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Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

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Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

#631

Post by greenie_beans »

nicksergeant wrote: post #610
greenie_beans wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

interesting. i love wagtail + django. sounds like you like your choice to switch to next?

Wagtail is amazing! It did everything we needed and more. My primary frustration was in building reusable server-side rendered components and "interactive islands" (as popularized by Astro). The Django/Jinja templating language can be pretty verbose and difficult to parameterize reusable functionality. I found myself constantly doing this: ``` {% with field|contact_label as label %} {{ label }} ``` (the "with" templa…

nice. yeah wagtail is great and so is django, but like any tech stack there are limits. i'm also skilled at react and have found a way to use react within django but it feels weird sometimes.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

#632

Post by cdosborn »

PinkPigeon wrote: post #24

https://pinkpigeon.co.uk Who'd have thought that a CMS could still make money in 2024, but this one is around £500 a month. It obviously doesn't pay the bills or the mortgage, but it works. All my clients are word of mouth, I do not advertise at all (a combination of costs and insanely opaque / fractured advertising models by Facebook and co...I don't have time to get a phd in your ad platform to see if any of my mon…

> It's mostly about having low-JS, good SEO, easy access to information, which can be managed by very inexperienced users

Nice!

I shared in the parent thread about my tool which spell checks sites, it found a few small issues: https://www.spl.ing/report-card?website=pinkpigeon.co.uk&uui...

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

#634

Post by woutr_be »

akudha wrote: post #593
woutr_be wrote: post #467

I have developed about 20 mobile apps for the KaiOS ecosystem, which does around $500-$750 a month. I also run https://monitorprices.org , which is just a list of available monitors on Amazon, but provides a bit more filters. Does about $125 a month, maybe double if there’s a creator reward campaign running. Nothing splashy or exciting really, but it gives me motivation to keep trying things.

This is interesting. Why did you pick KaiOS? If money was the goal, I guess iOS and Android would make more, isn't it? How does the development process feel like?

I did some work for a client who wanted to build an app for it. After that I ended up building a few apps just for fun, and once they started bringing in some ad money, I just ended up building more.

I think their ecosystem is still small enough that good apps do well, whereas with iOS/Android you really have to build super polished apps and market them to thrive.

KaiOS is just HTML/JavaScript, I ended up using Vue and building my own component library that I could re-use in every app.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

#635

Post by kebob »

dannydandan wrote: post #616
kebob wrote: post #418

I built a Figma to Bubble.io converter, basically Figma to code but for a nocode platform. Niche, but something that I personally needed so figured others may find value as well. I charge a flat $25/mo, and based on the Figma design it significantly speeds up my development in bubble. Been hovering around $1.4K MRR, only real spend is ~$15/day google ads which has yet to pay for itself, but I keep telling myself its…

How did you market this?

Twitter/X, bubble forum, bubblecon, etc. Bubble has a strong community, so I had a lot of support from other devs sharing it when I launched.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

#636

Post by josho »

ssiddharth wrote: post #262

I’m building Sink It for Reddit ( https://gosinkit.com ), a Safari/Chrome/Firefox/Edge extension to make Reddit usable on the web. It’s similar to RES (Reddit enhancement suite) but supports all of Reddit’s designs and is being actively developed with around 300k users, mainly on the Apple platforms. It was built during the Reddit API shenanigans last year and is making four figures a month. 99% of the app’s feature…

I suspect you can increase your conversion rate to paid quite easily. I've been using the free version for sometime. And I have no idea if the paid version gives me the improvements that I care about. I'm sure a 7 day trial, or an explainer video that walks through the differences would go a long way.

For what it's worth, there's a lot of functionality that I want removed from reddit. I've never crossposted, yet often click that link because it's next to 'hide'. I hate the hide link and would rather have 'hide everything above'. On old.reddit.com many of the links are too small, so increasing their size would be nice. Just a few things off the top of my head.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

#637

Post by vlucas »

I built a Google Sheets Add-on that imports bank transactions via Plaid into Google Sheets.

It formats transactions, auto-categorizes them, has custom category rules, and can automate data imports nightly.

It's called BudgetSheet ( https://www.budgetsheet.com ) and has been my side hustle for almost 5 years now.

Revenue is just over $5,000/month. Growing well. Targeting $9k MRR for 2025. Expenses are high because Plaid is expensive (last invoice was over $1,600), but still good margins and will get better with scale.

It's good software and I've put a lot into it, but the user experience really just comes down to how well Plaid supports your bank. Folks with really well supported banks love it, and folks with banks not well supported by Plaid tend to churn quickly.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

#639

Post by coldtrait »

throwaway77385 wrote: post #26
leetcodewizard wrote: post #18

https://leetcodewizard.io I released this fairly simple ChatGPT/Claude wrapper a few months ago. Currently it’s doing about 15K/month. It’s an invisible Electron app that can be used to cheat in coding interviews / OA’s.

I love this. I honestly want everyone to cheat on these leetcode style interviews. I want that process to be broken and for the whole system to become completely ineffective, so that companies are forced to go back to actually putting some thought into hiring. I doubt it'll happen and instead surveillance during these interviews will probably just increase instead, but perhaps you've kicked off a game of cat and mous…

Thanks for echoing my thoughts. This is what I feel about the process to, and at the point in my life where I'm at I couldn't care less about this being unethical.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

#640

Post by burningChrome »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #484
burningChrome wrote: post #472

My side project is managing several clients websites on a subscription based service. My buddy and I started a web design agency for small companies. It was just us two and we bootstrapped everything and were in the process of building several apps for the dozen or so architectural firms we were working with when he died suddenly of an aortic aneurism. It was such a shock to me and so I just shut the company down. Se…

Can you clarify what you mean by “leads” here - is this the sort of “we found fifty names and emails that might be interested”, or is it a landing page that collects a email and phone number for when someone enters them? I am not trying to accuse you of something weird - it’s I hear a lot of lead generation as a basic business need and I never quite understood the real mechanisms - I only get the slightly passive lan…

>> Can you clarify what you mean by “leads” here

They were what sales people would refer to as "qualified leads". We had two simple questions they would answer before submitting the contact form. It really helped to define what clients were looking for and their expectations. This made first contact a lot more productive, and allowed the firms to get clients into their design process and get a commitment a lot faster. For many of the firms we were working with, this meant better leads than the ones they getting on various other platforms like Houzz and then they started investing more in their content as a marketing approach then they did before.

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