Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2023 – Show and tell

Created Video Hub App (that will be 5 years old next month). I sell it for $5 and $3.50 of each purchase goes to the cost-effective charity Against Malaria Foundation (See GiveWell.org for details).

It was averaging around 100 purchases per month, though it's lower over the last year as I've not had time to release new updates (moving to another state is challenging).

Thanks to the sale of this software I've donated an additional $16,000 to my favorite charity (I give 10% of my income there regularly - see Giving What We Can).

https://videohubapp.com/ - Think of it like YouTube for videos on your computer. Browse, search, and organize your videos

MIT Open Source: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App

https://www.scanii.com a content arbitration/malware API service. It has been profitable for over 10+ years now with customers around the globe.

Building it was one of the best decisions I made in my life since it enabled me to make hard decisions at work that were not skewed by the fear of losing my job and not being able to provide for my family - I'm in engineering/product leadership.

But, do not be fooled, this also means I've had two jobs (albeit of unequal urgency) and that, obviously, equates to long work hours.

https://getblast.io/ - it is an end-to-end data platform: data ingestion + dbt-like transformations + data quality checks + data catalog, all through a single interface. It is making ~$4k/month currently.

Around the beginning of 2022, I was having a conversation with a few friends that are working at small mobile gaming companies, and they were having a lot of trouble building their data pipelines, especially because of the infrastructure part. I took on the challenge to start hosting some Airflow instances for them to get a bit more familiar with their problems, and over time some patterns started to emerge:

- they were writing custom scripts for mundane tasks.

- they had to write Python code, even though all they needed was scheduling a few SQL tasks.

- they needed some basic transformation abilities, but didn't have the budget to pay dbt-cloud $50/month (the minimum plan is $100 these days, I believe).

- they were losing track of where their data is going through and where it is coming from.

A friend of mine and I have started building some abstractions on top of Airflow to help these businesses: no need to write any Python, automatically deploying their changes to their instances after a git push, building data quality checks, materializing their assets based on their SQL "SELECT" queries, etc. Over time, we have gathered these features into a shared UI, and moved some of these companies piece by piece.

We keep improving the platform, and we are onboarding new companies for the past 2 months throughout our closed beta period. There are still many rough edges that we are trying to cover, but in the end, it was a great feeling when people were actually using the prouct quite often in spite of all these problems. We are pretty excited about where this can go.

If anyone is interested in taking part in the beta program, the first 6 months is free during the beta period. Feel free to fill out the form on the website and I'll reach out personally.

Shortly after stable diffusion was released, I realized that an enormous number of non-ML people were suddenly interested in using an ML model.

However, APIs are insanely expensive and not very developer friendly, and running it yourself required pretty fancy hardware. The goal was to make the technology absolutely as accessible as possible.

So I launched https://computerender.com with the simplest API possible - just a URL that points to an image like: https://api.computerender.com/generate/cupcake-of-the-sky.jp... I monitor the prices on vast.ai and runpod to find the cheapest GPUs and run the service nearly at cost (as little as $0.0001 per image). No subscriptions, only pay for what you use.

Recently hit 700k images generated, and am excited to continue expanding the service.

https://routineshub.com - a place to create, schedule and share your everyday routines.

I've been a long time self development enthusiast, regularly trying out new health/mediation/workout routines and wanted a tool to keep track of my routines, help me schedule everything automatically and where i could share my routines and explore other users routines too.