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

Given the pace of inflation shouldn't we raise the bar to $1000/month side projects? I'm always in search of "I could pay my mortgage with that!" side projects...

Haha, true story! But you gotta do $500 before you can get to $1k. ;)

Let's say, $500 *or more*. The previous year's submissions definitely had ones that were more. :)

This isn't so much a side project as a project that I tried to bootstrap and then never turned off, but as of December/January, I have made a little more than $500/month selling cloud true random number generators. I have not touched the code in a very long time, and today it is pretty much just a website and a listing on the AWS store, but it somehow made a few cents.

I'm still nowhere near wanting to quit my "day job" for it.

Shameless plug: https://arbitrand.com/

Clicky:

2023 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34482433

2022 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29995152

2021 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29667095

2020 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24947167

During my previous job, when we were migrating to Kubernetes I couldn’t really find a GUI app that I liked, and most importantly, that could connect to multiple clusters simultaneously. We had 6 clusters and having to switch context constantly was annoying

I ended up building one [1] to use myself, shared with a few people and they loved it. I asked if they’d pay for it and to my surprise, a lot of people said yes. I’ve put up a website and a “pre-order” button with a regressive monthly discount. Sales were going up month after month, and a few months later I decided to quit my job to go all in on it.

Today, I’m averaging on ~€5k/mo from this app, but I’m still doing some part time freelancing, as well as building other products that are not as successful, but are making >€1000/mo

The latest one is open source, privacy friendly analytics for apps [2] that I’m still very actively working on. This is my current “side project” as the previous side project became my main job :)

There’s also an open source upvote site [3] that I started 6 years ago, but haven’t had much time to work on it lately, still generating $$ monthly

[1] https://aptakube.com [2] https://aptabase.com [3] https://fider.io