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How much money are you earning from your software products?

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Re: How much money are you earning from your software products?

#71

Post by waleedka »

heliodor wrote: post #60
waleedka wrote: post #56

Symphony makes $2500/month ( http://www.symphonytools.com ). Launched 4 months ago. Back in December, my co-founder and I spent 3 weeks brainstorming and wrote 25 business plans for 25 ideas. And then chose this one. Started building it in January. It's written in Python. Hosting costs about $700/month on Google App Engine. It doesn't cover our costs yet, but it's growing. Hardest challenge so far has been to find wa…

Why are you still on GAE if it costs that much? I learned Django and migrated my projects off GAE a year ago. It was rather painless to learn the bits of Django needed to replace GAE, and looking back it was a great move.

I think of it as paying a little extra to outsource the boring parts of my job to Google. I don't worry about sharding, load balancing, replication, ...etc. I've done those in the past, and it wasn't that exciting. I like spending my time on code, and it lets me build things faster.

App Engine has it's disadvantages as well. At one point I used typhoonae (open source framework that let's you run you GAE apps on EC2) and was about to switch, and then decided against it.

Re: How much money are you earning from your software products?

#72

Post by [deleted] »

dannowatts wrote: post #23

have a few side projects. here's a fun one: http://ShouldIDrinkThisFuckingBeer.com it is making absolutely zero money (yet), but the engagement on the site is INSANE. also, the site itself, and the people who come to it (and email/tweet/blog/instagram/vine/smoke signals/carrier pigeon/etc about it) are passionate and willing to support craft beer. besides the benefit of interacting with super cool, kick-ass people wh…

[deleted]

Re: How much money are you earning from your software products?

#73

Post by pchaso »

Well here is my journey. A few months ago, I built a vertical jobs board platform, free for developers and paid by companies announcing their job offers (yes another one).

The numbers:

I launched during summer and have made around $200.

Have 1125 developers subscribed to daily alerts

Have processed around 1500 applications for 81 jobs posted (most of them through 100% discount tickets given away)

The idea was not very well thought, but something simple to start with. I used it to start gaining experience and also to start building a reusable code base (mailing, billing, etc) that would let me move faster with future products, not expecting to make any money at all from it. As a single founder/developer/designer/sysadmin/marketer/support guy etc, I found it very hard to accomplish, but very rewarding once it was launched.

I built a few sites:

for django jobs: http://djangojobbers.com

for ruby on rails jobs: http://railsjobbers.com

I also have boards for javascript, php, java, android or ios, but with not a lot of subscribers, so they are free for publishers for now. The links are http://php.jobbersnet.com, http://ios.jobbersnet.com, etc

Now I am getting ready to launch a new thing (identee.com) to help low level users increase their security by storing their usernames & passwords encrypted in the cloud.

Re: How much money are you earning from your software products?

#74

Post by jay_kyburz »

waleedka wrote: post #56

Symphony makes $2500/month ( http://www.symphonytools.com ). Launched 4 months ago. Back in December, my co-founder and I spent 3 weeks brainstorming and wrote 25 business plans for 25 ideas. And then chose this one. Started building it in January. It's written in Python. Hosting costs about $700/month on Google App Engine. It doesn't cover our costs yet, but it's growing. Hardest challenge so far has been to find wa…

How many users do you have for $700 a month on GAE?. My game Neptune's Pride that also makes about $2500 a month and has about 1000 - 1500 DAU only costs around $100 a month.

Re: How much money are you earning from your software products?

#75

Post by middayc »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #65

Neptune's Pride 2, an online strategy game is only doing $2500 a month. http://triton.ironhelmet.com I'm looking for remote work if you're hiring.

All your games look awesome. In general I saw your (well I didn't know they were "yours") games many times as they are the type of projects I am (falsely) imagining I would try to make some day. I think it's much harder to survive from gamedev than more boring SaaS projects. Besides being much more hit-driven and unpredictable you also usually need to pay for art and other resources. (I signed up to 2 of them)

Re: How much money are you earning from your software products?

#77

Post by waleedka »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #74
waleedka wrote: post #56

Symphony makes $2500/month ( http://www.symphonytools.com ). Launched 4 months ago. Back in December, my co-founder and I spent 3 weeks brainstorming and wrote 25 business plans for 25 ideas. And then chose this one. Started building it in January. It's written in Python. Hosting costs about $700/month on Google App Engine. It doesn't cover our costs yet, but it's growing. Hardest challenge so far has been to find wa…

How many users do you have for $700 a month on GAE?. My game Neptune's Pride that also makes about $2500 a month and has about 1000 - 1500 DAU only costs around $100 a month.

Only about 200 DAU (3K MAU), some are paying and the rest are on a 30-day free trial. But we do a lot of processing for each user. For example, we have a unified inbox for all your mentions and messages from all your social networks, so we pull a lot of posts on a regular basis. Our database has 3.7M records, and a total size of 15GB (8GB for data + 7GB indexes).

I expect the cost per user to go down as the percent of paying to trial users goes up. Trial users stay for 30 days, and then most of them stop. But paying users continue using it much longer. Also, there is a lot of room for optimization, which I'll get around to doing later, once the key features are in place.

Re: How much money are you earning from your software products?

#78

Post by dennisgorelik »

http://www.postjobfree.com ~$19K/month revenue -- mostly premium subscriptions from recruiters for job advertising and resume contacts, but also job alerts, revenue from sending job applications to job network and AdSense (in declining revenue order).

If it looks inspiring, keep in mind that:

1) It's revenue, not profit.

2) PostJobFree took about 4 years part-time + 2 years full-time.

3) I'm not doing it alone.

4) I still would be better off financially if I just worked as a programmer for hire.

Startups are tough.

Re: How much money are you earning from your software products?

#79

Post by amplification »

After doing a lot of listening in forums, on my email list, etc... I launched http://jfdi.bz as a response to a common pain I kept seeing: there's so many people building products by themselves (alone in their basements). They want a social connection with other folks who are doing the same thing (more here: http://jfdi.bz/guide.pdf)

Did a small launch in August. It's now just over $1,000/month in revenue. I use WPEngine to host the site. It's built mostly on the open source BuddyPress platform.

Re: How much money are you earning from your software products?

#80

Post by hobo_mark »

girasquid wrote: post #54

Beathound ( http://beathound.com ) is making between $50 and $100 a month in affiliate revenue from the various music stores. I'm working on rolling out some new features that will increase that.

Interesting! Plenty of room to grow considering it's iTunes-only and (anectodally) most people I know don't use iTunes... What music stores do you support? I've seen lastfm has 7digital, amazon, itunes and juno but I've never used any of them.
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