo in online courses. The latter being more active in terms of sales, promotion, offers. It's not sustainable since customers are not responsive to this kind of thing each and every month.
  • patrickk 12y ago
    Care to provide examples? Was thinking of getting into this myself with premium courses. Edit: this is a good example of the type of courses I mean http://www.diygenius.com/courses/ http://www.diygenius.com/courses/ (not affilated) Is it on your own site? Or the likes of Udemy?
    • snoonan 12y ago
      I'm not sure if its a good idea to share the exact topics, but generally they are language learning and software training (for example, specific CMSs). I do everything through my own sites and find customers through via free podcasts, free and promoted youtube videos, etc. Udemy's on my list, but I believe in always owning your own brand, customers and leads.
      • patrickk 12y ago
        Thanks for the info, I understand completely you don't want to give away profitable niches. > I do everything through my own sites and find customers through via free podcasts, free and promoted youtube videos, etc. Very clever, creative promotional strategy! I would love to read more if you have a blog (again without giving too much of your exact products or niches away). I'm building up a side business currently, and cost effective, targeted promotion is high on my list...(there's a great idea for a premium course btw, would purchase in a heartbeat.) > Udemy's on my list, but I believe in always owning your own brand, customers and leads. I guess there's an important trade off between owning the customer relationship 100% and getting exposure on a huge marketplace...
        • snoonan 12y ago
• frownie 12y ago
  I build a small ERP (closed source so far)... 3 customers at 100€ / month => 300 €/month, paid in various ways...
  • fiatjaf 12y ago
    I'm doing something like this. Where did you get customers?
• weiran 12y ago
  I get around $30 a month from a Hacker News app I made for iOS.
• PawelDecowski 12y ago
  £55 in just over a year from ads on http://jquerycreditcardvalidator.com http://jquerycreditcardvalidator.com Not a lot but it’s something. And I built the validator without even thinking about monetizing so it’s quite nice to get rewarded with some pocket money. It’s not 100% passive, as I do spend a little time maintaining it and adding new features, but what income is 100% passive?
  • hcho 12y ago
    Let me get this straight. You have a piece of software which helps monetary transactions, and yet you don't charge.
    • stronglikedan 12y ago
      It only validates the number. It doesn't take part in the actual transactions.
      • hcho 12y ago
        Still, it helps.
    • Someone1234 12y ago
      No disrespect meant to PawelDecowski at all (his CC number validator looks awesome, I'd use it) but he couldn't monetize it even if they he wished to -- too much competition in that space. Nobody is going to even pay $1 when they can just go on GitHub and find several similar libraries which do somewhat similar things. I think £55 a year is best case scenario. At least it likely covers web-hosting costs.
      • berberich 12y ago
        You can absolutely charge money for this if you solve a painful problem for businesses: http://creditcardjs.com http://creditcardjs.com
        • 12y ago
• dotnetkow 12y ago
  $2-5k per month (after Apple's cut) from my Fitbit mobile app, Fitwatchr: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fitwatchr/id684005201?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D4 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fitwatchr/id684005201?mt=8&i.... The unique value is Fitbit activity conversion to Weight Watchers points as well as a tougher but more rewarding calorie tracking that is based on real science (Mifflin equation). Effort on my part really depends on me/my current schedule as it's a side project. I admittedly have some bad reviews that boil down to getting users to understand how the calorie tracking works. Using Freshdesk (love it!) to answer 1-2 emails per day. It'll be 1 year working on this next month.
  • TheAlchemist 12y ago
    That's quite a good revenue. Is it only from app sales ? I've checked on App Annie ans your app seems to be around 500 (grossing) in health & fitness in the US. I find it a bit surprising that there are 500 apps in health alone making >2k month.
    • dotnetkow 12y ago
      Yes, only app sales - no IAP. Not sure how to explain other apps, but if you look at the list of top paid Fitness ones, many of them charge more than the typical 99 cents - that probably factors into it. It certainly does for mine! Also, I've noticed Yoga, pregnancy, etc apps absolutely kill it (consistently!) in sales day after day after day....
  • tomjen3 12y ago
    Curious, how long did you spend developing it?
    • dotnetkow 12y ago
      Unfortunately for the first version I didn't track hours (I am now). It took all of last summer (June to August) of nights and weekends. Not too bad considering it was only a few hours per week b/c of being more active outside due to Summer. It's PhoneGap based, so much of the effort wasn't so much writing features so much as learning/figuring out the tools I used: KendoUI Mobile for the UI, PhoneGap Build for building native versions, and Knockout.js. I come from a .NET backend background, so I wanted the new challenge of building an app with frontend tech, not only for CSS/JavaScript practice but also benefiting from one codebase for multiple platforms (iOS, Android, and WinPhone 8).
• rk0567 12y ago
  $300-$400 per month from my side project [0]. I spend 5-10 hours per month on updating/adding_new_features etc and the revenue comes from Affiliate/Ads. [0] http://assembleyourpc.net http://assembleyourpc.net - a pc builder tool
  • mrfusion 12y ago
    I assume you've contacted the builder communities on reddit? there's a build a pc one, and a build me a pc, something like that.
    • rk0567 12y ago
      No. I tried once but didn't get any response. I submitted there and received some feedback though.
      • mrfusion 12y ago
        I know on build me a pc (forget exact URL), they have a standardized format they paste in. I wonder if you outputted that format, maybe they would take it up?
        • rk0567 12y ago
          Thanks. I'll check out.
• goofygrin 12y ago
  Sold some Microsoft office365 to a handful of clients. Averaging 1200/month.
• michaelcampbell 12y ago
  Not "best" by any means, and perhaps not even passive, but I'm earning around 5% in my LendingClub account. I had some bad bets early on which lowered my returns a lot, but it's building up again.
• vicwhiten 12y ago
  ~80$ a month from ads on http://steamroulette.net http://steamroulette.net
  • tomjen3 12y ago
    You could make a lot more if you did two things: 1) Remove that under construction thing. Granted it has no gifs, but as a potential user it distracts me. 2) Describe what value I can get from using it. What problem do you solve?
    • vicwhiten 12y ago
      I actually realized I never pushed out my new version haha, thank you for pointing it out! Just deployed it.
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  • jaymzcampbell 12y ago
    That's awesome and inspiring. I have similar fears about any sort of jump in terms of 'working for yourself' so have always moved from job to job rather than even go contracting. I think your stack is very sensible - whatever works, isn't it - it's easy to become sidetracked thinking everything must be shiny & new or custom built. Really well done!
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
• chrissyb 12y ago
  I ran my own team as a non-dev and built http://drawvault.com http://drawvault.com - Took a bank loan to fund it, and ran out of money on the final straight. I really was hoping to be earning a meagre passive income by now, but i'm searching for a second job. Lesson learned!
  • deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
• iD3 12y ago
  I purchased, gutted and renovated a 1 bed flat in the city 4 years ago. It's gained about $7,000 a month every month for the last 3 years, plus saving about $3,000 in rent. Not exactly 'income' but most certainly passive, and I do plan to sell out when I feel prices are aproaching a peak and move out the city so will yeild then. Neighbouring flats usually sell within 7 days of going to market.
  • opless 12y ago
    Which city? (There's more than one you know!)
    • iD3 12y ago
      London. The financial district is often referred to simply as 'the city', so force of habit!
