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