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…
Smart and affordable app.
Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
281–290 of 575 posts
Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
#282I'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/
Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
#283https://soundreads.io/ An audiobook streaming service that focuses on timeless classic works in the public domain. I do everything from building the app to the audio engineering. One thing I'm especially proud of is the restoration I did on the "War of the Worlds" 1938 Radio broadcast. I'm really happy with how it turned out. I've made it temporarily free to listen to [1] in case anyone is curious. You should compare…
Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
#284Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
#285https://soundreads.io/ An audiobook streaming service that focuses on timeless classic works in the public domain. I do everything from building the app to the audio engineering. One thing I'm especially proud of is the restoration I did on the "War of the Worlds" 1938 Radio broadcast. I'm really happy with how it turned out. I've made it temporarily free to listen to [1] in case anyone is curious. You should compare…
I’m seeing a lot of AI tells in the cover art (like for War of the Worlds) and book descriptions. Didn’t see any discussion of where the narration comes from on the site. Are all your audiobooks restorations of classic readings? Do you hire narrators to record new ones? Or is there AI involved there too?
A good chunk of the initial audio has been curated and re-engineered/enhanced from librivox, however I’m also working with voice actors to produce originals. For instance I just release A Christmas Carol which is original to our platform (also see Metamorphosis and Alice and Wonderland). More are coming every month but it takes time to develop real audio recordings with humans.
I appreciate your constructive feedback and welcome more!
Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
#286I 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…
That's super cool, how do you run it? Are you using some other service under the hood, and just abstract their annoying pricing model?
Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
#287Link to game if anyone is interested: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2250550/Tornado_Research_...
Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
#288Occasionally $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-v…
Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
#289A friend and I host a monthly dinner club for people interested in ethnic cuisine. We work with a single restaurant each month to create an 8-12 course all inclusive price fixe menu. The food is served family style and is authentic to the region we are hosting. We typically host the dinners on a Tues or Wed when the restaurants in our region aren’t too busy and could use the extra business. Since 2023 we’ve been to 4…
This is so cool! As someone who loves trying out new restaurants I need to ask: why would I go with you guys instead of going to the restaurants myself with a friend or partner? Looking around your website it seems to me that there's very large attendance, which in my mind means generally less focus on the food itself. Do you think one of the main factors is meeting new people/the sense of community? Anyway good job!…
- We do the work to find the restaurant and curate a menu, story, and theme. E.g., we might go to an Indian restaurant and focus the event on only the southern regional dishes.
- Many times we have dishes that are off menu specially for our event.
- Sense of community. We have quite a few regulars who have gotten to know each other. In 2025, 45 people reached their 20th or 30th event with us. Since we take over the whole restaurant there’s a little more freedom in how the space is used. Lots of new friendships have been forged.
- When you go to a restaurant with a friend or small group, you can only order so much. We’ve had events with upwards of 25 different bites. There’s really no better way to sample everything the restaurant has to offer.
- There’s a few people who say their partner are picky eaters, so they come to our event each month to have the opportunity to be a bit more adventurous. It’s an incredibly diverse group with a lot of different reasons to attend.
Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
#290https://martiansoftware.com/chatkeeper/ 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…