Top
Best
New

Posted by cvbox 12/18/2025

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

It's the time of the year again, so I'd be interested hear what new (and old) ideas have come up. Previously asked on:

2024 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42373343

2023 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38467691

2022 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34190421

2021 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29667095

2020 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24947167

2019 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20899863

2018 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17790306

2017 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15148804

485 points | 560 commentspage 11
devgoth 12/18/2025||
while not exactly $500/month, my side project Whenish (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/whenish/id6745035749) makes me some beer money.

I made Whenish cause i was frustrated with apps taking you outside of group chats to schedule events and find out dates when people are available. Whenish is an iMessage extension app and it works pretty nicely so far.

recently got my first user feedback email which was really exciting!

hope to figure out how marketing works to get some more users and hopefully double downloads + sales next year.

GravityAnalyt1 12/18/2025||
Building version 3 of a front-end SaaS application that services proprietary models for analyzing securities, events/catalysts, etc. I am taking what I have learned from 5 years of users asking questions and basically redoing everything.

This version will hopefully provide a bot free / pump free replacement for iHub, StockTwits, Twitter, etc. to people who manage money professionally or otherwise.

Assuming I get more free time to finish it that is.

Version 2 is live here.

www.gravityanalytica.com

The two products Chat and Horizon both make more than $500/month individually.

This is a just side project. I run a family office.

For those of you who are in your 20s keep it up. In your 40s getting free time can be a real challenge.

riku_iki 12/18/2025|
> www.gravityanalytica.com

no ssl?

TCSoft 12/18/2025||
https://www.condoally.com/ and https://www.hoaally.org/ - Simple yet powerful tools for running small/self-managed HOAs.

The site is 15 years old now and pretty solid. I dreamed much more for it, but I still can't figure out the marketing.

The front-end is open-source: https://github.com/CommunityAlly/CommunityAllyWebApp

joewhale 12/18/2025||
Reddit marketing to relevant subreddits might help!
TCSoft 12/18/2025||
That's a good idea, thanks. I always wanted to help folks unite to defeat corrupt boards so maybe r/fuc*HOAs would be a good subreddit to advertise for that.
hankmh 12/18/2025||
What have you tried for marketing?
TCSoft 12/18/2025||
Hey, thanks for asking! I used those Facebook and Google ad credits you always get when you sign-up for something, ran two postcard campaigns sent directly to HOA presidents, paid to rank higher on Capterra, hired an SEO firm for 2 years, was in a Valpak insert, and ran an ad in The Chicago Cooperator for 6 months. The Capterra campaign was by far the best ROI, but still too expensive to make sense in the long term.
hankmh 12/18/2025||
That seems like a lot!

My assumption would be the best marketing, given you are a team of 1, would be demand capture campaigns. And it seems that your Capterra results bear that out.

But, your SEO agency would probably have focused on high intent keywords for demand capture, and presumably that didn’t work so well.

Anyway, seems like an interesting marketing challenge targeting a niche market that frankly I don’t know much about.

I wonder if you could target HOA management agencies rather than the association presidents. I know that many HOAs are managed externally at least from an operational perspective. That said, I know so little about the market…

TCSoft 12/18/2025||
This is great, thank you! I had to look up "demand capture campaigns" and that makes a lot of sense. Yes, I totally agree that property managers can be a source of growth. I'm very lucky to have a property manager user out of Michigan helping guide me with what she would need from a property management perspective. Their needs are just different enough that it will require some serious dev work and I'm "so very tired", haha. Everyone wants the equivalent of QuickBooks built-in to the software. I need something to bring back my enthusiasm from years ago.
hankmh 12/18/2025||
Nice, glad to know I'm not totally off my rocker. Good luck! (Also I know the "so very tired" feeling well.)
meerab 12/20/2025||
VideoToBe.com - Transcription & Chat for Audio/Video (board meetings, lecture notes, churches summons etc.)

Started as Pay-per-use service (upload the file and receive an email with transcript). Now we also offer subscription based service for media library, AI summaries, chat Q&A, insights/highlights.

Makes between $200 to $600 per month.

https://videotobe.com

Tips for sub growth in transcription space?

appsoftware 12/18/2025||
My product NumeroMoney (https://www.numeromoney.com) is the first I've built that makes over $500, and it's grown surprisingly quickly. I built it because I needed something simpler that the existing solutions I could find for understanding our families spending (YNAB etc were geared too much towards budgeting). It helps users to import and categorize bank statement transactions in a way that makes it really easy to make decisions about household spending.
AussieCoder 12/22/2025|
Just out of interest, is this a US based product? I'm in Australia and most of the major banks have this as a built-in capability in their apps.
janm31415 12/18/2025||
https://www.jamp-audio.com I started making audio plugins for iOS 2 years ago. I'm making about $300/month.
rogutkuba 12/18/2025||
I run a couple projects, only one makes money at the moment:

SFX Engine: https://sfxengine.com/ - ~1.2k MRR

I launched another two and hoping to get these scaled up as well

Sparkpod.ai: https://sparkpod.ai/ - $20 MRR

Disstrack AI: https://aidisstrackgenerator.com/ - $0 MRR

trowa159 12/21/2025||
I made a RPG pornsite blocker on Chrome

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/mrnofap-block-porn-...

Was helping a Porn addict friend, turned out there are a ton of people need it.

santa_boy 12/18/2025|
I run a side project n0c0de.com [1] ... thats no-code with two zeroes

I develop apps for experienced operators who want to start their own business.

It averages well over $500 / month in side income. Typically about $3-5K depending on the amount of time I have.

I spent perhaps a decade pushing going independent due to inability to get a product ready. I ended up learning the skills and now to solve that pain point for others.

[1]: https://www.n0c0de.com

More comments...