Posted by cvbox 7 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
I’m a physician with some 1099 income, built the platform myself because my kids help with my side projects, and have since onboarded CPAs who now offer it to their clients. I saved 5k this year on my own taxes by employing my kids and it has funded their Roth.
Soon after launching, I crossed the $500/month mark.
Link:https://trypixie.com
Also reminded me of when Justin Jackson talked about how he hired his kids for help with real projects and the positives from it https://justinjackson.ca/flipping-tables
It’s completely legal and even listed by IRS. [0]
It’s important to be compliant and do it in an easy to use manner.
[0] https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
A reasonable amount depends on their age but somewhere between 7500-15000 is a good amount and maximizes benefits.
It's been a good journey. Thank you so much to whoever keeps running this thread!
I can't find the pricing of the product on the site, I only find that I get '10 free credits', but I don't know how much a credit is and what can I do with it.
Home page says it's one credit per diagram, but then the docs say it's a certain amount of credits per modification (that could be correct or not, I guess...)
I usually skip if I can't find the price, but it could also happen that people create the trial account, spends quickly the credits, then they find the price and it doesn't fit them. Of course, there's always people coming just for the free credits.
I don't know if this is helpful to you or not, but I hope so :)
I stopped a site lately i ran for 10 years, because Google changed the ranking so often over the years, finally traffic drowned nearly completely like 1k visitors per month, it was so frustrating so I just stopped the webserver after so many years.
Another one but turned out it was never really a big deal: some chatbots from frontier AI labs started to support those niche features (people still coming to my app for the flexibility of using multiple AI models).
I think the biggest problem was #2, life kept pulling me the other way.
Oh, making or losing $500/month?
Never mind.
When Twitter killed off third-party apps, the browser extension I'd been developing ever since "New Twitter" launched in 2019 suddenly became one of the few ways to make Twitter more tolerable to use, and the number of users of the Chrome version tripled from 30k to 90k in a fortnight (mostly in Japan).
When they confirmed third-party apps had been killed on purpose and jacked up the price of the API to discourage new ones, I started selling it on the App Store the next week and it's made more than $500 per month ever since.
Before the end of the year I'm hoping to roll out a single paid subscription which works across all my extensions when you sign up for it, which enables syncing settings across all your browsers and devices, unlocks additional subscriber-only features, and will enable creation of extension-specific APIs if there are future features which require one. Between Control Panel for Twitter and https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-youtube I have ~390,000 users, so, y'know, please like and subscribe.
That will _eventually_ include my free Hacker News extension ( https://soitis.dev/comments-owl-for-hacker-news ) so things like new comment counts, user notes and muted users can sync across every browser and device you use Hacker News on.
If that takes off, I hope to make the App Store versions free and figure out how to give anyone who bought it 3 months of the subscription per extension they bought as a thank-you. If anyone's done something like that before, I'd be happy to hear about it via any communication method in my HN profile!
I built ChatKeeper because I wanted to treat my ChatGPT history like a local knowledge base, with local-first access to my data.
It’s a command-line tool (GUI in progress) that takes a full ChatGPT .zip export and syncs it with local Markdown files. You can move and rename them freely and they will stay in sync on future runs.
It pairs well with tools like Obsidian and lets you link your own notes to specific conversations or even points within them.
Revenue is modest but growing month over month. It’s a one-time purchase, not a subscription.
Most users so far are researchers and other ChatGPT power users who already live in Markdown or want to do things like curate and compress the context of very long-running conversations.
Same philosophy as ChatKeeper - local-first markdown files that sync and work great with Obsidian. I had the exact same problem with my Claude conversations buried in JSON exports.
Just published to PyPI:
pip install claude-vault
claude-vault init
claude-vault sync conversations.json
----
Auto-generates tags using local Ollama (completely offline, no API costs) and detects relationships between conversations
Would love to collaborate or integrate with ChatKeeper down the line - seems like we're solving the same problem for different LLMs!
Check it out: https://github.com/MarioPadilla/claude-vault
so far so good...
This game was developed by my friends and I during college, then we Kickstarted a few years after.
Sales have dwindled since, but I still like the game. So much so that I turned it into a free web app. Still a WIP but it's maybe 75/80% there.
Play for free here, you will need to make an account: https://lastyearofcarbon.com
Buy a copy here, but you should play the game first to see if you like it: https://lyoc.shop
Used it for: Skiing, hiking, cycling. Any outing with a route.
Import a route from Strava, RideWithGPS, GPX/FIT, Apple fitness. Plan for weather forecasting! Fitness readiness is obtained from metrics collected from a smart watch.
I actually turned it free recently. But barely reached over 400 MRR then started dropping. Consumer market is hard and I'm more interested in learning about AI and a full stack side project.
I'm building Snaption (https://snaption.cc).
It solves a specific pain point I had as a developer: "Screenshot Chaos." I take dozens of screenshots daily (bugs, UI inspo, code snippets), but manually tagging and organizing them into Notion was too much friction.
Snaption automates this:
Shortcut to capture.
AI analyzes and summarizes the content.
Auto-syncs to Notion.
The stack is Next.js + [Insert your specific tech here, e.g., Supabase/OpenAI].
I'd love to hear feedback on the landing page or the core concept from the community here.
Since I’ve been shifting more towards platform engineering work in my career, the best reward abut this side hustle isn’t the financial benefit, but is the opportunity to stay grounded in software dev. I love seeing the changing APIs each year with the new iOS updates. And the seasonal approach to doing updates is always fun too.
[0]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/afi-explorer/id1564964107
CoPlay is a platform for managing fleets of gaming consoles, users and subscriptions for pediatric hospitals. Think of it as an mdm for Xbox devices/users that does managed subscriptions