FreeBSD on EC2: Last year between my Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/cperciva), private "consulting", and a GitHub Sponsors donation from AWS, I received $20k to support my open source work. It's not a lot compared to my day job (Tarsnap) but money helps to free up time to keep everything working.
Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell
41–50 of 222 posts
Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell
#42A web scraping API: https://scrapingfish.com/
I’m curious who your customers are; being tech savvy enough to use an api, but not enough to scrape the web confuses me. Mind explaining how you make money?
They seem to handle all the more annoying parts of web scraping: bypassing anti scraping things such as rate limits and captchas.
Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell
#43We started https://scanrepeat.com to enable companies of any size to introduce continuous security scanning of their web apps with direct reporting to Slack, Trello, Teams, etc.
We also cover a few more misc cases like detection of potential GDPR/CCPA personal data leaks.
Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell
#44I got annoyed that my MacBook case would slightly buzz when plugged in, so I worked with a factory to make these grounded Apple adapters: https://www.amazon.com/Grounded-Duckhead-Apple-Mac-Adapter/d... They've been selling consistently to others annoyed by the problem or who want to ground their MacBook for other reasons.
> Grounds or "earths" your body whenever you use your computer! Earthing is good for your health.
You're really hitting all of the applicable target markets there. Love it.
Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell
#45I have a serious question to those making money and I am hoping to learn here. How did you acquire customers? We have a startup going on for 3.5 months but it is incredibly hard to acquire customers. People don't respond to email or LinkedIn. We have not tried SEO and Ads yet.
'ds' is still perfect advice: https://www.paulgraham.com/ds.html
Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell
#46I am making an uncountable amount of money with my side project of being a ‘gentleman of the night’.
What does it mean?
Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell
#47I got annoyed that my MacBook case would slightly buzz when plugged in, so I worked with a factory to make these grounded Apple adapters: https://www.amazon.com/Grounded-Duckhead-Apple-Mac-Adapter/d... They've been selling consistently to others annoyed by the problem or who want to ground their MacBook for other reasons.
Note grounding your MacBook is likely to result in you constantly zapping your MacBook with static electricity if you wear rubber sole shoes, which is likely to not be good for the MacBook and may randomly damage the electronics. This may be why they did not put a grounding pin the first place.
I usually discharge my static buildup in the office sink.
Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell
#48I have a load of side projects but I rarely market/promote them as I worry that if my 9-5 employer would be unimpressed if they saw me putting a load of effort into e.g. creating YouTube videos, running events, doing podcasts.
Is this something anyone else thinks about?
Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell
#49Serious question but does anyone get any value out of these threads? Most of the time it just devolves into hundreds of comments with links to random projects hoping to get traffic. I think to make it more worthwhile people posting here please write a little about your tech stack, why you made it, what are your struggles, and tips for other founders, etc.
One thing I wish I had when I was in school was learning about all the different things people do to make a living.
Threads like this give us a window into a world of ideas and possibilities.
Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell
#50Over $500/mo but not entirely a livable income yet
Manabi Reader, iOS/macOS app for learning Japanese by reading. Tracks the words you read on the web and shows you what % of an article you're already familiar with (vocab or kanji). Tracks your JLPT level progress. Has Anki integration or its own companion flashcards app.