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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

#561
I built a GLP-1 tracker app for iOS/Android called mojo.

mojo connects your health data (apple health/health connect) and get real-time AI feedback when new data is logged. It proactively detects your changes and provide insights on achievements and suggestions.

So far it's around $1150 revenue per month with 200 paying users and 4000 downloads.

https://mojoapp.ai/

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

#562
I'm not quite at $500/mo yet (just launched the waitlist), but this is my attempt to get there in 2026.

I'm building Snaption (https://snaption.cc).

It solves a specific pain point I had as a developer: "Screenshot Chaos." I take dozens of screenshots daily (bugs, UI inspo, code snippets), but manually tagging and organizing them into Notion was too much friction.

Snaption automates this:

Shortcut to capture.

AI analyzes and summarizes the content.

Auto-syncs to Notion.

The stack is Next.js + [Insert your specific tech here, e.g., Supabase/OpenAI].

I'd love to hear feedback on the landing page or the core concept from the community here.

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

#563

https://martiansoftware.com/chatkeeper/ I built ChatKeeper because I wanted to treat my ChatGPT history like a local knowledge base, with local-first access to my data. It’s a command-line tool (GUI in progress) that takes a full ChatGPT .zip export and syncs it with local Markdown files. You can move and rename them freely and they will stay in sync on future runs. It pairs well with tools like Obsidian and lets you…

I’ve been looking for something like this for Claude

Hey miller_joe! I actually just built this - Claude Vault! (Free)

Same philosophy as ChatKeeper - local-first markdown files that sync and work great with Obsidian. I had the exact same problem with my Claude conversations buried in JSON exports.

Just published to PyPI:

pip install claude-vault

claude-vault init

claude-vault sync conversations.json

----

Auto-generates tags using local Ollama (completely offline, no API costs) and detects relationships between conversations

Would love to collaborate or integrate with ChatKeeper down the line - seems like we're solving the same problem for different LLMs!

Check it out: https://github.com/MarioPadilla/claude-vault

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

#564

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…

If you don't need an account to send a fax, how do you comply with law enforcement's requests to identify who sent a specific fax? I would think this would open you up to significant liability

Safe harbor laws protect you from liability of the content sent.

You can simply respond to law enforcement that you have no data outside of payment data

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

#565

I love fountain pens, and use handwriting as a kind of superpower to remember everything I need to at work. So I started an online fountain pen shop: https://www.bottleandplume.com - it's focused entirely on all the stuff I love: fountain pens, fountain-pen friendly paper, bottled inks, and everything else you'd want or need if you were getting into the hobby, playing with . I got lucky with timing a few marketing th…

It's a great looking site. I'll keep it in mind once I use up more of the ink I already have!

Thank you! I can relate...buying too much ink is what got me into this mess in the first place :-D.

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

#566

https://dbpro.app I’m building DB Pro, a modern desktop database client for developers who want a fast, local-first workflow. I started in October 2025, launched v1 at the end of November, and just crossed $1k MRR. I also post devlogs of life building and marketing DB Pro and am about to post devlog #4. The latest one is here if anyone’s curious: https://youtu.be/-T4GcJuV1rM Still very early, but it’s been fun seeing…

For what it’s worth, I think there’s space for such an app for Duckdb databases. It’s growing in popularity and not very widely supported yet.

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

#567

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?

[deleted]

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

#568
post #513

I make between $400 ~ $600/mo between these two: Disk Prices on eBay - https://unli.xyz/diskprices/ Digital Film Stock - https://unli.xyz/digitalfilmstock/ Both are very similar... just a lot of regex (200+ expressions) to parse eBay item titles and descriptions

FYI United Kingdom is the right term and the one UK users are more likely to look for!

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

#569

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?

I was using an OCR service but I have migrated to use LLM recently. It is actually cheaper and more scalable because it is accurate enough and I can also get more information (guess currency and timezone, and translate, and even help tag the receipts) with a single prompt. Currently it sits just a tad bit cheaper than my previous OCR service per receipt scanned. Since I am providing this as an app instead of as an automation, there is UI for user to make edits and they seem to be happy enough about the results with very minimal need to edit.

I have also been playing with open source VLMs like Qwen3-VL and it was surprisingly not too far behind. I think the next generation I should be able to switch over and save a bit more on cost.

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

#570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you use for OCR, I wonder if it's LLM isn't that too expensive (or flaky if cheap) to be scalable?

I was using an OCR service but I have migrated to use LLM recently. It is actually cheaper and more scalable because it is accurate enough and I can also get more information (guess currency and timezone, and translate, and even help tag the receipts) with a single prompt. Currently it sits just a tad bit cheaper than my previous OCR service per receipt scanned. Since I am providing this as an app instead of as an au…

Thanks for elaborating! Btw, what model is currently cheap yet accurate enough for you?
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