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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

#401

Post by huydotnet »

tecleandor wrote: post #260
huydotnet wrote: post #44

I started my project in 2023 and posted here, made 20k that year. The traffic has been slowly decreasing during 2024, and last October, I was officially entering losing territory, where the cost of running it exceeded the total earnings (mostly due to free trials). It's been a good journey. Thank you so much to whoever keeps running this thread!

Just a small comment, as I don't know if you're planning to wrap up or keep maintaining the product... I can't find the pricing of the product on the site, I only find that I get '10 free credits', but I don't know how much a credit is and what can I do with it. Home page says it's one credit per diagram, but then the docs say it's a certain amount of credits per modification (that could be correct or not, I guess...…

Thank you so much, that is a fair point! It's part of a series of mistakes I made, the product started out as a free to try and only showed the pricing after the user used up all their credits (I didn't even have a landing page back then). I'll update the landing page to make this clear!

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

#402

Post by ahhmki »

strongpigeon wrote: post #11

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

"This app isn't available for your device because it was made for an older version of Android"

Using android 15 on a Nothing Phone 1. Any chance to get it working?

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

#403

Post by ferrufino »

Route weather forecasting based on date/time, speed/pace, ideal conditions in Settings. As also go/no go callout windows, AI nutrition/gear list. Deterministic engine of fitness readiness, being able to see progress and fitness and overall body health.

Used it for: Skiing, hiking, cycling. Any outing with a route.

Import a route from Strava, RideWithGPS, GPX/FIT, Apple fitness. Plan for weather forecasting! Fitness readiness is obtained from metrics collected from a smart watch.

I actually turned it free recently. But barely reached over 400 MRR then started dropping. Consumer market is hard and I'm more interested in learning about AI and a full stack side project.

https://brezza.cc/

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

#404

Post by dezmou »

tikotus wrote: post #120

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.

I love it, just purchased a pack. I've also found that it is a very great tool to test LLM, like take a screenshot of a half resolved game and feed it to ChatGPT with the rules and ask him to select the next target

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

#405

Post by podlp »

I run a podcast app for flip phones called PodLP. Revenue hasn’t always been $500/month, but averaged over the past 5 years it’s been over $500. It’s been primarily from sponsorships (podcasts get featured on the homepage to get more listeners), although next year looks more uncertain so I’m looking at other avenues.

https://podlp.com

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

#406

Post by strongpigeon »

ahhmki wrote: post #402
strongpigeon wrote: post #11

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

"This app isn't available for your device because it was made for an older version of Android" Using android 15 on a Nothing Phone 1. Any chance to get it working?

Yeah that shouldn’t be happening. I’ll take a look today

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

#407

Post by dezmou »

dezmou wrote: post #404
tikotus wrote: post #120

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.

I love it, just purchased a pack. I've also found that it is a very great tool to test LLM, like take a screenshot of a half resolved game and feed it to ChatGPT with the rules and ask him to select the next target

turn out Claude Sonnet 4.5 is far better as resolving those as ChatGPT 5.2

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

#408

Post by hankmh »

TCSoft wrote: post #393
hankmh wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What have you tried for marketing?

Hey, thanks for asking! I used those Facebook and Google ad credits you always get when you sign-up for something, ran two postcard campaigns sent directly to HOA presidents, paid to rank higher on Capterra, hired an SEO firm for 2 years, was in a Valpak insert, and ran an ad in The Chicago Cooperator for 6 months. The Capterra campaign was by far the best ROI, but still too expensive to make sense in the long term.

That seems like a lot!

My assumption would be the best marketing, given you are a team of 1, would be demand capture campaigns. And it seems that your Capterra results bear that out.

But, your SEO agency would probably have focused on high intent keywords for demand capture, and presumably that didn’t work so well.

Anyway, seems like an interesting marketing challenge targeting a niche market that frankly I don’t know much about.

I wonder if you could target HOA management agencies rather than the association presidents. I know that many HOAs are managed externally at least from an operational perspective. That said, I know so little about the market…

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

#409

Post by buggy7 »

laurentiurad wrote: post #365
buggy7 wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, I was looking to try this out but I was getting a 404 on the signup page. Just a heads up.

Thanks for that! I just checked and it seems to be working. Can you maybe try again?

Looks to be working now, thanks.

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

#410

Post by nanfinitum »

duckkg5 wrote: post #321

Cold call training aka 'exposure therapy' https://coldcallgym.com Just a call a number and practice a cold call with a bot. People seemed to like it when I built it so I made a free and paid tier. Getting like 3-5 new users per day without really doing anything.

This is pretty unique and amazing. How are you marketing this all the way to $500/mo.?
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