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Posted by cvbox 12/18/2025

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

485 points | 560 commentspage 9
Etheon 12/18/2025|
I created Multy 5 years ago. Thanks to a post on HN at that time, it was a small success (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25870504)

Since then, I continue to maintain the website and I have around 50k lists, 8k users, and around 400€ MRR (ads and subscriptions).

I'd love to see more users, but I'm glad of what I did with multy !

If you want to check: https://multy.me

internet_points 12/18/2025|
how do you deal with spam/abuse?
Etheon 12/18/2025||
Dashboard and moderation. I created an admin dashboard to check users and lists and can easily delete / ban users.

Right now it's fine with the number of lists created per day

xk3 12/19/2025||
I make between $400 ~ $600/mo between these two:

Disk Prices on eBay - https://unli.xyz/diskprices/

Digital Film Stock - https://unli.xyz/digitalfilmstock/

Both are very similar... just a lot of regex (200+ expressions) to parse eBay item titles and descriptions

rjh29 12/26/2025|
FYI United Kingdom is the right term and the one UK users are more likely to look for!
jianzong 12/18/2025||
I have been building an iOS net worth tracker app as a side project for more than 5 years now:

https://www.percento.app

I was an accountant for 3 years before I switched my career to be a programmer, then I kept coding for 10+ years in big tech companies and had always wanted to build a product on my own. Eventually, I found the niche to combine my finance knowledge and my iOS skills into this App and happily building for a few years.

leipert 12/18/2025|
Can I share data with my partner? I’ve been looking for a way to help my partner understand where we at money-wise.
jianzong 12/18/2025||
ah sorry currently there is no share data feature although I've heard this feature request from time to time, I probably should consider implementing this later. The premium membership can be shared with family members though -- one purchase for all members.
gagarwal123 12/18/2025||
I recently exited a Shopify App which was making ~800$ MRR and just shipped my first AI Chrome extension. It dubs YouTube videos into 82+ languages and offers more controls for better youtube experience

I’d love your feedback - https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/atlas-ai-youtube-du...

hboon 12/18/2025||
I work on https://theblue.social which provides Bluesky native tools and cross-posting tools.
dsincl12 12/18/2025||
We're a group of developers who worked together years ago. We meet a few times a year, but scheduling is always a hassle with endless back-and-forth trying to align everyone's calendars. Frustrated by this, I built Troviamo to solve it automatically. I know similar tools exist, but this one is modern and tailored to exactly what we needed.

https://troviamo.app

MyFirstSass 12/18/2025|
How's this different than the good old Doodle everyone uses in europe at least?

https://doodle.com/en/

jborak 12/18/2025||
I run Packetriot: https://packetriot.com, which is an alternative to ngrok. It's been in operation for 6-ish years and reached $500/month in year two. It doesn't replace my salary (yet) but that's what I'm working toward. Thankful to have thousands of users and some big companies using our services or self-hosting our server.

This is a fun space to work in but there's lot of small competitors and opensource alternatives. In the first few years it was sometimes demotivating, but at some point I began seeing competitors bow out and Packetriot kept getting better and better each year.

This year I published a lot of updates across the platform. Our UX is better with a new web-based UI for our client and all of the features of the platform can be managed in the client UI. No more going back forth between the client and user portal.

I'm planning on releasing a community edition of our server in 2026 so that anyone can use our network server for free, for personal use or to evaluate for commercial use.

meshosh 12/22/2025||
I run a porn website that gets me around $1000 a month now. I'm doing this for about 5 years and it started as a side project to learn more about hosting, SEO, and monetization.

This was a simple Wordpress site, but then eventually I rebuilt the whole thing with Nextjs and tailwind because Wordpress was just too damn slow. In the process, I ended up building a custom CMS, which I'm now working on a white label version that I could sell in the future.

I'm hosting the whole thing on a VPS that costs about $30/month and have videos on cloudflare R2 for about $15/month.

[obviously NSFW] - https://blowjobit.com

phone_book 12/23/2025|
How are you dealing with porn verification laws? I have an idea for something porn related but it feels like there is a lot of red tape now that I don't want to deal with but I haven't done all that much research into it so I am probably wrong
superfamicom 12/18/2025||
Super Fine Cuts, super low run custom "vinyl" records. I have been working on automating some processing but currently it is all manual.

Had an overwhelming response as people are finding it mostly though ChatGPT which has been very interesting as I did a soft launch to friends only and no marketing.

https://superfinecuts.com/

meetingthrower 12/19/2025|
Now that is cool! What is pricing?
karolcodes 12/20/2025|
https://slouchsniper.com

i'm solving the "sitting is new smoking" problem. Basically an app that uses your webcam and local AI models to predict if you are sitting + your sitting posture, so you don't develop neck pain.

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