      • opless 12y ago
        I had assumed that, but thought it best to ask :)
        • stevenspasbo 12y ago
          I was thinking San Francisco, that sounds about for the bay area too.
      • thedevopsguy 12y ago
        Haven't seen flats sell as quickly as they are now. Living a 3 minute walk from Liverpool Street station and the flat I wa renting sold by the second viewing. It was on the market for three days but things are cooling off.
• mkertajaya 12y ago
  Earlier this year, I helped out a friend setting up online shop selling electric bike (dropship model). It has been good this summer, average of $1000/month net profit. Traffic is still very low but constant buyers. - shopebike.com.
  • graftonshow 12y ago
    I'm very intrigued by the dropship model, would you mind sharing how to go about evaluating suppliers? Or even where you start looking for suppliers? Thanks!
• galfarragem 12y ago
  40-80€/month (depends on the season - college holidays are bad seasons) with adsense and amazon affiliates. It demands from me 5 minutes each day (or 3 hours monthly, 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: - Good content is better than SEO, but you only pick the fruits 1-2 years later as your work compounds. Use your expertise. It is much easier/faster/more rewarding if you blog about something you are an expert. - Adsense is (and probably will always be) ugly but is the fastest way to monetize a blog. I was making 15€/month before adsense and now I have slightly less traffic. Text ads or images ads? If you have a text intensive blog go for image ads and vice versa.
• BryanBigs 12y ago
  $1000/month from adsense on my free background picture (no attribution required, use it for whatever you want) website. Kinda looks like crap, but I'm afraid to touch it because it's such a steady-eddy producer. I add a picture every month or two, and get <10% of my traffic from direct search. Has so many links from Uni's and articles on where to find free stock photos that traffic just rolls on it.
  • jacksworker 12y ago
    Can you share url?
    • BryanBigs 12y ago
      sure - http://freemediagoo.com http://freemediagoo.com By end of august I'll be split-testing moderenizing it (it's not mobile/tablet friendly, backend makes it a pain to add content (especially text),etc) - I'm hoping making it nicer doesn't hit the income.
      • imjk 12y ago
        How did you decide on the placement of adds and layout of site? Glad it's doing well for you.
        • BryanBigs 12y ago
          Testing about a year ago. Had a 8x increase in CTR without much drop in CPC, so that was a big win for the site. I think there's more to squeeze out but it was written a long time ago in hobbled-together .asp, and that's not my forte. Someday I'll move it to a different back-end so I can experiment with things with more ease. For instance, I have content (with real words!) ready to go, but sadly the amount of work I'd need to do to hack the code to display it isn't worth it if I plan on changing the code out anytime soon.
      • vijayr 12y ago
        Where do you get the photos from?
• euroclydon 12y ago
  Here are the all time sales figures for http://www.makecupcakewrappers.com http://www.makecupcakewrappers.com They've been pretty bad the last few months. I think it's because the server was overloaded and response times were getting really bad. It was running on a GoDaddy $70/mo VPS with IIS, SqlServer. But that server was also hosting an Umbraco site and a WordPress blog. The PHP process was taking up 99% CPU nearly all the time. Now I have it running independently on a GoDaddy VPS and all the static resources are on Amazon CloudFront. It is much faster. My wife says the designs we have are out of date and we need to make some newer designs. This involves going to Target, looking at the greeting cards, place mats, napkins, and other nick-hacks to get ideas. Also, Pinterest is great for design ideas! Then, opening up InkScape or a D3 console and creating SVG color-in templates in the site's specific format. +-----------+--------+ | Mon (desc)| Sales | +-----------+--------+ | July | 128.70 | | June | 227.45 | | May | 124.65 | | April | 301.50 | | March | 274.40 | | February | 287.35 | | January | 415.25 | | December | 128.70 | | November | 175.65 | | October | 188.60 | | September | 132.75 | | August | 330.25 | | July | 343.20 | | June | 297.45 | | May | 505.90 | | April | 351.30 | | March | 484.05 | | February | 188.60 | | January | 248.50 | | December | 38.85 | | November | 155.40 | | October | 89.85 | | September | 209.65 | | August | 179.70 | | July | 299.50 | | June | 329.45 | | May | 229.50 | | April | 279.45 | | March | 419.15 | | February | 249.45 | | January | 149.70 | | December | 119.75 | | November | 199.60 | | October | 109.75 | | September | 99.80 | | August | 99.80 | | July | 70.80 | | June | 25.90 | | May | 25.90 | | April | 38.85 | | March | 0.01 | +-----------+--------+
  • deluvas 12y ago
    Nice business there! I'm curious, if I may ask, where do you get most of your traffic from?
    • euroclydon 12y ago
      I get nearly all the traffic from Google. AdWords never worked for me. For a few months I got a lot of great traffic from Cake Central. They have a cupcake forum [1] which is hyper-relavent to my site. Also, I reviewed myself [2] in their reviews section, and it sat in their sidebar feed, getting the placement of a $1000/mo ad, until it fell off. [1] http://cakecentral.com/cake-decorating-forum-33.html http://cakecentral.com/cake-decorating-forum-33.html [2] http://cakecentral.com/products/cupcake-wrapper-creator/reviews/54 http://cakecentral.com/products/cupcake-wrapper-creator/revi...
• nicholas73 12y ago
  Best month so far has been 50 bucks. It'll take a long time, but I'm hoping eventually enough people link to it and add my widget, so that I can capture search traffic. http://sudokuisland.com http://sudokuisland.com
• jaymzcampbell 12y ago
  My best month was around £120 (in February 2014) (~$200) through Amazon affiliate links & Admob. All within a very simple shopping app 'designed' for android 2.1 back in the day and updated just once in 2 years. I've since pulled it due to changes upstream breaking data so it became useless, I didn't find the time to really fix everything. I have just launched (like a few days ago) http://photobrix.com http://photobrix.com - but that is yet to bring in a penny from the limited adverts - I'm likely going to add a higher end/more featureful interface to generate instructions that people will spend $3 - 5 or so on. Additionally I'm aiming on allowing users to order their own prints (rather than deal with the hassle of individual bricks).
• th1agofm 12y ago
  Stock market: I'm breakeven in a meh year in my country's stock market(Brazil) and it's my only passive income.
• passive_ish 12y ago
  I built a B2B SAAS app about 18 months ago. I neglect it now, as I took a full time job (living in NYC isn't cheap, and I needed a better living situation). It brings in about $1,800-$2,400/mo. I'd sell it if I had a buyer.
  • thoreauway 12y ago
    I'd consider purchasing it, do you have more information?
    • passive_ish 12y ago
      Nice username. How can I get in contact?
      • thoreauway 12y ago
        se at priest com
  • mrfusion 12y ago
    Shoot me an email with some details. I might be interested. (email in profile)
  • jteo 12y ago
    If you're keen on selling, could you email me more details?(my email is in my profile).
    • passive_ish 12y ago
      Doesn't seem to be there.
