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Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

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Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#62
I spent about 6 months building Itinee (https://itinee.com) which is a trip planning app focused on being budget conscious. I built it because my wife and I love to travel but my assortment of spreadsheets was a little intimidating to her. I wanted a platform that let us both participate in the planning process. Unfortunately, due to COVID, people aren't traveling so I haven't really put any money into marketing it or done any more development on it. I might revisit it once things get back to normal. I don't plan to do much more development until I get user feedback, though

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#63
post #60

"Oh By"[1] I built this in 2016 and, in fact, it has made some money ... a handful of people have, indeed, purchased custom Oh By Codes. But very few. I remain convinced that there is a collection of interesting, compelling use-cases for Oh By Codes but I, and others, have not come up with them yet ... [1] https://0x.co

I don’t see why anyone would pay to have whatever hosted on a random unknown domain. Nobody would see 0xJonh and think “oh I better check that out on 0x.co”

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#64

Webmix.io - a site to see many pages of the same type for web design. For example, you could see many big SaaS login pages to get inspiration. The issue is that categorizing sites is way more time consuming than I thought, and WordPress makes saving/using user “likes” really challenging.

https://saaspages.xyz/ does that as a way of driving traffic to their paid product, a landing page builder.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#65

I spent about 6 months building Itinee ( https://itinee.com ) which is a trip planning app focused on being budget conscious. I built it because my wife and I love to travel but my assortment of spreadsheets was a little intimidating to her. I wanted a platform that let us both participate in the planning process. Unfortunately, due to COVID, people aren't traveling so I haven't really put any money into marketing it…

How'd you come to the pricing model? To me only having 24 hours before losing data would probably preclude me from putting effort into trying it out. Have you thought at all about a freemium model?

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#66

A long time ago a friend an I created a website to help people organize pool bets between them, for a sport event. We charged $1 / person in the pool. Made about $1,500 in total for the event. - I paid about $400 in ads to Google: they have a much better business model than us ;) - I competed against free offerings, and I still had clients, because I could afford ads, they could not. - It was a very strange, happy fe…

Why didn't it make sense to continue after the event ended? Most sports events happen on a recurring basis.

I wonder if this idea got legs if you would get in trouble with regulators of some kind..

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#68

My German library app to track books borrowed from a library: http://www.videlibri.de/ It was doomed from the start, because basically no one goes to public libraries anymore. But you cannot go to a library without it. Like this week I saw a post of someone getting a 150€ late fee bill from the library while having no idea why, that would never happen with my app. That should have been well monetarizable, pay for my…

> But you cannot go to a library without it.

Why is this? Did you arrange some kind of exclusivity deal with libraries in an area to manage borrowing so that people have to use it?

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#69
I launched mergecaravan.com to deal with a problem I've encountered at a few jobs in the past. Mostly, I built it initially to scratch my own itch, and to go back to doing more django dev.

Basically, you can add a label to a PR in github and it will then queue it up to be merged once all the required checks pass, and it keeps queued PRs "up-to-date".

It's made a little money, but not much.

Github recently rolled out a feature at Github Universe that has overlap, so I'm guessing it won't get much more traction.

A few lessons I learned: - Especially when building on a platform, make sure you have the right niche. In this case, it probably has a wide enough audience that Github decided it was worth it to build as part of the platform. - Like any engineer, I spent too long building and let scope creep delay me from launching.

All in all, it's pretty cheap (read: basically free) to run, but I probably committed somewhere over 120 hours on it.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#70

I built a VPN application for iOS and Android (still working on it) that uses user's DigitalOcean, AWS, or GCP to log in via OAuth2 or API token and create a VPN server so that only the user can connect and use. However, I still can think of any monetization except Ads (which I don't think will help because the VPN server also include ad-blocker). The only monetization might be donation. But if anyone has any idea I…

This guide https://github.com/nayafia/lemonade-stand was written for OSS maintainers, but it could still give you ideas on how to monetize your project.

Good luck!

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