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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

#531

Post by alsetmusic »

BeniBoy wrote: post #139

I designed a pocket music instrument. I partnered with a company in China called Seeedstudio, they do the manufacturing, shipping, customer handling, etc. and I receive royalties on each sale. I varies from month to month, but above the 500$/month on 2025 :) I love to be able to focus on the design and not the practicalities of selling a hardware product! https://minichord.com/

I'm a recording electronic musician and clicked through with interest. Maybe I overlooked it, but I didn't see where I could hear how it sounds. It should be so obvious that I can't miss it, so even if it's there, I'd suggest making the link more prominent.

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

#532

Post by DANmode »

DamnInteresting wrote: post #389

My long-running website damninteresting.com and its affiliated projects (e.g., omiword.com) earn me a combined ~$700/month profit on average. Donations have been declining, however, so I don't know if I'll be piping up in next year's thread.

If you’ve recently dipped below, definitely still post.

I personally would still want to see your comment.

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

#533

Post by alsetmusic »

technusm1 wrote: post #159

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…

Froze at 99% scan completion on M1 Max, 64GB RAM, 14.8.2.

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

#534

Post by technusm1 »

alsetmusic wrote: post #533
technusm1 wrote: post #159

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…

Froze at 99% scan completion on M1 Max, 64GB RAM, 14.8.2.

Sorry about that - thanks for reporting it.

I haven’t been able to reproduce a freeze at 99% yet. If you’re willing, could you share a bit more detail (approx folder size / number of files, and whether CPU or memory spiked near the end)?

If you’re open to it, I’d also be happy to jump on a quick call or screen share to debug this together — totally optional. You can reach me at my support email mentioned in the About DedupX menu item. I’d really like to track this down and fix it.

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

#535

Post by aspenmayer »

czhu12 wrote: 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.

Just a heads-up:

The footer of https://canine.sh/ says the project is MIT licensed, but the GitHub site at https://github.com/CanineHQ/canine says the project is Apache 2.0 licensed.

I'm not sure how to reconcile that, but the project seems really interesting, either way.

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

#536

Post by techtalksweekly »

https://techtalksweekly.io/

I run a newsletter called Tech Talks Weekly[1] where my subscribers get one email per week with all the latest Software Engineering conference talks and podcasts[2].

I originally built it for myself because I was subscribed to too many conference channels on YouTube and things started getting messy, so I wrote a script to fetch the new talks automatically. Eventually, I turned it into a newsletter.

I currently have over 7,500 subscribers with email open rate consistently between 32%-35%, although I plan to trim the list soon to get into the 40-50% range.

I recently started offering sponsorship options[3] and made $500 in Nov and $700 in Dec so far.

[1] https://techtalksweekly.io/

[2] https://www.techtalksweekly.io/p/what-is-tech-talks-weekly

[3] https://www.techtalksweekly.io/p/sponsor

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

#537

Post by kaeruct »

crobertsbmw wrote: post #19

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

Just bought a German copy. Spanish would be nice as well :)

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

#538

Post by trowa159 »

quarry_quirk wrote: post #372
dubme1 wrote: 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…

Why would you ever admit to such a thing? Don’t you have any shame? It’s odd you admit looking at NSFW content all day messes with your mental health but I guess it’s ok since you make 50k and the women in your life aren’t having AI porn generated of them.

Why should he be shameful. Porn is considered entertainment industry. People use technology to do whatever they want dude. Its not like he is using it to kill someone.

Seriously, there are way too many Whiners on HN

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

#540

Post by aristofun »

lhr0909 wrote: post #477

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.c…

What do you use for OCR, I wonder

if it's LLM isn't that too expensive (or flaky if cheap) to be scalable?

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