      • jteo 12y ago
        Sorry, added email to my profile. :)
  • sixpenrose16 12y ago
• vlucas 12y ago
  I created http://jscompress.com/ http://jscompress.com/ several years ago as a simple online JavaScript compression tool that can also combine multiple files into a single output (and guarantees they will be compressed in the order input). It's been making around $200-300 per month for several years, and this year has jumped up to $300-500 per month. This is only from Google Adsense: http://cl.ly/WobJ http://cl.ly/WobJ - I also always get a nice holiday spike in traffic and revenues, even though there is nothing seasonal about compressing some JavaScript. It's zero maintenance, and sometimes I even forget about it. I spend maybe 1-2 hours updating the website to a new Uglify.js version per year. It's a simple single file node.js app hosted for free on Heroku.
  • impostervt 12y ago
    How does it make money? I turned off my adblocker and still don't see ads.
    • vlucas 12y ago
      Do you have Ghostery or something else turned on? There are definitely ads on the page :).
  • ohblahitsme 12y ago
    That's great! Did you do any advertising to get it going? How long has it been around?
    • vlucas 12y ago
      Zero advertising. All I did was link it from my blog and a few other websites I own and tweet about it a few times. I imagine the strength of the domain name and the keywords on the page help a lot. It's also been linked as a useful tool on many highly trafficked and well respected blogs, so it's got some very good credible link juice going for it. Honestly I just created it for myself back before Grunt, Gulp, etc. after searching for some simple online tools and not finding any that allowed uploading and combining multiple files together. The first version was PHP, and I switched it to a node.js app in 2011 after Uglify.js came out (there were a lot of problems with the PHP library I was using). I created the website in 2008, so it's been going for quite a while, collecting backlinks and traffic ever since. I am not looking at the reports right now, but I believe it made less than $200 the whole first year I had ads on it (it didn't always have ads).
• black_friday 12y ago
  My side project is www.stealengine.com It yields about $50 a month, I'm just happy it pays for itself and requires little maintenance. During Black Friday(November) it made $400, other months are a lot slower. I have not done any marketing and my friends like to use it so its fun.
  • rail2rail 12y ago
    You might consider listing some example searches under the search box. My initial impression is that I'm not quite certain what I'm supposed to be searching for.
    • black_friday 12y ago
      Thanks for the feedback, I am going to add that.
  • raelmiu 12y ago
    This is great. Do you aggregate a lot of deal site or are you monitoring prices?
• mahdavi 12y ago
  Selling 3d assets on Turbosquid.
  • raelmiu 12y ago
    Nice. How much does it bring in?
• somebodysomeone 12y ago
  I built an information website (not USA) that now pulls in roughly $8800 a month via adsense. To get to that figure takes about 500k user sessions/month (lots of long tail traffic). Runs on a single medium website instance in Azure, takes about an hour a day in maintenance and monitoring for malicious traffic like scraping that can be a problem for info sites (I've mostly automated this). The initial time outlay was quite large, but it was always approached from the point of view of generating a lot traffic to get the payback. Won't share the link as it's a competitive niche.
  • epayne 12y ago
    I am curious about how you chose the niche and which factors you think make it successful for you?
    • somebodysomeone 12y ago
      It was certainly an area that I was interested in and understood. Also, I made a conscious decision to choose something that would have interest for a very broad group of people, or that was owned by a lot of people.
  • baudehlo 12y ago
    That's fantastic income. Is any of that hour a day spent adding content?
    • somebodysomeone 12y ago
      Generally no. When I add info it tends to be in bulk (augmenting existing information pages), and then this will be done as a stand-alone project - the info tends to need lots of massaging and making intelligent to give it value.
  • drzaiusapelord 12y ago
    >(I've mostly automated this). Can you talk about this? Also, how many ads and what formats/sizes work best for you?
• Carl_Platt 12y ago
  This is an excellent post, I am looking to setup streams of passive income mostly for savings and to allow me to travel. Just never sure which itch to scratch :/
• 0x420 12y ago
  i have a niche humor blog on tumblr that makes about 30$/mo from adsense ads. not bad considering i was doing it for free up until recently.
• polimux 12y ago
  About 500€ a month with automated soccer bets. It's 100% passive but it' still a gamble. So it coud be over in a day with some bad luck ...
  • corobo 12y ago
    Any chance of going into detail on this one for the curious? Automated in what way, putting bets on low odds results? Through an API? If anything I'm interested more in how it works than how I can do it myself!
    • TimTimTim 12y ago
      Things like BetFair let you place bets both sides (unlike some shops like Ladbrokes where you are betting against them). This allows you to track the current betting prices and create situations where no matter the outcome you can make money. There are a few places on the net explaining this in more detail.
      • elymspears 12y ago
        A gambling site that allows you to make Dutch books? Lunch is on me!
    • polimux 12y ago
      I have some bots placing bets for me 24/7 on betfair. They provide a nice API for that (https://developer.betfair.com/default/api-s-and-services/sports-api/ https://developer.betfair.com/default/api-s-and-services/spo...). The bots written in JS running on a node.js server. The strategy (bet pattern) I use is actually pretty simple. But it's not betting on low odds only, tryed that and failed :)
      • PolemicThoughts 12y ago
        Can you go into further detail about your betting pattern?
      • 12y ago
• phatle 12y ago
  I earned about 100$/month from knocktocall.com product. It's okay for me because I don't do any marketing for knocktocall.com. Have a full-time job, some freelance job and I'm still making new app for my passion.
• bnycum 12y ago
  Last September I put Amazon Affiliate codes on links in a somewhat popular post about setting up a Raspberry Pi to open my garage. I know I'm not suppose to divulge exact numbers, but lets just say I've bought games, books, toys, and a PS4 so far with my earnings. On around ~1,000 visitors a month. I wish I had it setup when that post got a ton of traffic from reddit.
• vbsteven 12y ago
  I currently earn about $1000/month after Googles 30% cut with an Android app that syncs with OmniFocus. (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.quantus.apps.androidfocus https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.quantus.app...). I'm still improving the app in my spare time so it's not completely passive yet.
• dangrossman 12y ago
  Improvely (https://www.improvely.com https://www.improvely.com) has more than doubled in customers and revenue since the last post, when it had recently broken 5-figure MRR. It could easily support salaries for a small staff at this point, but I still run it myself from home. I try to push out a set of new features every 1-2 months, and have to answer an e-mail on occasion to help out a new user, but otherwise it's very hands-off as a business. I don't do any outbound sales or anything else high-touch. W3Counter (https://www.w3counter.com https://www.w3counter.com) meanwhile generates less than 10% that revenue from 100x the users. They're really similar services fundamentally, but worked out very different. W3Counter ends up being used by hobbyists that want to see vanity metrics like page view counts going up, most of which will not pay for analytics, while companies eagerly pay for Improvely as a profit multiplier for their online marketing. Aside from those sites, not much has changed. I have a few e-commerce stores that essentially run themselves as passive income, and a steady stream of commissions from various business referrals I made years ago.
  • tbuehl 12y ago
    Nice! How do you market Improvely? Or which channels do you use to attract new users?
• opless 12y ago
  A friend wanted a glockenspiel app for their daughter, so I took his thrown together html demo and coded a unity3d app and made it free. http://www.simonwaite.com/apps/glockenspiel http://www.simonwaite.com/apps/glockenspiel After a little bit of feedback about "making the keys bigger" I threw together a paid for app http://www.simonwaite.com/apps/glockenspiel-plus http://www.simonwaite.com/apps/glockenspiel-plus which brought in £2.50 from the android store last month which I was deliriously happy about. The free one has about 10-20 downloads a day on iOS and 80-130 a day on android.
