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Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell

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Re: Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell

#291
post #84

Radiant: https://getradiant.app/ Premise: Takes your Spotify and turns it into a personalised FM-style radio station, complete with a snarky, AI-powered radio presenter called Rad. Rad'll quip, read you the news and weather on the hour, announce what you've just heard and what's coming next, gives you biographical info for bands you might not be too familiar with but most importantly; Rad helps you discover new music…

Trying it now and it seems really nice! I wish you had a desktop/web version, and it would be my daily background radio while I work all day. Spotify's Discover Weekly playlists are nice enough, but they barely carry me through the first 1-2 days, and then it gets pretty repetitive. It would also work really well as an Alexa skill, especially with Rad's commentary. What did you write the apps in?

Yep, the idea is that the stream of music it plays is both time appropriate and always relatively fresh. You can tune its selection algo too with the thumbs up or down (long pressing on either for more fine controls).

Web is due out in the next 2 weeks. Alexa skill has been on the roadmap forever as I've always seen smart speakers as like the place it makes the most sense.

The apps are Svelte based with capacitor (planning on switching to Tauri when that gets proper mobile support) and some custom plugins for the native stuff. It was a native iOS app but got a full rewrite to support Android and iOS with the web planned as a fast follow.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell

#292

https://zagi.net/ is a pay-for internet search engine, backed by Bing. I have been using myself for over a year. As it turns out, getting a payment system working is super frustrating. Current revenue is less than $5 per month (just me), and costs are less than $100 per month.

I was interested to understand the concept behind this service, went to the site and clicked the Docs link, but got " Not Found". Can you provide a simplified explanation for the concept behind the site? Thanks!

Re: Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell

#293
post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool! Just signed up. I was a little turned off by how much access you need to Spotify. Is that just because they don't have granular enough permissions?

What does it request? That part was in french for me.

Weird its in french. Thats all controlled by Spotify which suggests your Spotify is set to french. Might be worth checking to see if your Spotify is being accessed anywhere else...

Re: Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell

#294
I'm about break even on a learning project for me: https://chrono.quest -- until you factor in my dev/user support time lol

It's a bite-sized daily history game, much inspired by Wordle.

Why do it?

Every once in a while someone emails about how they play it with their friends or family every day and it helps them keep in touch.

Also, as a data engineer, I wanted to understand more of what goes into deploying a consumer web app. Turns out I much prefer crunching data :)

Re: Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell

#296
DevEstimates

I made a tool to turn my spreadsheet for project estimation into a slightly better web app experience. The premise is that project estimates (how long will feature X take to ship) tend to be extremely inaccurate and moderately toxic BUT if you don't /try/ to make them accurate you can still get useful project data.

This is essentially the 2 outside estimates from the "3 point estimate" project management paradigm -- I ask everyone working on the project for two intentionally extreme estimates - a mythical ship date if everything went impossibly well (works on the first try, the designs don't change, nothing pulls you away, etc) and a date that is intentionally after the ship date if absolutely everything goes wrong. These are extreme enough it tends to take the stress out of picking a date, they can be given from the hip in 30 seconds, and they obviously can't be weaponized as 'actual estimates' so there isn't as much fear that some manager somewhere will try to hold anyone to them as a deadline.

There is no resulting "this will probably ship on date X/Y/Z" answer but it has been extremely helpful on my team so far since you can learn a lot from the relationships between the guesses - big gaps between team members means we're not on the same page, everyone jumping up means requirements just got changed or discovered, the guesses growing at the same rate week over week means we don't feel like we're making progress, etc.

It has been a surprisingly effective tool when using it this way but I'm the first to admit it isn't for everyone since it does NOT spit out a "when will this ship" date and it actually just tells the project leader where to go do more legwork (and I think it takes a rare, mindful person to like using a tool that tells them to go work more - doesn't feel like a pain killer OR a vitamin). As a secondary benefit it has also been helpful for folks (me included) to reflect on our estimation accuracy after the project ships.

I've made it in a "maybe this could make money one day if other people unexpectedly want this too" but I don't expect that and I honestly kind of love the project being just for my use case and not having customers - the writing is snarky (eg, "Estimating sucks but most businesses still demand estimates from their makers anyway..."), the ui is brutalist and minimal (no design framework other than the ironically named classless.css), and it is not very feature bloated yet. I have had fun throwing spaghetti code around and not worrying about breaking things for customers or impacting other team members.

At this point the project is (minimally) feature complete and I'm using it for my real life work - I'm in the last stage of deciding where it is going to live in production so hopefully it can 'go live' next week instead of living on my laptop. I'll make a proper HN post at that point so y'all can roast me into oblivion since I need to be taken down a peg every once in a while.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell

#297
post #251

https://blocvox.com tl;dr: crowdsourced microblogging platform that encourages inter-community dialogue. I.e. wrest the very fate of your causes back from self-serving officials, celebrities, and mass media! It started as a side project 10 years ago, before I took some time off to try to build it into something more. Alas I knew far too little of marketing and customer development.

Sound interesting, tried checking on it but getting a "NET::ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID" notice (NOT a criticism, just an FYI)

Re: Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell

#298
post #84

Radiant: https://getradiant.app/ Premise: Takes your Spotify and turns it into a personalised FM-style radio station, complete with a snarky, AI-powered radio presenter called Rad. Rad'll quip, read you the news and weather on the hour, announce what you've just heard and what's coming next, gives you biographical info for bands you might not be too familiar with but most importantly; Rad helps you discover new music…

Cool! Just signed up. I was a little turned off by how much access you need to Spotify. Is that just because they don't have granular enough permissions?

I know it's a bit of a laundry list. Everything there is required to use the Spotify API the way I needed to. Playlist read/write so it can add songs you like to the 'Liked on Radiant on Spotify', Profile to set your locale when making requests and for setting your profile picture if you have one etc etc.

I'll look at paring it back in future if I can!

Re: Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell

#299
Bulletyn is a custom news digest creator: https://www.bulletyn.co/

No fees, no ads. Only costs me ~$5/mo to run anyways.

As others here have mentioned, I maintain this because I get so much value out of it personally - it's easily worth the cost for myself. I have ~100 total users who I hope are also getting similar value.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell

#300
https://ideastrikes.com/ A project idea and brainstorming app. It's largely in an MVP stage and gets almost no traffic. I've done very little to promote it, and the UX can use a bunch of work, but I find it valuable for myself so I keep it online.

It's a tool that I use, and no one else does, but I get enough value from it that justifies the annual domain name renewal.

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