Top
Best
New

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

479 points | 552 commentspage 4
abe-101 6 days ago|
https://mergecal.org - First project I built when learning Django a couple years back. Takes multiple iCal feed URLs, merges them into one feed. Turns out people actually need this!
tiziano88 6 days ago||
cool project, but what on earth is going on with scrolling and back button?
tecleandor 6 days ago||
I almost built something like this a short time ago. Some devices/softwares (in my case it was the Supernote calendar app) only allow for one calendar as a source, and I had to merge my work and personal calendars to show up in my device. :)
duckkg5 6 days ago||
Cold call training aka 'exposure therapy'

https://coldcallgym.com

Just a call a number and practice a cold call with a bot. People seemed to like it when I built it so I made a free and paid tier. Getting like 3-5 new users per day without really doing anything.

nanfinitum 6 days ago|
This is pretty unique and amazing. How are you marketing this all the way to $500/mo.?
duckkg5 5 days ago||
Thank you. I'm not doing any marketing at all. In fact I noticed about a third of the traffic comes from ChatGPT of all places. I guess that's just from the SEO. But users keep trying it out, maybe because it's really simple to start. Just call the number.
parttimelarry 6 days ago||
Been doing a YouTube channel on Python for Finance for quite a while and make some affiliate revenue: https://youtube.com/@parttimelarry
chirau 6 days ago||
Oh, it's you! One of my favorite channels on YouTube. Learnt Alpaca and TA-Liband backtesting from you and also built my screener with your vids. Awesome content always. I am looking to go through the IB ones soon.
KellyCriterion 6 days ago||
Jesus, 130k++ subscribers, WOW!!!!

This is a huge success!!! Im also in this field, never thought that you could collect so many people on this niche topic!

If you say: some affiliates - think about getting a sponsoring partner for some B2B stuff, and speak the advertorial by yourself(!), one slot per one video/show. In my country we have a small but good&nerdy startup podcast run by two guys - they do advertising this way, mainly B2B tech stuff (accounting software etc.) - in an interview recently, they unveiled their numbers - per slot (20-25 seconds) they get 8k - 10k. And they have a couple of slots per month.

KellyCriterion 5 days ago||
haha, getting downvoted for applauding someone who built a successful product, while I judged based on my own professional experience?

:-))

StackBPoppin 6 days ago||
I released a game on Steam, and work on it a few hours every day. Income each month varies but is consistently above $500.

Link to game if anyone is interested: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2250550/Tornado_Research_...

bespoke_engnr 2 days ago||
I love fountain pens, and use handwriting as a kind of superpower to remember everything I need to at work.

So I started an online fountain pen shop: https://www.bottleandplume.com - it's focused entirely on all the stuff I love: fountain pens, fountain-pen friendly paper, bottled inks, and everything else you'd want or need if you were getting into the hobby, playing with .

I got lucky with timing a few marketing things and it's grown considerably, with lots of repeat customers (I'm really active in the community, not as a business strategy but as a result of my fountain pen addiction, so that helps).

I have a tech job that pays the bills so I'm more focused on having fun and building the fountain pen store I wish existed than on squeezing every last dollar out of my customers and business. It's a lot of work but I'm really enjoying it.

csixty4 2 days ago|
It's a great looking site. I'll keep it in mind once I use up more of the ink I already have!
bespoke_engnr 7 hours ago||
Thank you! I can relate...buying too much ink is what got me into this mess in the first place :-D.
hanamizuki 19 hours ago||
I built a GLP-1 tracker app for iOS/Android called mojo.

mojo connects your health data (apple health/health connect) and get real-time AI feedback when new data is logged. It proactively detects your changes and provide insights on achievements and suggestions.

So far it's around $1150 revenue per month with 200 paying users and 4000 downloads.

https://mojoapp.ai/

Frajedo 6 days ago||
Just signed our 3rd customer with TrueCast (600€/month) (https://www.truecast.fr/), which is Granola for tech and non-tech recruiters. Rather than replacing recruiters in the HR process, we want to give them real time hard skills knowledge superpowers so they can better assess candidates before submitting them to their teams. We are convinced that recruiting should remain human-first.

There’s also a bot option, for self-conducted interviews, mostly used for open applications for some pre-filtering.

We are still unsure on how to enter such market, so we are doing direct networking atm, if you guys have an idea on how you’d do it or want a free trial of the product we’d love having a chat with you about it.

wahnfrieden 6 days ago||
Manabi Reader - learn Japanese by reading

More than $500/month. It currently sustains my full-time focus

https://reader.manabi.io

I quit my job a couple years back to work on this app full-time, as well as its companion flashcard app, Manabi Flashcards. The goal is to help you learn through immersion and eventually replace some of your flashcard reviews time with reading (once I finish auto-reviews for flashcards)

What's special about it? Manabi Reader became popular as an Japanese-focused alternative to services like LingQ in that it locally tracks and analyzes all the words and kanji you read and study. It shows you which words are new and which you're currently learning via flashcards, so you can easily find content that suits your level and see what flashcards to prioritize adding.

It also passively accumulates an on-device (and in your personal iCloud) corpus of example sentences from your reading. It’s also one of few ways to mine sentences including pitch accent directly into Anki on iPhone.

I had built this part-time while working over many years (starting with flashcards and then the reader app) but going full-time gave me the time to do a full rewrite: SwiftUI, native iOS + macOS, and an offline-first architecture that syncs with iCloud and my server in the background.

Although it has a companion SRS algorithm (FSRS) flashcard app, it's also excellent for mining Anki cards. This works with AnkiMobile on iOS and AnkiConnect on desktop.

You can use it like a web browser for the web, or subscribe to RSS feeds. It comes with a bunch of curated content by level. Recently I added EPUB support, pitch accents, and note-taking with todos.

I'm now almost done adding a manga mode via Mokuro, and Netflix/streaming video support via realtime captioning of audio streams.

To scale this with UGC/influencer market I need to make it more beginner friendly. Currently it assumes you can read kana at least.

Jabbs 6 days ago||
https://www.unlistedjobs.com/

26.3% of jobs found on company websites are not advertised on any job boards but found using this tool.

The app scrapes company's directly (24/7) and give the user:

- a head start over other job seekers

- access to thousands of jobs not listed anywhere else

- daily job filter emails with ability to be highly curated to reduce noise

akudha 6 days ago|
1. What is the churn like? Don't people cancel after finding a job?

2. Has any company objected to scraping?

Jabbs 5 days ago||
1. Churn isn't as bad as I would have thought. There is also the use case for someone who has a job and wants to find the next one. But yea if someone wants to only use for 1 month, that is expected

2. I think companies (or the ATS's they use) might object to reposting a job listing on my site but I'm not doing that. You can search/sort/filter jobs but in order to view the job posting you will open a link back to the original job.

bsnnkv 6 days ago|
Not consistently, but there have been a few months this year where I have hit $500 selling individual commercial use licenses for my tiling window manager[1]

https://lgug2z.com/software/komorebi

kalterdev 6 days ago||
Nice licensing
pillefitz 6 days ago||
I'd buy it for a 20 USD one-time fee
bsnnkv 6 days ago||
The experiment is end-user mediated wealth redistribution from large corporations by leveraging reimbursement mechanisms, and so far I'm content with the results
cess11 6 days ago||
I like this, bookmarked in case I'll ever be forced by work into MICROS~1 operating systems again.
More comments...