W3Counter is completely passive -- no new code or features in over a year, no customer support load, autoscaling frontend (EC2) and backend (Aurora). Improvely gets feature updates a few times a year and has some light e-mail support load.
I also added a single banner ad to each of my open source projects' documentation sites, and that's added ~$200/month via AdSense. Developers are surprisingly lucrative targets for advertisers I guess.
Is anyone doing old-fashion landlording these days? I'm trying to break into that space, but I have no idea what I'm doing and could use some advice from someone who's done it before.
I have some anti-advice, not what you asked for, but perhaps valuable anyway for you to take into consideration. When I moved to a new home, I started renting out my old house. I found I just cannot handle being a landlord. The seemingly constant calls for repairs just throw me for a loop. I cannot concentrate at my dayjob when I'm thinking about having to yet again deal with plumbers, handymen or other trades people and their associated expense (and they are EXPENSIVE) and/or repairing it myself (and I'm no handyman). I went days with close to zero productivity as the repairs drag on. And this is with pretty good tenants. I cannot imagine the added mental stress if they were bad tenants. I've pretty much decided when the home selling season starts picking up in spring, I'm selling and getting out of landlording.
I co-founded a company developing QA automation software in 2012. Worked on it full-time until 2014. Had an EU grant covering our costs during that period. In 2015, I invested about 200h into it (mostly answering support emails and dealing with taxes) and made about 20k€ this year. I've been working on an Appointment Reminder clone for a year now in my home country Austria. I will about break even in 2015, but will h…
> Had an EU grant covering our costs during that period. In 2015, I invested about 200h into it (mostly answering support emails and dealing with taxes) and made about 20k€ this year.
How is it that the EU gives grants to for-profit companies? Is it to encourage business growth so the GDP goes up?
I'm talking about a "grant" which seems to imply gratis, free money, as opposed to a loan that has to be paid back, which is available in most countries.
I co-founded a company developing QA automation software in 2012. Worked on it full-time until 2014. Had an EU grant covering our costs during that period. In 2015, I invested about 200h into it (mostly answering support emails and dealing with taxes) and made about 20k€ this year. I've been working on an Appointment Reminder clone for a year now in my home country Austria. I will about break even in 2015, but will h…
> Had an EU grant covering our costs during that period. In 2015, I invested about 200h into it (mostly answering support emails and dealing with taxes) and made about 20k€ this year. How is it that the EU gives grants to for-profit companies? Is it to encourage business growth so the GDP goes up? I'm talking about a "grant" which seems to imply gratis, free money, as opposed to a loan that has to be paid back, which…
Yes, it is to encourage growth. The grant was gratis (ie. we didn't have to pay it back) but did come with a lot of administrative bullshit (maybe a third of one man lower over the course of two years).
https://www.ottopost.com/ - a simple Instagram postcard printing service. I created it as an alternative to the many printing services that require a dedicated app. OttoPost doesn't require an app since it just searches for your new Instagram photos and prints automatically (that's configurable). Not exactly world-changing, but definitely something hands-off at this point and better than nothing :)
Heavy Instagram user here. This is cool.
I really like the price point, but for a 99¢ postcard including postage, do you actually make any money?
During my day job I run a full-time startup, but, as a weekend hack a couple years ago, I built an automated email sales tool called Autopest ( https://autopest.com ). I've never done any promotion for it, but it keeps growing on its own organically via word-of-mouth. About a year and a half ago I mentioned Autopest in an HN thread titled "Ask HN: How to start earning $500/month in passive income in next 12-18 months…
Awesome product! Do you mind giving more information about how long have you been building this, and how much do you make?