• privatedan 12y ago
  ~$50,000 USD per year in dividends from individual, public stocks, which isn't bad considering I do not seek out dividend payers specifically. Was earning another $25,000 or so renting out an apartment, but sold that recently to look for a larger property.
  • new_test 12y ago
    >~$50,000 USD per year in dividends How much is your invested capital? EDIT: I think I got my answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7749253 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7749253
• drpgq 12y ago
  I've been experimenting with Adsense on blogger for years. I had some ideas that the company I work for could put on the web and wanted to work with Adsense so I just started with a blog about my local sports team. Eventually I made another blog about local and regional politics and analyzed and repackaged some government data as a whole series of posts that proved slightly popular. Now I'm up to around $1000 per year. I'm working slowly at making a few sites based on the data I've already done and some new data.
• bprajapa 12y ago
  I do consulting around enterprise software and typically make about $1500/month. It's not quite passive income because it requires me to work in the evenings but its not bad.
• mjwhansen 12y ago
  Geocodio (http://geocod.io http://geocod.io) is adding 5-10 new users a day and monthly revenue has gone from <$100 to >$1,000 in just over six months. It's a self-serve product (geocoding US addresses via API or CSV upload), though there is a fair amount of support and continuing development. I've posted this before, but I wrote up some thoughts about things I've learned about launching a side project here that you might find helpful: https://medium.com/@mjwhansen/things-ive-learned-launching-a-side-project-2968c3becd17 https://medium.com/@mjwhansen/things-ive-learned-launching-a...
  • AlexNeoNomad 12y ago
    Can't people just make a request to google maps? Why do they you use your service instead? In what sense is it better (if it is)?
    • mjwhansen 12y ago
      Great question! There are a couple reasons people use Geocodio over or in addition to the major providers, like Google: * Google's free tier is 2,500 a day. But if you need more than that, you have to sign a yearly contract ($10,000+). Our pricing is 2,500 free a day with additional lookups at $.001 each. * We don't place any restrictions on our geocodes. The major providers often a lot of restrictions on how you use their lookups, like having to use it with a particular brand of map, can't use it in a backend, can't resell, can't store them, etc. Our lookups are completely restriction free. * Related, at the enterprise level, we have an option for unlimited geocoding for $750 a month. Major providers usually have a daily limit for their enterprise plans, such as 100,000 lookups a day. * We provide additional data that people often need along with lat/lon, like timezone, Congressional district, school district, and state legislative districts. * We're non-developer friendly. We have a CSV upload option (http://geocod.io/blog/2014/04/30/csv/ http://geocod.io/blog/2014/04/30/csv/) that lets people upload a spreadsheet of addresses and download it directly from the same dashboard. A big difference is that we're US-only for the time being. Additionally, it's worth noting that our data is close to Google quality, but not quite. They've embarked on an ambitious, admirable, and expensive quest to map the world and have cars driving around the globe daily. We don't.
• mythril 12y ago
  iPad port of a 5 year old game of mine (which previously already paid for itself about 9 times over in its PC and Mac versions) was released a few months ago. Didn't expect much but amazingly it pulls in consistently $70-$110 a day (about $2,500 a month) for a few months now (not counting the initial release spike). Game is free to download with 1 In-App-Purchase that unlocks the full game. Thinking of doing an iPhone version soon which will be a bit more involved than a straight port due to the small screen size and different screen aspect ratio, but I'm currently convinced it will be worth it since the genre actually usually does better on iphone than ipad. Just wanted to add this to counter all the doom & gloom posts about iOS games not doing well. If you have a great and unique product for a good target market with good retention and monetization, then you can still do very well without too much marketing. (I actually run ads with about $4 daily budget. Not sure if it actually helps, but I think it does.)
  • existencebox 12y ago
    Mind sharing which game this is? I'd simply be curious to see what sort of/quality of game generates that sort of (as you said, very favorable) income characteristics in this current market.
    • mythril 12y ago
      Sorry, I can't for fear of competition.
      • godDLL 12y ago
        Competition is not an actor. It is a process, of which you're part; whether you want it to be this way, or would prefer a different market to the one we have. Embrace the competition. Plan for it. Set time aside for it. Make it work for you.
        • sejje 12y ago
          In the meantime, keeping smart people off your back works, too.
• markrickert 12y ago
  I have a plethora of niche-based iOS apps for skydivers, beer enthusiasts, and people in direct sales. Bring in about 1-2k a month, but I actively maintain about half of the apps and am actively developing new apps. Since January, I've netted roughly $13,000 after Apple's 30% cut. I also make income through Apple's affiliate links that are automatically applied to my apps on my website - http://mohawkapps.com http://mohawkapps.com
• ComNik 12y ago
  ~100$ / year from an Amazon Price Tracker (http://www.rankique.com/ http://www.rankique.com/) I wrote a long while ago. It's 100% passive and is free to run, although some SEO should increase that, which frankly I neither have the time nor the expertise to do.
  • mail2vks 12y ago
    I run something similar for India. http://www.pricetrak.in http://www.pricetrak.in
• bvogelzang 12y ago
  I make an average of $70/day on my app in the Mac App Store called HD Cleaner. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hd-cleaner/id836769549?mt=12 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hd-cleaner/id836769549?mt=12. I wish I had more time to invest in making more apps like this one. I've been really surprised by how well the app has done with little to no marketing.
• dmarlow 12y ago
  Just launched http://www.smscmd.net/ http://www.smscmd.net/ so not much at the moment.
• searine 12y ago
  Wrote a Fiction Novel. Still in the red, but I've handed out about 10,000 free copies...
• dusing 12y ago
  My business partner and I started Snow in Seconds (http://snowinseconds.com http://snowinseconds.com) on the side, 6 years ago. It is a powder thats been around for decades (used in diapers) but when you get it at just the right grain size it looks, and feels like snow when water is added. We found a good source, designed a professional looking brand, made a TV spot (kinda), bought some search ads, and boom, predictable income. Sales are online only (have not pursued wholesale yet) and is enough to live off of if all else fails. After 6 years we are have about $600K in total sales.
  • anishkothari 12y ago
    Wow, congratulations! This would be great around Christmas time in parts of the world where it doesn't snow - S/SE Asia in particular where people have a surprising fondness for Christmas.
    • dusing 12y ago
      Yup, most of our orders are from the South (in the US) and Australia for international.
  • malchow 12y ago
    If you're willing to give us a range, what's your COGS on the snow? Great animated GIF on the home page!
    • dusing 12y ago
      Margins are good. PPC Advertising cost more than the snow on most orders.
  • zizzer 12y ago
    You might want to edit your login page (http://snowinseconds.com/account/login http://snowinseconds.com/account/login) it still has some Lorem ipsum on it!
    • dusing 12y ago
• m-i-l 12y ago
  Where I live (or have lived). Aim to get other people to pay for my mortgages. Started out by renting out a spare room, then moved and rented out the whole property, then moved again and rented out both properties. When I started out the rent was around GBP300 per month and the mortgage peaked at GBP450 per month (interest rates were unusually high at the time), and now (after many years) two lots of rental income total approx GBP2700 per month after fees and three mortgages total approx GBP1800 per month (although interest rates are unusually low at the moment). Calling it passive as I've never bought a propery as an investment, just a place to live. Not entirely passive though as there can be a bit of work when there are problems with tenants. I reckon the hassle factor is worth the free accommodation though, given how large a chunk of people's income accommodation usually is.
