Posted by cvbox 6 days ago
Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
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
- https://dave-bot.com -> a full-stack AI platform where you can generate videos, images, music, code, 3d objects with frontier Gen AI models.
- https://headsnap.io -> a platform that you can generate images of yourself based on 4 selfies.
- https://quantiq.live -> a service providing financial and historical data for stocks, as well as government trades.
- https://aivestor.tech -> an AI agent that picks small/midcap stocks and trades them using Alpaca API. It uses Reddit, news, polymarket, Google Trends and many other data sources to take investment decisions.
- @Polyglot_lingua_bot -> a voice-enabled Telegram-based bot that can help you learn new languages.
- https://select.supply -> a directory of carefully-curated and well-crafted products.
All of those allowed me to quit my day job and live a comfortable and flexible life. I still invest time in maintenance and adding new features, but I love coding, marketing and everything that comes with promoting and selling a SaaS (and I also have a serious addiction for Stripe notifications).
On top of that, I developed my own software agency where I help clients build and scale software (https://bitheap.ch).
Also, the user got the pictures after just a few minutes and there is a clear disclaimer, and an email is being sent to the user once the pics are ready. On top of that, I have no complaints from other users about it. It's clear to me that the intent of the user was to cause some reputation harm, which I think didn't work. I also got an email from a person with the same first name (not sure if it's the same person tho) that they offer UX services for Headsnap.
When it comes to QuantiQ, I thought about targeting businesses. I already have 2 major clients and had plenty of demos with others. Usually they are not interested when taking a decision about reading pages on the website. Most of them are concentrated on finding out how you manage incidents, security policy, how do you handle improvement suggestions, SDLC, velocity etc. They anyway do their due diligence when it comes to the founder. But I totally understand your point. For B2C this is really important.
Already fixing the mobile navigation and adding some pages with more info about me.
Alternately that their presence doesn't grant any rights for other use would be a good clause which I didn't spot.
Not a knock just being honest as it looks like you just don’t know so maybe this helps. Here is an example of a real company that scrapes k/q docs.
You seem to be trying to promote a service and throw weird accusations that the service looks like a scam without even trying it, which is shameful tbh.
Wish you luck but don’t take honest opinions from someone who buys significant amounts of financial data as someone trying to promote a service. Just linking someone I would consider a competitor to yours in the Edgar space.
The question is about financials and nothing you linked to is about financials.
I specified clearly in the description of this service that I deliver financials, historical or congress/senate trades. I think it's obvious for someone working in finance that the last two cannot be fetched from quarter or annual forms. Things like revenue, eps, ebitda, pre/post earning moves (those use last, open prices too), are strongly-related to 10Q though.
I really don't care whether you like the landing page or not. I have two B2B clients for this API and 0% churn so far, which is the best metric I need to track right now. I will stop responding to this thread since I don't think it's productive for any of us.
LE: I just added the pricing page for unauthenticated users too.
I found this so instantly frustrating that I rage-closed the page and came here to moan!
Reading the comments, I don't believe you're looking to implement a dark pattern and not show the price, but that's what seems to be happening currently.
Now I see the main pricing page, it's worth pointing out that the categories and prices there don't match with those on the front page: 'starter' with 30 headshots vs. 'novice' with 35; 'basic' with 60 headshots vs. 'proficient' with 70, etc.
LE: done :D
Or do you think this effect is counteracted with AI also opening up for new opportunities for creating services that would not otherwise be feasible pre AI?
Important to mention, IMHO not many people are willing to sacrifice their time and energy to start something that doesn't have a clear path to profitability.
Like, say AI makes distribution and marketing easier, now it’s easier for everyone, but they still compete for the same clients. So while your signal is getting stronger, so is the noise (the signal of all the other competitors). So those who put in the hours and smartness to «invent» a more clever marketing strategy are the ones able to break through the noise and reach the clients?
In other words, distribution/marketing is the bottleneck and the target is ever moving?
Recently I started to use n8n automation to post on Twitter/LinkedIn, however I tend to keep those posts short since they are created with LLM's and do not seem authentic.
As for the SEO part, I usually upload search console extracts into Perplexity deep research and ask for actions on how to improve ranking for different keywords.
For customer queries, I usually respond myself. However when I am not available, I have a small team of freelancers that help me just with that. I played with LLMs for responding to questions, but it just didn't work out for me.
The base product is open-source and I make money from custom builds, additional plugins, paid support, and the occasional extra feature for companies with specific needs. It's a bit more than noodle profitable but quite under a normal salary.
It was basically a backend for generating STS credentials on the fly using a more ergonomic interface. It never went anywhere and I haven't thought about it in years, but I still believe it was a good idea that I just didn't have the organizational clout or time to push forward.
