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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

#471

Post by popupeyecare »

i-dont-remember wrote: post #431
popupeyecare wrote: post #165

I’ve created Pixie, a platform to employ and track your kids work. For families with a business, it helps reduce tax burden and fund a child’s Roth. I’m a physician with some 1099 income, built the platform myself because my kids help with my side projects, and have since onboarded CPAs who now offer it to their clients. I saved 5k this year on my own taxes by employing my kids and it has funded their Roth. Soon afte…

This is neat, I appreciate that even if I can't use the service, i still learned something new about what's possible. Gonna keep it in the back-pocket for sharing with friends. Also reminded me of when Justin Jackson talked about how he hired his kids for help with real projects and the positives from it https://justinjackson.ca/flipping-tables

I love working with my kids. They help out, feel accomplished, and its bonding time.

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

#472

Post by whatamidoingyo »

davenci wrote: post #194
laurentiurad wrote: post #135

I built and run several SaaS platforms: - https://dave-bot.com -> a full-stack AI platform where you can generate videos, images, music, code, 3d objects with frontier Gen AI models. - https://headsnap.io -> a platform that you can generate images of yourself based on 4 selfies. - https://quantiq.live -> a service providing financial and historical data for stocks, as well as government trades. - https://aivestor.tec…

Do you think it will become more difficult to make money on such services due to AI getting better and better at coding? Like, wouldn’t that make it easier for people to create competing services? Or do you think this effect is counteracted with AI also opening up for new opportunities for creating services that would not otherwise be feasible pre AI?

That headshot project looks completely AI generated. The landing page is a full-fledged AI template.

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

#473

Post by black_puppydog »

mickael-kerjean wrote: post #91

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…

This could probably be more profitable for you with better tagline/explanation!

I have the context for what "that comment" was, might even be in the target audience, yet from the landing page I'm still not entirely sure what it actually does. Might be worth trying a few "it's like X but with Y" or "imagine if dropbox could Z" and other formulations on uninitiated people in your target audience?

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

#476

Post by nsim »

For projects of this size, what legal/financial structure do you use? Particularly of interest for what Australians do, but any stories would be good.

When I've looked, a sole trader with liability and cyber insurance seemed reasonable (maybe $2k/yr), but a Pty ltd with the same would probably be safer ($5k/yr).

It all comes down to what the risk of being sued is though. I'm sure selling games wouldn't require this.

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

#477

Post by lhr0909 »

I built a receipt organizer and tracker app on iOS in May this year and now it has just past $200 in monthly recurring revenue and >$500 in December. Before this I have been collecting my own receipts and scanning them into a private website I built for myself, then one day I was like, why don't I make it into an app so it is easier to use and I can share it with others?

https://receipt-genie.com

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/receipt-organizer-receiptgenie...

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

#478

Post by DamnInteresting »

nikole9696 wrote: post #455
DamnInteresting wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! We had our 20th birthday earlier this year, so we've certainly been around for some vintage devices. Over the years our primary audience moved from desktop web browsers to mostly mobile readers, and now our largest audience is podcast listeners. Site traffic is indeed down in recent years. The largest decline was when Facebook introduced "boosting," and stopped showing our posts to 90%+ of our Facebook follow…

I love this site - have you considered monetizing with like e-books or other offline offerings, if you don't already? Also, your traffic might not be counting those of us like myself who use an RSS feed (a la Feedly) - those links don't go to your site, they just go to, well, the link. =)

Thanks! We do indeed have a sort of e-book monetization; donating above certain thresholds gives one access to download an e-book version of our entire catalog.

And true enough that RSS traffic is largely uncounted, but there are many other indications of reduced visitor count--server-side logs, comment count on original content, number of email subscribers, and that sort of thing.

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

#479

Post by throwaway5757 »

eXpl0it3r wrote: post #328
throwaway5757 wrote: post #317

I put sponsor information on my open source project, and it has been giving me $600/mo in the past few months. There are only a few thousand stars on GitHub, but it's already the most popular tool in a paticular niche area.

What are the reasons to use a throw away account and neither mention the product nor the niche area?

There are 5%-ish code are contributed by other people, I feel really bad for not sharing the money with them. Anyway, I wish that GitHub offers the option to sponsor a project, not one single maintainer.

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

#480

Post by didgetmaster »

keybits wrote: post #261
skwee357 wrote: post #145

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!

I still have a 25 year old HP LaserJet printer that has a built in FAX function. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to use it since we gave up our landline about 20 years ago. Still prints well, however.
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