Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

I made an AI chatbot for OnlyFans models. Their fans can speak to "them" via a third party messaging app. It's currently pulling ~15k USD MRR. I built my own GPU infra for inference and I run Llama 3 with a fewshot prompting to get the model to respond like a given OF model, typically using their actual DMs with fans.

I don't have a website for obvious reasons, but if you're in the biz you've no doubt heard about my tool :)

It’s not really MMR but I have a side business when I provide software for online and in-person festival payments (entry/food/drinks). If you take the total revenue (or profit) for the year and divide by 12 I’m well over the $500/mo limit.

I currently do 3 festivals a year which all pretty much fell in my lap, I’ve yet to start any sort of sales/marketing due to being busy with my day job/life and not wanting to grow too fast.

I started back in 2021 when a local company I’ve worked with to make apps came to me looking for a solution for their food/music festival that didn’t require handing out and (almost as importantly) counting all the tickets/tokens that people bought to spend at the vendors. I did a quick turn around of a couple months to get a v1 out and working in time for the event. In the next year I essentially rewrote 90% of it and added in-person payment support (previously had just supported recording in-person payments made through a CC terminal.

Each new festival has new needs but I’m starting to get fewer feature requests and less I need to build for each new client which is nice.

Sure!

It's QR-based, so customers create an account, load money onto their account, then show their QR code to vendors who scan it to charge their account. We also provide plastic cards (think: gift card) for people who don't want to use their phone but we see 80%+ of people interact completely on their phone/online. We have an app and website (same codebase, Quasar framework) and for in-person payment (entry, bar) we provide iPads with connected CC readers.

My best advice is this: your hardest challenges will not be technical in nature. The hardest part is the equipment, dealing with customers, hand-holding the festival organizers. I don't say any of that as some gross thing or bad thing, just reality. In fact, I think I've succeeded larged based on the in-person aspect (We travel to the event and are on-site for the event) and being the "I have all the answers for your festival payments"-person. Rolling with the punches is a huge part of it.

The whole thing runs on AWS Lambda with a postgres DB from Neon.tech. I'll be honest, it's incredibly over-architected, the whole thing could run a a couple (or even 1) servers as a traditional NodeJS app without issue (and with less complexity) but I used this project as learning experience and a chance to try our some technology I was interested in. Lambda is incredibly cool and I think I might have one of the best use-cases for it (incredibly spikey load: no traffic for 9 mo, tiny traffic for presales for 1-2 months, 1 month with higher sales, then 1-2 days of the event with crazy sales) but the debugging story isn't the best. SST makes it 10000x better than anything else I've tried and the developer experience is bar-none for writing lambdas but all the other crap (CloudFormation, logs, monitoring, etc) is so much overhead. If I was writing this again today I'd probably look at something like NestJS but I won't let myself re-write the code (again) without a pressing reason and if I need to spend time anywhere it's sales/marketing.

Here is my, crappy, "marketing" website: https://grubbux.com/

This is really cool, I think this may be the first time I watch one of these threads and be tempted to get something

I think I might just have downvoted you because I‘m a clumsy idiot.

So let me just say I love these honest no-bullshit posts!