  • delinka 12y ago
    I've always thought that living my entire life "having others pay for mine" would be ideal. Rent out property, the margin pays for my own residence. Operate restaurants, the margins provide (at a minimum) my own meals. Get into the car rental business, it provides my transportation as needed... Can't quite get myself to bootstrap this idea...
• jasonkester 12y ago
  It's been a while since I shared my S3stat [1] numbers. I prefer to talk in vague handwavy terms rather than concrete numbers, but this should give a picture of the trajectory: 6 months: Regularly covering server expenses (which were ~$50-100/month at that point). 18 months: Would have paid for me to live nicely on the beach in Thailand. 30 months: Would cover my rent (and nothing else) at a nice apartment in a major city. 40 months: Passed the monthly take-home pay from my first (non-software) Engineering job out of college. 60 months: About what I'd have been making had I stuck with that first job out of college for 10 years. 80 months: Roughly a Senior Dev salary anywhere but the Bay Area. As I noted a few years back for the first version of this list, this is for a SaaS subscription product that I built with the explicit goal of having a low-level income stream that I didn't have to put much time into. Early on, there were periods where I worked 80 hours or more per month to get the infrastructure ticking away to my satisfaction. These days, it requires maybe six hours of my attention each month. This year, though, I've been back to full speed (meaning high single digit hours per week) building out and releasing a bunch of new features. [1] https://www.s3stat.com/ https://www.s3stat.com/
  • ohblahitsme 12y ago
    I'm curious to know how well your cheap bastard plan (https://www.s3stat.com/web-stats/cheap-bastard-plan https://www.s3stat.com/web-stats/cheap-bastard-plan) has been working out. Has it brought in some customers?
    • jasonkester 12y ago
      Quite a few people have taken advantage of it, but less than you might think. It brings in some extra traffic, and the occasional new paying customer, so overall it does what it's supposed to. For the most part, the people who request the Cheap Bastard Plan don't have much in the way of traffic, so it's not particularly expensive to service them. Every once in a while I'll get a request from somebody who's a bit "cheap"'er than normal, asking for an upgrade after posting a comment to an online forum or blog entry, or even just a tweet. But for the most part people tend to have nice things to say about the product, and proceed to say them.
    • 12y ago
• anonu 12y ago
  Wrote a basic strategy to sell call spreads and put spreads on various index ETFs. I only sell near-dated stuff <1 week expirations to avoid paying too much theta. A fairly consistent trading strategy can easily gross >50% returns on your capital. Not exactly "passive" - but with enough tweaks to the strategy you can get this to run with fairly minimal input time.
  • mrfusion 12y ago
    Sounds amazing. How did you learn everything you needed? Can you recommend ways to get more background in this?
  • malchow 12y ago
    What platform do you use to automate the trading? I was always surprised that innovative companies like Interactive Brokers never invested in a simple to use scripting language that would allow people to try out ideas out in the markets.
• sourabh86 12y ago
  admob earning of ~$100 from 2 very small android apps catering to a very small set of users.
• ryanfelton 12y ago
  I built an niche e-commerce marketplace called http://doleaf.com http://doleaf.com. Independent Nurseries and Garden Centers (the sellers) sign up and can instantly upload their items for sale directly to customers expanding their sales region of their niche products from just their neighbored to the entire USA. Since its niche customers who are looking for specific items customers find the site fairly easy through search. The site is now doing about $2,000 total revenue per month. I'm taking a proportion of each sale. For now, I'm mostly covering cost, but hoping to work on some automated marketing tools to increase revenue. As others have mentioned, my best performing referrers in terms of sales completed are often Forums (as opposed to AdWords, organic search etc). The site does marketing via emails and some top products Google Ad Words, Facebook, and hopefully Titter soon. I'm using Google Analytics with the e-commerce plugin to build Adwords remarketing campaigns and plan to do Facebook rmarketing campaigns soon. It's not totally passive as there's some support request, but I'm hoping to bring on an on-demand virtual assistant for support requests as discussed by the Internet Business Mastery guys: http://www.internetbusinessmastery.com/ibm-218-work-less-make-hiring-virtual-team-interview-chris-ducker/ http://www.internetbusinessmastery.com/ibm-218-work-less-mak...
  • ryanfelton 12y ago
    Great to see via Google Analytics there there are 6 active users from Hacker News viewing the site right!! Hopefully the Google Analytics E-Commerce Sales Report will show several sales attributed to users coming from Hacker News ;-)
  • sdab 12y ago
    You mention being easy to search, but I cant seem to find your site on google or duckduckgo (in case it was my historical disinterest for plants affecting google searches). I tried some combination of the keywords garden, nursery, seeds, plants but never saw doleaf on the first page of results. Am I using the wrong keywords?
    • ryanfelton 12y ago
      I'm still working on improving SEO, but here's some examples for Google: "buy variegated peperomia plant" #7 / DuckDuckGo #2 "jackson vine" Google #9 / DuckDuckGo #4 "rainbow eucalyptus for sale" Google #22 / DuckDuckGo #6 Apparently I need to start using DuckDuckGo!!! These results are great! From the attracting perspective sellers (nurseries), the "Buy Plants Online" search has a lot of competing bidders on Google so I'm going to have to get creative there.
• mindbreaker 12y ago
  I have some german nice sites like http://www.garten-fussballtor.de http://www.garten-fussballtor.de. My best website earns 100 € / month. If you have any question i will try to answer it.
  • MobileAppVault 12y ago
    Is www.garten-fussballtor.de the website which earns 100€/mon?
• kanakiyajay 12y ago
  I manage a simple jQuery plugins blog http://jquer.in/ http://jquer.in/ in which I list one plugin a day. Hosting costs are about 20$ a year. Average monthly advertising revenue is about 100$ not bad considering I haven't started sponsored posts yet.
• ivan_ah 12y ago
  My math textbooks [1,2] generated over $20k since 2013. The sales are split between print and pdf sales. It's definitely motivation enough for me to continue as is, but I'm scaling the business further with better distribution. Books are not dead. I believe there is a great opportunity for specialist to "distill information" in their field and offer it to others as books. People don't pay for the content (which can be found on the Internet) but for the analysis and the curation of this content. It's not "easy money" because writing and editing a book takes years of sustained effort, but if you're an expert in X, you already spend your days explaining X so writing down your explanations won't be //that// tough. [1] noBS guide to Math and Phys: http://minireference.com/ http://minireference.com/ [2] https://gum.co/noBSLA https://gum.co/noBSLA PS: Anyone interested in writing a book about Chemistry and/or Biology? Get in touch with me so we can combine forces and take over the UGRAD textbook market!
  • anishkothari 12y ago
    Great job and good luck to you in the future! I'm all for interesting textbooks, math was difficult for me in undergrad and the textbook we used was so hard to understand!
  • elliotanderson 12y ago
    I bought your Math & Physics book a few months ago. Only got a chapter or two in thanks to time constraints, but I really enjoyed the approach. Hopefully I can finish it in the coming months. Cheers!