Edit: apparently I contributed at some point too? I *barely* remember that. Glad to see the project is still succeeding!
I have the context for what "that comment" was, might even be in the target audience, yet from the landing page I'm still not entirely sure what it actually does. Might be worth trying a few "it's like X but with Y" or "imagine if dropbox could Z" and other formulations on uninitiated people in your target audience?
Mainly used in organizations with developers who want to deploy to a corporate Kubernetes environment, but don’t want to deal with the complexities.
It’s fully open source so we’re covered by sponsors, the largest being Portainer $5k+ / m from sponsorships.
Makes it possible to keep the cloud offering totally free.
The footer of https://canine.sh/ says the project is MIT licensed, but the GitHub site at https://github.com/CanineHQ/canine says the project is Apache 2.0 licensed.
I'm not sure how to reconcile that, but the project seems really interesting, either way.
Been trying to find time to fix the issue on the other side
On the discord, or chris@ canine<dot>sh
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
It started as just an uptime checker for websites, eventually I added support for APIs and cron jobs, and automated status pages (you may have seen this one yesterday: https://hackernews.onlineornot.com/)
I started it in 2021, I give it two hours a day before work every workday, and I cut scope on most features to ensure they're shippable in two hours. Then I iterate. It works because it's default-alive. I keep a full time job to be able to build it exactly how I want.
Like my React blog, I started it knowing thousands of others were doing the same thing. I made a bet that my unique perspective would be useful to others, and it paid off.
Has been above $500/mo since 2022, growing steadily since (still a few years away from being able to replace my salary).
Then I started to get feedback on the initial project which was quite helpful(universities, EEVBlog and colleagues) and based on that made a "Logic Trainer" which is like very advanced version of the initial idea. It has so many features and it kind of has taken off in a sense that 2 universities want to buy it for themselves. Also I didn't expect it but most people who buy it do it for their kids. IMHO its way too complicated for kids, but practice and feedback that I have gotten shows that it really isn't. I haven't made any profits from the project yet (due to high development cost) but hopefully in the future it help to pay my rent :).
Check out the website at https://logicgat.es
(We'll get back into 3d printing once life slows down a _little_ bit again)
I started it primarily wanting to take a shot at productizing an image diffusion model (Stable Diffusion 1.5 when I started) in a novel (at the time) way and it ended up growing legs of it's own.
She's steadily chugging along, growing about 10-20% per month with minimal marketing, exceeding all expectations I had for the project when I set out
We also handle all the post-processing (upscaling, image cleaning, etc) that you need in order to get great printed results - with Gemini (Nano Banana) or ChatGPT you've got to pull each image out, possibly remove the watermark, set the curves/levels in photoshop/gimp, upscale it, etc then print the page - you can just hit Export and download a pdf ready to print from our site
It started as a small side project but slowly grew every month and recently exploded to well over 50k USD revenue per month. It's fun to have a large community of paying users but honestly I never thought out of all my side projects this one will make it.
I am still a one man show managing everything from development, marketing, customer support and content moderation. If I am honest the money is nice but I am severely burnt out and not sure if I can or want to do this much longer. It is a 24/7 job and I miss the days where I can just sit down and code a nice feature that people will like. Also looking at NSFW content all day kind of messes with your mental health.
I had some discussions of potential buyers but selling something for less than its monthly revenue seems crazy so I am still here trying to do my best and waiting for the right exit.
I am currently rewriting the user role and permission system with the goal of introducing a moderator role in the future that has limited, moderator-only access rights. At the moment, there are only admin and regular user roles.
Even with this in place I am unsure where to advertise for an NSFW content moderator position.
While job hunting years ago, I got approached by a company running adult websites. They seemed to be pretty relaxed about it and they were multiple candidates for the position. There were advertising through LinkedIn as just any similar small business.
Thank you for the post. It once again reminded me how important it is to choose a pet project that aligns with your personal values.
Also maybe you missunderstood what AliveAi.app is. It is strictly a on-platform AI generation. We do not allow editing of user uploaded content (i.e. deepfake) for obvious reasons.
“We do not allow editing of user uploaded content” Wait until you find out how these models are trained!
Seriously, there are way too many Whiners on HN
It‘s making about $700 on iOS and $300 on Android, solely from $2.99 IAPs for the later missions in the game (the first 2 missions are free).
I think a main reason for this is that escape rooms (and games) don’t „saturate“: you play them only once, because then you know the solutions. So another escape room (place, game, app) doesn’t cannibalize the market - it may rather strengthen the others by fostering it as a group activity.
I also put 0$ into ads- it solely spreads itself by being a group activity (3-5 people are best) and through its mission editor (people can make their own missions, used in school and for birthdays etc).
Curious to see where it goes next!