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Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell

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Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell

#261

I run a dead-simple, one-time, online fax service called JustFax Online[0]. While I don't have a recurring revenue as I operate one one-time payment, for the past months I have been consistently grossing over €500/mo. This also brings tears to my eyes, as I remember[1] browsing these threads and being amazed (still am) by all the people who make side projects and make money from them, and at the same time thinking th…

TIL you can still buy fax machines!

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell

#262
post #7

Occasionally $500/month, but more reliably $300/month in sales of my Video Hub App - lets users browse, search, tag, and organize videos on local / network drives. Aiming to have an 8th anniversary release February 2026. $5 per copy (Windows, Max, Linux; keep forever) https://videohubapp.com/ MIT open source (build your own copy) https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App

A bit of unsolicited advice -

* Focus on Windows users. Windows desktop share is 10x that of Mac and nowadays Windows users pay almost as willingly as Mac ones.

* Charge several times more.

* Redo the website. In particular get rid of 3D slant and on-hover animations, put larger high-res screenshots, explain each of them well (and not in gray on gray text), put up "Windows / Mac / Linux" in bold friendly and highly-visible letters. Better yet have separate Download buttons for each. Add version and last release date, next to the Download button. Have at-a-glance summary of features closer to the top of the page. Ditto for pricing and trialing details. Ideally, adjust windows chrome in the screenshots based on the web client's OS, i.e. show Windows screenshots to Windows visitors, Mac ones - to those coming from Macs, etc. The last thing you want to show Mac screenshots to Windows people, because it implies that the Windows version was an afterthought.

All in all, the site gives an amateurish/hobby project vibe, and the $5 price cements the impression. If you are to spruce things up a bit, you can potentially live off this app. At the very least and with not much of an effort you can double/triple what you make off it.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell

#263

I launched Filestash [1] as my response to the infamous “Dropbox should just be FTP” comment. Once I had a decent FTP experience, I kept going: adding support for pretty much every storage protocol, plugins to expose Dropbox (or anything else) over FTP, SFTP, MCP, or S3, and all the features I wished Dropbox had, with plugins to customize everything. The base product is open-source and I make money from custom builds…

Where is the dropbox-part in this? This seems to be a filemanager for remote storages, which is kinda the opposite of dropbox, which is mainly a local service for syncing data. Or did the documentation missed explaining the sync-function?

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell

#264
post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

30 pictures? I doubt that

Polaroid paralellises well.

anyway it's just a disclaimer. It never took more than 25 minutes and the fastest generation was 3 minutes for >30 pics.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell

#265

I'm developing Wallpunch, a censorship resistant VPN for people in China, Iran, and Russia. Userbase is pretty small as I'm still polishing things up, but I hope to expand my marketing efforts a lot in 2026! https://wallpunch.net/

How are you going to accept payments for this without outing yourself and becoming a target to authorities in those countries?

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell

#266

Here’s my own side project that’s been earning a bit on the side: I built DedupX, a macOS app for finding duplicate and visually similar files fast - especially useful for photographers and anyone with big local storage collections. What it does - Exact duplicate detection using incremental hashing so it doesn’t have to fully load huge files. - Perceptual image matching finds similar images even if they’re resized or…

How do you market it, through social-media or are there dedicated channels for sharing awareness for such Mac Apps, if you don't mind sharing?

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell

#267
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...

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell

#268
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).

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell

#269
post #184

I was hesitant to add my own but I think you might find it interesting as we make money not from clients but from grants. We have IronCalc[1]. We don't make money from customers as we don't have a finalized product yet. But we have an ongoing grant from the NLnet[2]. You can have a look at the kind of projects they are granting money. It's always a source of inspiration. That being said IronCalc takes a lot of time f…

The friction to try it out is already really low, I like that! But it could be even lower if instead of an image the interactive version is served right on the landing page. Great project!

Yes, Dani the designer involved in the project, keeps saying that. There are two things that stops me from doing that:

* It would make the landing page a bit heavier * I would need to synchronize deployments somehow

But I guess I should do that sooner rather than later.

Thanks!

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell

#270

https://cluesbysam.com I started making a daily logic puzzle called Clues by Sam in May and it's been stadily growing since. The number one thing people were asking for was more puzzles, so I started selling puzzle packs instead of monetizing with ads. The reception has been great, and the revenue has been enough for me to decline some consulting gigs and instead focus on improving the game.

Oh, and perhaps worth mentioning that today's puzzle is not very representative of a regular puzzle, as usually the grid is filled with different professions and not reindeers!
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