• bradly 12y ago
  A bought a vacation rental in Hawaii this January. It has been very nice. Purchase price was 510k. It rents for $260-$400 a night and has 90% occupancy rate. I can share more details for those interested.
  • ohblahitsme 12y ago
    Do you have someone managing the rental or do you do that?
    • bradly 12y ago
      We have our unit listed on VRBO, but my wife and I handle the inquires and renting ourselves. Most condo buildings will run your unit for you if you prefer. They will take care of everything for you (bookings, cleanings, furnishings, etc), but you make much less. Also, you just get a percentage of what the building makes as a whole, so those rooms are really incentivized to be as nice. We wanted our place to be nice and something we would like to stay/live at.
      • jadc 12y ago
        How has your experience been with VRBO? Any reason that has prompted you not to use AirBnb? Edit to ask: do you mind sharing which island/area, your rental is in? 90% occupancy rate sounds pretty amazing.
        • bradly 12y ago
          If you do a lot of rentals VRBO is much cheaper. AirBnb charges you 10% per booking vs VRBO's $1,000 upfront and then 2.5% credit card transaction fees. This makes our place much more expensive for a renter for us to get the same amount of money. VRBO also has great phone customer support and it just feels more setup to support your rental as a business rather than your rental as a thing you do casually. Our place in on Maui near Kaanapali beach. Hawaii is nice because it isn't too seasonal.
  • nonane 12y ago
• deleted 12y ago
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• patio11 12y ago
  Bingo Card Creator is still plugging along, though both down from previous years and an increasingly small portion of my business. I spend under 20 minutes a month on it on about 2 to 5 issues which make it past T1 support. As for numbers: http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/sales-by-month http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/sales-by-month Historically, multiplying by 60% usually gets a good approximation for profits.
  • NKCSS 12y ago
    your ssl cert has expired
    • patio11 12y ago
      Can you tell me what browser/etc you are using? I replaced the cert a month ago on expiry and believe it is serving the correct one, and have verified this independently as of a minute ago, so I am wondering if there isn't a caching issue somewhere.
      • NKCSS 12y ago
        It was Google Chrome (36.0.1985.125 build 283153). I've checked again today, and now I don't get a SSL warning. I am pretty sure I've never visited your site before, so I don't think it's caching on my end.
  • OrwellianChild 12y ago
    Probably been addressed already elsewhere, but for a relatively static non-tech-dependent product, did you ever figure out why these were such epic months? 9/12 $6,399.30 10/12 $7,811.95 11/12 $6,169.70 12/12 $7,063.20 1/13 $5,221.25 2/13 $8,236.25 If at all repeatable, that's a fairly attractive revenue level...
    • patio11 12y ago
      The Google gods (AdWords and organic) were kind to me.
• waterside81 12y ago
  Personalized kids books for the iPad: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/little-heroes/id477247738?ls=1&mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/little-heroes/id477247738?ls... We're completely revamping the app because it's very hard to be noticed when all your books are in one app, so we're splitting the app into individual books. But this "library" app does quite well.
  • pewpewlasers 12y ago
    That's pretty funny, because my girlfriend's sister asked me last year if I would develop her million-dollar-idea: an app that creates personalized books for kids.
• eddievb 12y ago
  Publish a friend's political writings at MetricHour.com, split the AdWords revenue. Learned a bunch about Handlebars and the Ghost.io CMS in the process.
• glxybstr 12y ago
  In August 2013 I released a very simple web app called Space Email - where users send out messages and read messages others have sent, totally anonymously. It had too much volume for what was built on a very poorly designed backend, and with no reporting/flagging system it had to be taken down. This past June I re-launched it on a better platform. This time users could pay a dollar or more to sign up for an account where they get a few extra nifty features. The first week I made $1200, the last month I made around $450. Things have been slowing down with some personal things going on, so it's been mostly passive as of late. When I launched I had some real speed issues and a lot of optimizing to do, which was incredibly nervewracking as it's my first web app built on PHP and the first project I did that uses a database. edit: forgot the link: http://space.galaxybuster.net/ http://space.galaxybuster.net/
  • _nb 12y ago
    This is pretty darn interesting. I've definitely noticed there's a clear split between the interesting, longer, sort of more profound messages 'from space' and the flood of 1-word test or joke messages. Any thoughts on this - is it even a problem?
    • glxybstr 12y ago
      it's to be expected. most of my users come from tumblr, where those sorts of longwinded posts and that style of humor is pretty common. i don't think it is a problem - i'd rather have a happy medium, though. things like this: http://space.galaxybuster.net/shv.php?id=NTIw http://space.galaxybuster.net/shv.php?id=NTIw or http://space.galaxybuster.net/shv.php?id=MzAwMTg= http://space.galaxybuster.net/shv.php?id=MzAwMTg=
  • danielepolencic 12y ago
    may I ask where do you get users from? ppc?
    • glxybstr 12y ago
      its all word of mouth, mostly from tumblr where it has a bit of a cult-following: http://www.tumblr.com/search/space+email http://www.tumblr.com/search/space+email
• solomania9 12y ago
  I created a website where you can pay per character using bitcoin: http://bitcoinmegaphone.com http://bitcoinmegaphone.com On average it generates around $1 per day (in Bitcoin, of course :-)
• habosa 12y ago
  Made an Android Snapchat client called SnapHack. It allowed you to download Snaps and send pictures from your Gallery, pretty much the only features people would want to add to Snapchat. Powered it with an IAP to add 'My Story' support and small banner ads at the bottom of the screen. The app got about 2,500-3,500 downloads a day up to a total of 165,000 downloads. When searching for 'Snapchat' on Google play it was the 2nd or 3rd result. IAP brought in about $25 a day (after 30% removed) and the ads peaked at about $70 a day, so total was between $90 and $100 a day when things were good. Didn't last long though, took a while to get to that daily amount and Google/Snapchat removed it from the store after the 3rd month of availability. So total was a few thousand. Still a very, very good result but not full-time income. Side note: Java library that I made for interacting with Snapchat API hosted on GitHub (https://github.com/hatboysam/SnapHack https://github.com/hatboysam/SnapHack). Contributions are welcome and it supports even all of the new Snapchat features like messaging. Feel free to recreate SnapHack!
• bernatfp 12y ago
  Not much at the moment: Profits realized from a very long term Bitcoin investment: 10000$ Bitcoin miner: 600$ (profits) so far. Now I'm covering the costs of running my own SaaS [1] with these profits to create a more sustainable business (I've lost confidence in Bitcoin from an investment standpoint). At this moment my SaaS has 2 trial users but no paying customers. [1] https://calloud.com https://calloud.com
  • mncolinlee 12y ago
    Has liquidity ever been a problem for you with Bitcoin investments? I would imagine limited supply and short term spikes could result in filling currency trade orders at lower prices. In other words, it's not clear if you can always depend on selling at face value.
    • bernatfp 12y ago
      Yeah, but quite a relative issue depending on the exchange. The first thing you learn is that you can't sell at market prices, you just have to place some orders and wait. To be honest I made a few mistakes related to this when I was starting and lost some money. On Btc-e my orders aren't that large so there's nothing to worry about when placing them. It felt more risky on Bitstamp, and Kraken specially due to low volume, but I rarely have to trade there.
