Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell • Hacker News Board

Just signed our 3rd customer with TrueCast (600€/month) (https://www.truecast.fr/), which is Granola for tech and non-tech recruiters. Rather than replacing recruiters in the HR process, we want to give them real time hard skills knowledge superpowers so they can better assess candidates before submitting them to their teams. We are convinced that recruiting should remain human-first.

There’s also a bot option, for self-conducted interviews, mostly used for open applications for some pre-filtering.

We are still unsure on how to enter such market, so we are doing direct networking atm, if you guys have an idea on how you’d do it or want a free trial of the product we’d love having a chat with you about it.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell

#4

Post by mkummer » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 4:06 AM UTC

https://dreamandcolor.com/ has been a fun solo bootstrapped side project for me for the past 2.5ish years - (specialize in converting photos to coloring pages for parents, educators, etc)

I started it primarily wanting to take a shot at productizing an image diffusion model (Stable Diffusion 1.5 when I started) in a novel (at the time) way and it ended up growing legs of it's own.

She's steadily chugging along, growing about 10-20% per month with minimal marketing, exceeding all expectations I had for the project when I set out

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell

#5

Post by JKCalhoun » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 4:06 AM UTC

I'm…

Oh, making or losing $500/month?

Never mind.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell

#6

Post by kaesve » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 4:12 AM UTC

My wife's Etsy shop (https://www.etsy.com/shop/LittleLanternShop) is starting to pick up. She is leaning into creating digital sewing patterns for decorative felt crafts. We have had Etsy success before with 3d printed products, but managing printers and fulfilling orders can be stressful and time consuming, and she was hoping to build up a more passive income stream. She made over $1000 in the past month, which beat both our expectations

(We'll get back into 3d printing once life slows down a _little_ bit again)

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell

#7

Post by yboris » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 4:21 AM UTC

Occasionally $500/month, but more reliably $300/month in sales of my Video Hub App - lets users browse, search, tag, and organize videos on local / network drives. Aiming to have an 8th anniversary release February 2026.

$5 per copy (Windows, Max, Linux; keep forever) https://videohubapp.com/

MIT open source (build your own copy) https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell

#8

Post by trubalca » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 4:23 AM UTC

I sell laser cut decorative maps

TheMapsGuy.com

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell

#9

Post by darknavi » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 4:25 AM UTC

trubalca wrote: post #8

I sell laser cut decorative maps TheMapsGuy.com

What's your laser setup? 80-100W CO2 laser?

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell

#10

Post by mvkel » Thu, Dec 18, 2025, 4:25 AM UTC

https://www.repth.com, an AI cycling coach that I vibe-coded back when gpt-3.5 was hot and vibe coding wasn't yet a thing. We've come a long way!

Free for athletes, but I license the underlying "coach" logic to actual, human coaches.