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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

#341
post #338

I run https://aliveai.app a large uncensored (i.e. adult) AI image and video generator. It started as a small side project but slowly grew every month and recently exploded to well over 50k USD revenue per month. It's fun to have a large community of paying users but honestly I never thought out of all my side projects this one will make it. I am still a one man show managing everything from development, marketing, c…

Have you considered hiring someone to reduce the load of repetitive tasks?

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

#342

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!

It's still included on some office multifunctional printer/scanner machines.

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

#344
post #20

https://canine.sh - makes it dead simple to turn your Kubernetes environment into a Heroku like PaaS. Mainly used in organizations with developers who want to deploy to a corporate Kubernetes environment, but don’t want to deal with the complexities. It’s fully open source so we’re covered by sponsors, the largest being Portainer $5k+ / m from sponsorships. Makes it possible to keep the cloud offering totally free.

API Reference returns a 404 btw

https://docs.canine.sh/swagger/page.html

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

#345

https://fivethreeone.app/ a weightlifting app for 5/3/1 has been earning me ~$1000 a month for over two years now. I'm actively working on a successor that allows you to create your own custom workout programs using formulas: https://vis.fitness

Looks really good, will try it.

What is your revenue split, tip vs non tips? I've always wondered if putting a tip button on a free app could generate significant income.

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

#346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fetch those from 10-Q forms through an internal scraper I built. The response is quite big, you can check it out here: https://www.quantiq.live/docs

Honestly looks like a scam and your description of it makes it even sound more like one. Most of those fields you return in that docs page have nothing to do with k or qs and are equity pricing data you are buying from another third party. Not a knock just being honest as it looks like you just don’t know so maybe this helps. Here is an example of a real company that scrapes k/q docs. https://sec-api.io/docs

Question was about financials. The service is not only limited to q forms, obviously. Historical data or government trades are not available there. So you want me to share with the Internet all my data sources just to prove you it's not a scam?

You seem to be trying to promote a service and throw weird accusations that the service looks like a scam without even trying it, which is shameful tbh.

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

#347

I’m still selling Computer Engineering for Babies. And I just launched a new book called Simple Machines Made Simple on Kickstarter a month or two ago. Both books are basically just simple interactive demos for kids and adults. https://hackylabs.com

It makes me so happy to see this genre taking off. We did "ABCs of Programming" [1] when our son was 2 at least partially because there weren't any real kid's books talking about what "dad does all day". Funnily enough it wasn't selling that well until I posted an article [2] on HN about my experience writing it. Then it did steady business for a few years

[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/1548489778 [2] https://arthur-johnston.com/hacker_writes_a_childrens_book/

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

#348
post #338

I run https://aliveai.app a large uncensored (i.e. adult) AI image and video generator. It started as a small side project but slowly grew every month and recently exploded to well over 50k USD revenue per month. It's fun to have a large community of paying users but honestly I never thought out of all my side projects this one will make it. I am still a one man show managing everything from development, marketing, c…

Have you considered hiring someone to reduce the load of repetitive tasks?

For a while I was looking for a non-technical co-founder, but I found it difficult to find someone who is both skilled and motivated in the adult content domain.

I am currently rewriting the user role and permission system with the goal of introducing a moderator role in the future that has limited, moderator-only access rights. At the moment, there are only admin and regular user roles.

Even with this in place I am unsure where to advertise for an NSFW content moderator position.

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

#349

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…

I don’t need to send a fax often, but when I do it’s a real pain. I’ll be bookmarking this.

I love that it doesn’t need an account and is a simple straightforward service, as if I was paying to use an actual fax machine somewhere. I wish nearly every service online was built this way.

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

#350
kitecourier.com - the end-to-end certified mail platform that makes sending legal notices as easy as sending email.

Revenue is very spiky. Some months ~$10k, some ~$100.

Inspired by this Patrick McKenzie thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7135833

Certified mail is weirdly powerful leverage. I decided to productize that.

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