• lessmilk 12y ago
  I wrote an ebook on how to make games in HTML5 with the Phaser framework. It's been out for a month now, and it has made me over $16,000 in sales. I keep making a couple hundred dollars per day with it. Link to the book: http://www.discoverphaser.com http://www.discoverphaser.com More sales number: http://blog.lessmilk.com/ebook-sales/ http://blog.lessmilk.com/ebook-sales/
• michaelbuckbee 12y ago
  I built a Heroku add-on that handles the purchase and installation much more quickly and safely than they could do manually (about 80% of our customers get SSL installed on their sites in less than 5 minutes). https://addons.heroku.com/expeditedssl https://addons.heroku.com/expeditedssl It's been more challenging to get going than I anticipated as it's a significant upfront cash investment to get good cert reseller terms.
• JamesChevalier 12y ago
  I'm getting about $50/month through an IFTTT/tumblr/AdSense setup that I have running. That pays the server costs for http://citystrides.com http://citystrides.com which hasn't generated much revenue, yet.
• eignerchris_ 12y ago
  I built docklister.com in 4 months during my spare time. I started approximately 24 months ago and have a single customer that covers the hosting costs (~80/mo). I just got back from a 30 day honeymoon; anxious to get back into the flow! Marketplaces are hard to bootstrap. For the last 6 months I've been trying to grow pageviews and leads by doing low-touch marketing experiments: post listings to Boating and Yachting FB groups, asking for feedback in /r/sailing (lots of great feedback and pageviews), replying to craigslist ads for boats suggesting they list on docklister. I have a several great blog ideas and I have a newsletter with approximately 45 people that I plan to start actively emailing content to. Currently doing ~100 pageviews/day. edit: forgot active link - https://www.docklister.com/ https://www.docklister.com/
• KurtElster 12y ago
  In my best month, I did $3.3K in AdSense. No idea is stupid if you can monetize it. To explore projects outside of clients’ demands, we began a Labs initiative in March 2012. Think of it as a palate cleanser between client work. It's resulted in about ten completed projects. The formula is pretty simple. Find a problem, build a website to solve it. If it can be done in an afternoon, we don't even think about it. We just do it. Of the ten sites we've built in the last year, the most popular are: RainyCafe, CalmingManatee, Is this Retina?, and Will there be mail today? Getting traffic is a pretty straight forward process. Submit the site to blogs in relevant niches. In the case of RainyCafe, we submitted it as a tip to Lifehacker who posted it the next day. Once you've got a major blog exposure like that, having frictionless sharing (in the form of social media buttons) is enough to keep it going. However, this assumes the content is compelling enough to share to begin with. Sometimes doing that much isn't even necessary. CalmingManatee was different. We tweeted it once, and about a week later it was everywhere. A million visits in the first month everywhere. We received requests for interviews from NPR, Huffington Post, and some other random blogs as a results. The success of these afternoon projects was a pleasant surprise, and the free publicity was welcome, but what would be even better is some extra revenue. As freelancers, having recurring revenue is critical to building our business. Our first attempt at monetization was to sell Manatee greeting cards through Zazzle. After six months, we sold so few that we couldn't meet the the threshold to get paid out. Fail. We switched to donations. Using WePay, we allowed people to donate via three suggested donation levels. That netted about $100/mo. Better but not great. We had to reconcile dozens of micro-transactions in Quickbooks which, when you factor the time, made it a net loss. Fail again. Then we tried making a RainyCafe iOS app that we planned to sell for $1. Apple rejected it because they found that our Rainy Cafe app provides "a very limited amount of content and a very limited set of features" specifically because it "only contains two ambient noises." Strike three. Finally, I got off my high horse and switched to AdSense.Not only did we hit out of the park with AdSense, but it was the easiest of our four monetization attempts to implement. I wish I'd done it sooner. Lesson learned: Simple is great. Ever since CalmingManatee, if someone in the office has an idea that can be implemented in less than an afternoon, we don't even debate it, we just implement it, put AdSense on it, and see what happens. Some work, some don't. At the very least, we always learn something from it.
  • 12y ago
• raelmiu 12y ago
  I build small web apps, like http://blankpage.io/ http://blankpage.io/ Since the last thread on this I've cut my costs from $200 a month to about $5 a month, but it took months to rewrite the backend to do that. So still losing more than I'm making.
  • boaticus 12y ago
    Excellent landing page! Love the use of typography! And, the animated gifs make it quickly obvious what your app does and how someone would use it. Best of luck!
    • raelmiu 12y ago
      Thank you! Worried a bit about if it was clear or not. Thanks!
    • raelmiu 12y ago
      Fixed it up a bit btw, love any feedback.
• stevenwilkin 12y ago
  The last few years I've been building up a portfolio of dividend paying shares. In the previous 12 months dividend payouts have totalled GBP 2488.31. There has also been some capital growth. The portfolio is inside a SIPP (self-invested pension) and the funds funnelled into it have been the profits from my contracting business which would have been liable to higher-rate income tax here in the UK. Keeping money from the taxman which then makes me more money is great, shame I can't access any of it until 2040 ;)
• clarky07 12y ago
  So far this year I've made ~33k on my iPhone apps. I'm actively working on new apps and doing freelance work, and every once in awhile things need updated, but for the most part it's passive. I have > 20 apps at this point, the best one doing ~7500 so far this year. https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/30-south-llc/id331245760 https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/30-south-llc/id331245760
  • juicejerry 12y ago
    link is dead
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
• dsizemore 12y ago
  I make $200+ with Adsense and BuySellAds from http://www.logogala.com http://www.logogala.com. It's been online for around eight years or so now. I typically work on it maybe 15-20 minutes a night or every other night uploading new designs that have been submitted. Currently planning to re-develop it and make it so designers can sign up and manage their own profile and designs but I'm a little afraid to touch it and end up losing all of the little bit of money I'm currently making.
• seestheday 12y ago
  No Revenue for me yet, but I've been inspired by patio11 and Amy Hoy to build a product. I'm starting very small with a premium wordpress plugin focused on food bloggers. Progress has been slower than I'd hoped due to personal distractions. My plan is to spend equal parts on marketing and development. I have released a free version of the plugin in order to get it listed on the wordpress repository and to start seeding my mailing list. So far I have 20 people that signed up for "product updates and early release pricing".
