Not consistently, but there have been a few months this year where I have hit $500 selling individual commercial use licenses for my tiling window manager[1] https://lgug2z.com/software/komorebi
I'd buy it for a 20 USD one-time fee
Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
61–70 of 575 posts
Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
#62I make https://universymbols.com and it’s still new, but off to a good start. It can create/restyle feature icons to expand an app’s icon set.
It supports SF Symbols, Material Symbols, and a bunch of open source styles, but I’m adding the ability to make a private custom style target.
Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
#63https://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, growi…
Well done! How does it compare to using built-in image models like nano banana?
Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
#64Not consistently, but there have been a few months this year where I have hit $500 selling individual commercial use licenses for my tiling window manager[1] https://lgug2z.com/software/komorebi
I'd buy it for a 20 USD one-time fee
The experiment is end-user mediated wealth redistribution from large corporations by leveraging reimbursement mechanisms, and so far I'm content with the results
Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
#65I run SideProjectors - https://www.sideprojectors.com - a marketplace where people can buy/sell their side projects and businesses. I've been running it for over 14 years now.
Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
#66https://fivethreeone.app/ a weightlifting app for 5/3/1 has been earning me ~$1000 a month for over two years now. I'm actively working on a successor that allows you to create your own custom workout programs using formulas: https://vis.fitness
Love the AI generated image, "Extra-Large (>72pt) Font". Made me chuckle. Definetly a feature of the app. But looks really cool ill be trialing it this week!
Send me an email (see my profile) if you want to try the custom program creation. I’m starting the beta this week.
Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
#67Just over $500 in subscriptions right now since posting on HackerNews and Reddit.
This is mostly because of the posts gaining high engagement and people signing up and subscribing. Many also migrating from other apps.
Expecting the revenue to go down next month
Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
#68https://fivethreeone.app/ a weightlifting app for 5/3/1 has been earning me ~$1000 a month for over two years now. I'm actively working on a successor that allows you to create your own custom workout programs using formulas: https://vis.fitness
That looks very cool. Are you planning on adding Apple Watch integration? I cannot stand having to fiddle with my phone while at the gym.
Yes (for Vis) but I have a medium size list of stuff I want to get to before I work on the watch app.
You can control it via Siri, though that only really works in a home gym
Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
#69https://mergecal.org - First project I built when learning Django a couple years back. Takes multiple iCal feed URLs, merges them into one feed. Turns out people actually need this!
cool project, but what on earth is going on with scrolling and back button?
Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
#70I started my project in 2023 and posted here, made 20k that year. The traffic has been slowly decreasing during 2024, and last October, I was officially entering losing territory, where the cost of running it exceeded the total earnings (mostly due to free trials). It's been a good journey. Thank you so much to whoever keeps running this thread!
What do you think led to the fall off?
Many reasons: 1) lack of marketing, 2) I stopped working on it for a while, 3) because of #2, the app lacks new features to attract users.
Another one but turned out it was never really a big deal: some chatbots from frontier AI labs started to support those niche features (people still coming to my app for the flexibility of using multiple AI models).
I think the biggest problem was #2, life kept pulling me the other way.