I make anywhere from $300 to $800/month on http://pizzacodes.com. About 3 or 4 months ago I switched domain names to make it more memorable, and I dropped out of search results for everything but my site name. Traffic has increased pretty substantially from other sources over the past few months, so I'm back just over $600/month again.
Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?
181–190 of 441 posts
Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?
#182Making about $800/month from 2 Android apps. Not much but it keeps me alive.
Trying to release some games and see if I can increase that amount in the next few months...
Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been curious because I was thinking of doing something that would host content; is it a legal nightmare if someone uploads illegal material? Is it common?
Yes, and yes.
Care to elaborate? How much risk is there to the site owner which accidentally hosts the content?
Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?
#184I make between 5-10k a month on my apps and book. (It depends on the season. Summer and Christmas are best.) http://buildanappbusiness.com/ https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/30-south-llc/id331245760
Derek, you're missing out on an extra ~7%! Sign up for Amazon's affiliate program and use your own affiliate links on your links to amazon. ------- Also, as commented below - I posted the first of these recurring income threads almost two years ago - I'm now compiling some stats, data and insights [1] for myself so that I can learn how to boost my numbers closer to yours :) [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6…
That's actually a good call. I'm already an affiliate from another blog I have. I've been meaning to change those links and I hadn't gotten around to it. Thanks for the reminder.
Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?
#185I've usually read these threads without thinking about my own situation, but suddenly realized, I'm getting checks every month. It's not much, only $100-$250 per month, based on advertisements on my youtube channel, most coming from a 24 part series I made on locks & lockpicking a few years ago, but it's passive to the point that I literally forget about it. Unfortunately I'm the sort who is very uncomfortable asking…
Now that's interesting. Please do share more about your disposition away from revenue. What does that mean to you?
Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?
#186$0.1/month from ads in a free iPhone app.
10 cents?
Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?
#187$2000/month from free Android apps. I just copied existing apps on android like Logo Quiz, 4 pics 1 word etc. that were number 1 in the play store. Just took 24h to rebuild this apps, since they're quite simple. Did that around 10 times. Admob makes $500/month, Airpush $1,500/month. However, Google just shut down Airpush push notifications, so the latter is now gone. ha.
Very interesting strategy. Thanks for sharing.
Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?
#188I gross just under $10K per month from http://www.letscodejavascript.com, a subscription-based JavaScript screencast for professional developers [1]. It's a full-time job: I put out two new episodes every week, plus a "special" every month that takes quite a bit more effort. That leaves me with about half my time for developing the business. I'm bootstrapping this, so it's just me. I don't plan to hire any employees until there's more money coming in. (I also make a few hundred a month from royalties on my book [2], which is truly passive.)
I've talked about Let's Code JavaScript on HN before; check out the previous thread [3] for some details about how I started and market the site.
Since simonswords82 was so generous with details about his business, I'll do the same. About 2% of the visitors to the site sign up for the free trial. That seems poor, although I don't have a lot of insight as to what the number "should" be. I do require a credit card in order to sign up for the trial. The trial automatically converts to a subscription after seven days.
About 70% of trial subscribers convert to a paid subscription. This seems pretty good to me, although I'd of course be happier if it was higher. Once they've subscribed, I lose about 25% of subscribers in the first month, and then the number drops asymptotically down to about 5% (of the initial total) per month. I'm reasonably happy with this as well. It's poor by the standards of a SaaS, where a churn rate of 1-2% is doable, but I think it's pretty good for a content site.
My most recent push was an inbound marketing campaign: I took one of my monthly specials and turned it into a dedicated site on object-oriented JavaScript [4]. That was very successful; it nearly doubled traffic in the first month (from 2,800 uniques in the previous month to 5,400) and looks like it will permanently add about 1,500 uniques per month. Trial rates went down slightly as a result, but overall subscriptions went up.
The biggest challenge for me is having lots of things I'd like to pursue, but not enough time to do them all. The Object Playground inbound marketing campaign was successful, but a lot of work. I recently released another special that might make a good inbound campaign (on large-scale JavaScript fundamentals: modularity and automated cross-browser unit testing), but I'm not sure it's worth the time it would take to create a marketing site for it on the scale of Object Playground.
For now I'm focusing on A/B testing various ideas for improving conversion. It takes less effort and potentially has longer-term impact. So far, I've improved the subscribe page [5] by adding testimonials and a better design. Next, I'll probably provide more opportunities for people to preview the series without signing up, as well as more obvious calls to action on the video pages. I also have some other plans in the works that I can't talk about yet. :-)
[1] My screencast is Let's Code: Test-Driven JavaScript, a series for professional JavaScript developers. It's available at http://www.letscodejavascript.com. I'd love to hear your feedback.
[2] My book is The Art of Agile Development. It's been out for over five years now, so it's nice to still be getting royalties from it.
[3] I talked about my experiences launching and marketing the screencast here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6038226
[4] My recent inbound marketing campaign was Object Playground, a tutorial and visualizer for object-oriented JavaScript: http://www.objectplayground.com.
[5] The Let's Code JavaScript subscribe page is at http://www.letscodejavascript.com/v3/subscribe.
Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
I sell on codecanyon as well though only make around $300 a month right now. I have almost the same number of items as you do yet can't seem to get the visibility. Do you have any tips you can share? Also, completely agree about the semi-passive! Lots of questions to deal with daily.
In my experience quality sells. Quality code. Quality feature set. And most importantly, quality design. I think a lot of items on codecanyon neglect the design aspect and therefore don't sell as much as they could. Also, I've been somewhat lucky in that almost all of my items have been featured. This probably has something to due with how much time I spend on design - at least 40% of my total development time is des…
I make it a point to make sure the featured items look really yummy. ;)
Re: Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?
#190I make $300-$500 per month with an online design tool for printable cupcake wrappers. I don't do any advertising. I get 80-100 uniques per day. I have very few quality inbound links. I do rank high for a few keyword combos, but their monthly traffic isn't that big.
I spent quite a bit of time early on writing the website, and lost some hair recently trying unsuccessfully to upgrade the OSS libraries, but for the most part it runs itself, at least when GoDaddy's $60/month VPS isn't flaking out. The only other expenses are the domain, e-junkie, and payment processing fees.