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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

479 points | 552 commentspage 6
trubalca 7 days ago|
I sell laser cut decorative maps

TheMapsGuy.com

soared 6 days ago||
Really cool! Huge fan of maps - it looks like there is some amount of processing, so you have that automated or are you manually editing details? Also any advice on someone just getting into engraving?
darknavi 7 days ago|||
What's your laser setup? 80-100W CO2 laser?
trubalca 7 days ago||
I use a CO2 laser yeah
DubMFG 7 days ago||
If you use LightBurn, hi from the team!
darknavi 7 days ago||
Wow! I was using LightBurn this evening for some holiday presents. Hello from a very thankful MacOS user.
jaza 6 days ago|||
Wow, lovely cartography and lovely works of art! And so many cities to choose from!
meetingthrower 5 days ago|||
Very cool! Also very high value! Suspect you could raise prices.
chirau 7 days ago|||
These look nice. If I request a custom city, how long would it take?
trubalca 6 days ago||
I can usually get a map shipped out within a day of the order (depending on what time you order at). I'll have you give me the custom map information here:

preview.themapsguy.com

lemonberry 7 days ago||
These are gorgeous. Nice work.
trubalca 6 days ago||
Thank you, I appreciate it! :)
callyma 21 hours ago||
I'm not quite at $500/mo yet (just launched the waitlist), but this is my attempt to get there in 2026.

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.

mergesort 2 days ago||
I started running AI workshops this year [1], stemming from work that I do teaching at a non-profit in New York. [2]

I've spent a lot of my life teaching people, but for the last 2-3 years I've been fascinated with AI. I'm not in the "Sam Altman is building a digital god" camp, but I've seen how amazing AI is by watching people who have no technical background build products, launch their own businesses, and change their lives in under 9 months. It's pretty remarkable what's already possible, but not everybody knows or believes that.

I set out to find a niche when it comes to teaching: I make AI more accessible to regular people. A lot of what's written about AI is unbelievable — either because people say AI can do things that it cannot or because people say that AI cannot do things that are already possible today.

I've been bridging that divide one workshop at a time. They've spread very well by word of mouth because there are no tricks here. People bring an idea that they want to build, and we do that in three hours by learning the mental models and communication skills necessary to work with AI in a short period of time.

I've had a few workshops every month since I started in April, which is remarkable as an indie who's been trying to earn a living by helping people. I'm grateful to my friend who sat down with me for what became my first workshop, and helped me start this new line of business.

It's very gratifying to hear a PM with great ideas tell me "I have a new hobby that I can't put down". That's what I mean when I say I'm making AI accessible — people are this close to manifesting the ideas in their head the way programmers have been able to for decades — they just may need a little bit of guided learning.

[1]: https://build.ms/ai [2]: https://pursuit.org

planb 6 days ago||
My Mac App Store only scanning app (https://www.pdfscannerapp.com/) still makes approximately this much a month after nearly 15 years on the store (I published it on day one when the store was realeased) - all updates since then have been free, so I'm just selling to new customers. It's a hobby project that keeps me into Apple platform development and allows me to work on it in bursts (like the last update for Liquid Glass) and then let it rest for a while (if Apple doesn't break any APIs).
syrgian 6 days ago||
My wife runs https://www.saviament.com/, an open-access educational website in Catalan. She also sells printable content following the same style as the website, which has exploded in popularity this year and has become a decent source of income.
codeadict 6 days ago|
Molt bé!
dbgrman 7 days ago||
Launched Standly, a standing desk companion app on iOS and Max in Feb 2025. Steadily grew it by talking to people on reddit and in person. Mostly word of mouth sales and ASO. Initially it was only for mac but launching iOS has been good. Most downloads coming from organic search. Most people like it to build stamina for standing and stretching while working, especially those with lower back pain. Most customers are from EU.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/standly-standing-desk-timer/id...

simonsarris 6 days ago||
I made https://meetinghouse.cc as a way for twitter people to put themselves on a map and write a bio, and what they're looking for. It's a way to find and be found, if you want to see who's interesting nearby for friends, dating, new parents meeting new parents, etc.

Pins cost $12, there are 474 pins placed so far. This keeps the quality high (there are no spam pins, only real people) but will fundamentally limit the growth, I think.

lippihom 2 days ago||
The map for this is cool but a table view would also be nice.
daveguy 6 days ago|||
> but will fundamentally limit the growth, I think.

Thank goodness. We need more small social media with inherently limited scope to protect from the manipulative garbage coming out of big social media companies.

callamdelaney 6 days ago||
I keep zooming but the profile pictures never get bigger!
Aldipower 6 days ago||
Because I was frustrated of the pricing and feature list of TrainingPeaks, I've built my own training planning and analytics platform for endurance athletes (and coaches too!). It is called Tredict (https://www.tredict.com.) and it covers almost everything for runners, cyclists and swimmers over training effort forecasting and prediction, a comprehensive training log, training plans, workout planning, Vo2Max calculation, FTP assessments and collaboration with other athletes and coaches, equipment tracking and so on and so on. Quite a lot of things TrainingPeaks offers too. It has integrations for sending and execution of planned workouts to your watch with Garmin, Wahoo, Suunto, Coros, icTrainer and it receives executed trainings or health data from Polar, Dropbox, Oura, Withings and others! I think I did more then 15 oAuth integrations in total over Tredict's existens? And the platform offers an oAuth2 API for 3-party integrations on its own.

The payment model is a pre-paid model for 12 months of write access to your calendar. It brings ~500-600 Euros (before taxes) a month since 6 years.

https://www.tredict.com

bot347851834 6 days ago|
Nice! The site looks very clean, good job! I recently bought a Garmin and I was looking into analytics-heavy training platform since I'm doing a lot of different sports so I can't just go for a 10k training plan or something. I ended up going with intervals.icu, how is tredict different from it? It appears a little tighter on the visual maybe? Anyway good job!
Aldipower 6 days ago||
Thank you. Tbh I cannot tell too many difference to intervals.icu, last time I had a look was 2 years ago or so. I remember it lacked some things, but this could have changed. I think Tredict is a little bit more on the straight forward site, just looks cleaner, visually and also from the workflow, also more performant. But this is of course opinionated as I am the inventor of Tredict. I have deep respect for Intervals too. You just could use both for a certain amount of time to see which one fits better for you. :-)
binsquare 6 days ago||
I run a keywords research tool, it scans posts across social media sites like bluesky, mastodon, hackernews, etc.

KeywordsPal.com

It's actually super interesting the technical aspects to scan 50k posts a day for as cheap as possible. I write about it here: https://keywordspal.com/blog/building-multi-platform-content...

I also built it as a result of being unsatisfied with f5bot

lippihom 2 days ago||
What were your issues with f5bot? I tried to sign up and Supabase auth went to spam btw.
tonixx 5 days ago||
[dead]
pattle 6 days ago|
I run Brick Ranker a website that tracks the value of LEGO sets and minifigures. You can also signup and catalogue your own collection so that you can track it's value or just see what you own.

It makes around $500 a month from a mixture of adsense and affiliate schemes. Would be good if I was making more but I've automated most it so I spend maybe 1 hour on it a month.

https://brickranker.com

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