It kind of depends on what one means by 'making $500/month'. I operate damninteresting.com, and we receive a bit over $1600/month in donations. But a lot of that is used to pay authors for new submissions, pay editors, pay podcast narrators, pay residuals, pay for subscriptions to archives, pay for hosting fees, etc. As the founder my personal per-month profit is in the neighborhood of $600/month.
Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2022 – Show and tell
51–60 of 93 posts
Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2022 – Show and tell
#52I'm running a website for people learning Japanese (a dictionary and an SRS/Anki replacement, among other things) and currently making ~$1300/month from Patreon donations, up from ~$590/month the last time this show and tell was posted. Link to the website: https://jpdb.io/ Still only a side-project, and will probably stay that way for a long time still. Here's some info about the tech stack I'm using: https://news.y…
Nice. I am exploring something very similar, but for a different language. I am curious if you considered making this a business (as in paid features/subscription based) and if not why not?
> I am exploring something very similar, but for a different language.
Which language if I may ask? I'd like to branch out into other languages too in the future (preferably into something that's easier to parse than Japanese), but since I'm nowhere near done with Japanese at this point it's probably going to take many more years until I do so.
> I am curious if you considered making this a business (as in paid features/subscription based) and if not why not?
I do already have some Patron-only features. For example, normal users get access to two different voices for the audio files, while Patrons get access to four; Patrons get early access to work-in-progress new features, etc.
But inherently I'd like to keep the base product, and in consequence the major essential features, free. It's probably a horrible business decision, but I recognize that not everyone can actually pay, and I want those people to be able to use my site too. I was once poor too, so I know how it is.
Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2022 – Show and tell
#53I started investing in stocks couple of years ago. It is probably not what you wanted to hear but it makes me a lot of money and allowed me to retire in my 30s, as a minimalist. I am a long-term investor(I hold positions at least 1 year) so the time it requires is essentially none. Besides that I tried to run multiple project in my past but none took off. The problem is that the internet has been monopolized and it i…
pity to see this downvoted. Its very hard to monetize anything. Even just with ads, there used to be a number of competitors to google, now it's just google and it's eating away increasingly bigger chunk of the pie. For the past 15 years the VC funding has destroyed anything that might have value (because valuation >> value). Regardless, i still enjoy my own projects and online communities that i have created, but they dont pay much.
Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2022 – Show and tell
#54I'm running a website for people learning Japanese (a dictionary and an SRS/Anki replacement, among other things) and currently making ~$1300/month from Patreon donations, up from ~$590/month the last time this show and tell was posted. Link to the website: https://jpdb.io/ Still only a side-project, and will probably stay that way for a long time still. Here's some info about the tech stack I'm using: https://news.y…
Is Patreon a good way to finance your side projects? How do you take the next step from there?
I used Patreon since it was a convenient way to 1) just get some money flowing without having to deal with all of the complexities of integrating a payment processor, e.g. without having to waste what little time I have on things like taxes (Patreon automatically handles the VAT), 2) I don't necessarily run this as I would run an actual business and most of the features are completely free, so it kinda fits Patreon's model of "supporting a creator" instead of your normal SaaS model of completely paywalling everything and giving you only a two weeks' worth of trial use, and 3) most people have already heard of Patreon, so when you're brand new and just starting out it's somewhat less sketchy than asking for people's credit card numbers directly.
In the long-term I'll probably switch to using Stripe or something along those lines (while still keeping the option to use Patreon for those who prefer it), but at this income level it's not really worth my time.
So to answer your question, I think that whether using Patreon is a good way to finance your side projects depends on what those projects are, and on what exactly you goals are.
If you're trying to run a profitable business then what I'm doing is not a good example of what you should do. It might be totally obvious, but the more you give out for free and the more you rely on voluntary Patreon-like donations the less money you'll make. I know of other apps (using a fully paywalled financing model) in this space which have less users than I have and yet they're already hiring other people to work on them, while I can't even pay myself a livable wage to make this a full time job, never mind even thinking about paying someone else to help me out.
Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2022 – Show and tell
#55Running a service to manage remotely old phone-based intercoms (e.g DoorKing) without the need to change any hardware. We got some property managers in San Francisco and one locksmith reseller as customers. https://www.DropBy.io
How does it work without internet? "zero hardware upgrades, or internet required."
And for the tip, please make a better presentation video what the product and benefits are, with a voice over. You can get one from freelancer sites as low as 20$
Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2022 – Show and tell
#56I started investing in stocks couple of years ago. It is probably not what you wanted to hear but it makes me a lot of money and allowed me to retire in my 30s, as a minimalist. I am a long-term investor(I hold positions at least 1 year) so the time it requires is essentially none. Besides that I tried to run multiple project in my past but none took off. The problem is that the internet has been monopolized and it i…
You started investing a couple of years ago and now you're retired? If that is the case, you would make millions from selling courses and sharing your secrets. Also, if we're talking about side projects that net $500 a month, I think the monopolization theory is a little dramatic.
The people who make those courses make money from the courses themselves, not from their investing.
Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2022 – Show and tell
#57I started investing in stocks couple of years ago. It is probably not what you wanted to hear but it makes me a lot of money and allowed me to retire in my 30s, as a minimalist. I am a long-term investor(I hold positions at least 1 year) so the time it requires is essentially none. Besides that I tried to run multiple project in my past but none took off. The problem is that the internet has been monopolized and it i…
Pretty sure this answer is machine-generated...
if it generates discussion i dont see a problem ... sooon we ll have to learn to live along with such machines
Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2022 – Show and tell
#58Running https://text-generator.io which is a cheaper alternative to OpenAI text generation, with a few improvements like it also researches links and understands linked images via analysing any image content, also you can generate a set number of sentences or stop based on hitting low probability words (enables auto complete).
Graphics cards cost do cost around 500 a month though right now which makes ml pretty tight margins... Hoping to sell it more to people wanting to self host in future for that reason
Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2022 – Show and tell
#59Running https://rosterbird.com on the side for 2 years now. It's oscillating between $800-$900 mrr for the past 3 months. I originally wanted it to be a passive income project but it has grown in scope before I even realized. Building and maintaining a B2B SaaS on the side is pretty draining. There's always more features, support requests, etc. Wouldn't recommend unless it takes off immediately or it is within a nice…
I am not an expert by a long shot.
My thoughts are the price is low. Maybe up the price and make $900 from fewer customers and therefore less support work.
Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2022 – Show and tell
#60I built OnlineOrNot ( https://onlineornot.com ) - it's a hosted Status Page, with built-in Uptime Monitoring. It supports: * Custom domains * Private Status Pages (password protection) * Automatically posting incidents to your status page based on uptime monitoring (possible to BYO monitoring via Uptime Robot) * Subscribing to incident updates via Email The uptime monitoring itself supports websites, web apps, and AP…
Congrats on building up to that revenue!
There seem to be a lot of these type of services, how do you differentiate yourself?