• TylerJewell 12y ago
  I may have written about this before, so apologies if this is repetitive. In 2010ish, I had gotten fairly sick due to a metal poisoning. The biggest issue was that it was messing with my cognitive abilities and that made me fearful of not being able to work and earn an income at the standard of living I had become accustomed to. I quickly recovered, but became obsessed with finding a way to live - indefinitely - off of the savings that I had accumulated in my 20 year software career at that point. I had chosen a path around increasing responsibilities of management as opposed to startup founder (though I am one now). And I had diligently saved money, but didn't have not-work-anymore money. I looked for a way to generate 20% returns reliably on my money, requiring little effort, manageable risk, and - mostly - passive. The stock market proved to be an answer. I ended up developing a couple of theories about how markets behave, generated some derivative trading algorithms and have been investing 100% of my spare cash since. The mini hedge fund requires activity once / week (generally) towards the end of the week, and also has two nice benefits of mostly getting taxed at long term cap gain rates along with being in all cash (fully liquid) with more core funds every weekend. For this year, the algorithms have produced a return of 14.11% YTD. Since beginning the algorithms, they have averaged a yearly return of 24% compounded. I have traded these algorithms in a normal trading account and in an IRA, though the IRA returns are a bit lower around 20%. When the market has a flat year, vs. an up year, the algorithm is likely to perform closer to 30%. Down years that drop less than 10% will return closer to 30% as well. Up markets return lower. I publish a white paper on this, and happy to share with anyone interested. It's a few quarters out of date, but the essence is all there. You can email me tylerjewell [at] gmail dot com for the paper. For those that are curious, the algorithms depend upon a few assumptions: - The market has never crashed "up" - they only crash down. - As a result, the market climbs upward very orderly, but moves down very disorderly. - Time is infinite. - There is always volatility. When you start with those assumptions, and then you apply maximum leverage (with safety nets for blue moon crashes with a max 35% loss), then you can start to derive algorithms that achieve the results expected, by using your money as an insurance provider to others in the market place by selling derivatives. FWIW - when I started playing with the concept of the algorithms, I did not think it would be possible to achieve these results. So am quite pleased that it's possible to do so. Also, it's very easy to down dial the algorithms to be 1/2 the risk and get about 1/2 of the returns as well.
• fsethi 12y ago
  My social game (for the last 3 consecutive months) has brought in about $8000 - $10,000 a month. Pretty consistently averaging about $300 a day. Generally spend about 4 hours a month on it total. To note: The developer I work with spends much more time on it than I do; but it is not a focus / priority for either of us. It took about 18 months to get it to this point. It probably got to break even in roughly 5-6 months.
• clarky07 12y ago
  I've made a few thousand on an ebook about my app business. Not as much as I make on the apps, but it is 100% passive as opposed to mostly passive. http://buildanappbusiness.com/ http://buildanappbusiness.com/
• rphlx 12y ago
  An undisclosed amount, mining an undisclosed (but top-50) cryptocurrency, with an undisclosed (but legal) technology. Mining is so rediculously hyper-competitive that I hope you'll understand the lack-of-detail. You learn to keep your mouth shut, head down, and just hope that you'll remain marginally profitable after the next difficulty adjustment.
• someotheridiot 12y ago
  $2500 for Dec/2013 (close enough to 2014) http://rebrickable.com http://rebrickable.com - reuse your LEGO pieces to build other cool stuff. Not exactly passive yet, but maybe one day.
• ocram 12y ago
  I developed some Opencart and WooCommerce extensions (payment gateways, product feeds). They've been generating ~$600-800/m for 3 years now. Not completely passive due to some service emails, but overall a very good ROI.
• asteiger 12y ago
  Last year I made a wine cataloging app for iOS based personal gripes that I had with all the others out there. I just wanted something incredibly simple, and all the others were ugly and complicated. I was inspired by the 7 minute workout app posted here, and set aside 8 hours to build the whole thing. All told I ended up spending about 40 hours on it and haven't really touched it since. I started selling it at $.99, but sales were slow and I wasn't really making anything at all off it. So I raised the price 5x to $4.99 and sales didn't really change much. Now it brings me in about $50-150 / month that I use as extra cash toward paying off my student loans.
  • cotsog 12y ago
    Do you mind sharing a link to your app? I'm a wine aficionado. :-)
    • asteiger 12y ago
      Sure. Here you go: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/vino/id666479302 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/vino/id666479302
• cityzen 12y ago
  I wrote an ExpressionEngine Add-on called Detour Pro that sells for $22 ($17.60 after the site I sell it on takes their cut). I released it back in February of 2012 and to date I've made about $15k, this year alone $4k to date.
• gmays 12y ago
  Residential real estate. I bought a few short sale condos here in San Diego from 2010 to 2012 at 1/3 their values from a couple years earlier and hired a property manager. Now I get about 1.5% their purchase price gross in rental income every month. After buying them and fixing them up the majority of the work I do on them is at tax time (still do taxes myself to stay in the loop). HOA and property management fees eat into it a bit, but it's not a bad haul. In addition to the cash flow, they've all appreciated from 20%-50% in the last couple years. These days dividends from Apple stock (not bad for a tech company) and some other investments are doing better, though not even close to as well as the real estate. The key is often to save up enough money to be able to take advantage of opportunities. For example, we just decided last week that we're moving to Florida. We were planning to rent, but we found a 3BR condo in a high-rise gated community on a golf course about 1mi from the beach for around $300,000 that went for $800,000 before the financial crisis. Luckily, we had the cash to be able to capitalize on the opportunity. I assume the property value will at least double in the next 5 years. Even if it doesn't, if we had to rent it out tomorrow we could break even on what we pay for the mortgage + HOA fees with rent. It's risker than other endeavors, but investing in residential real estate like this is the best kind of investment I've found for my risk profile with the amount of money I'm willing to invest. The hard part is getting together the initial capital to do so. I started working full time at 21 and it took me until around 25 to be able to make my first investment saving most of my modest income during that time.
• deleted 12y ago
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• C00L 12y ago
  $10K-$25K/mo for past 2 years. Product sales + adsense + adsoptimal.
  • bstew 12y ago
    Could you expand more on this? Is this all on the same website?
• ivanyv 12y ago
  An AdSense site that's been running since '04: +-----------+--------+ | Year | $ | +-----------+--------+ | 2004 | 343 | (I was 24) | 2005 | 440 | | 2006 | 2,800 | | 2007 | 8,900 | | 2008 | 11,400 | | 2009 | 12,500 | | 2010 | 12,400 | | 2011 | 18,000 | | 2012 | 21,600 | | 2013* | 34,000 | | 2014* | 19,800 | (probably about $39k by year's end, more like $50k if I can help it) +-----------+--------+ * These are approximate as Google started paying in my country's currency. I've made redesigns and adjustments over time, but it's been mostly passive, specially the past three years or so as I haven't touched it at all. Don't ask me the URL, it's fugly and I'm embarrassed (though you can probably find it). Over the past few months I've been actually working on the side building a platform to help me launch other similar projects in a more useful, less ugly fashion. Too much to do, too little time. Stupid wasted youth :D I never done a calculation like this before, and I didn't realize it's its 10th year anniversary! How cool is that. I would live like a king at 24 with my current cashflow.
• martinvol 12y ago
  About $50-$100/month on http://onlyfonts.net http://onlyfonts.net I'm not proud of this product by any means, but it is good for experimentation and A/B testing. One thing that I should point out is that even if I don't write any code, I'm still thinking about how to improve it and looking at the analytics, so having a passive income is not totally free.
• yaronl_elh 12y ago
  Not as successful as the other ones here, but it's starting to show promise. http://mynativemap.com/ http://mynativemap.com/ I created it to help people that can't surf into Google Map's in their own language. the link's forces the selected language manually and ignore the automatic language detection. Started a few months ago and it's already covering my hosting in ad revenue. hopefully I'll have better numbers to report on the next Round of "...best passive income.." :)
• notoriousjpg 12y ago
  Bit late to the party but i've been arbitraging promotions on Sports betting websites. Yes this sounds incredibly suspicious. It's pretty interesting, and easy. Much easier than trying to monetise blogs (which i've also done). Not exactly an intellectual exercise but it gets me enough money to pay for public transport, lunch etc. If you're interested just google Punting Deals ...They've got an article explaining how they do what they do. PS Australian only I think