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Posted by cvbox 7 days ago

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

482 points | 553 commentspage 11
garnett 4 days ago|
Appreciate that we go meta here and it has been done many times before - for my own research and record-keeping I've made a catalog out of these https://dlebedev.com/500-bucks-a-month-idea/
mesmertech 7 days ago||
Got two websites but the second one is basically a clone of the first with better visuals and better tech stack that I actually want to work on

https://aieasypic.com - 3k per month (declining cause not working on it a lot, just maintenance) https://bestphoto.ai - 2k per month (increasing cause of better SEO)

Now trying my hand at an actual non-consumer product, not that b2b but something to make making ads easy because that’s where I find myself getting stuck on when doing fb ads or TikTok organic stuff : https://admakeai.com

rsanek 7 days ago|
It doesn't seem like any of the photos on bestphoto.ai load for me. This is on Firefox on Mac; does seem to work in Safari.
devgoth 6 days ago||
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 7 days ago||
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 6 days ago|
> www.gravityanalytica.com

no ssl?

TCSoft 7 days ago||
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 6 days ago||
Reddit marketing to relevant subreddits might help!
TCSoft 6 days ago||
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 6 days ago||
What have you tried for marketing?
TCSoft 6 days ago||
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 6 days ago||
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 6 days ago||
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 6 days ago||
Nice, glad to know I'm not totally off my rocker. Good luck! (Also I know the "so very tired" feeling well.)
appsoftware 7 days ago||
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 3 days ago|
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 7 days ago||
https://www.jamp-audio.com I started making audio plugins for iOS 2 years ago. I'm making about $300/month.
rogutkuba 7 days ago||
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

nsim 6 days ago|
For projects of this size, what legal/financial structure do you use? Particularly of interest for what Australians do, but any stories would be good.

When I've looked, a sole trader with liability and cyber insurance seemed reasonable (maybe $2k/yr), but a Pty ltd with the same would probably be safer ($5k/yr).

It all comes down to what the risk of being sued is though. I'm sure selling games wouldn't require this.

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