Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2017 – Show and tell

I make over 700$ per month through patreon for my open source work, primarily https://github.com/ory/hydra . Hydra started as a side project for a work-for-hire project. After getting bashed by people for it being trash (it was, mostly due to bad dependencies but also due to bad architecture), I rewrote it (and the libraries enabling it) and now it's one of the go-to services for getting an OAuth2 server up and running. I am very stubborn and spent a ton of time on auth* questions while building other projects, and it seems like people like my approaches to it! :)

It's come so far now that I'm starting to consider this my full-time thing (I'm in the final stages of completing my MSc computer science) and I'm currently running evaluation on an API security platform based on that technology. Basically, I spend most of my time on it and I even got a small team helping me - but it's not what earns my living at the moment.

Before that I gathered a lot of experience from running and building https://en.serlo.org/ which is basically a Wikipedia for learning (I built the whole CMS from scratch) that serves over 1m MAUs in Germany (the english page is very sparse, most of it is on https://de.serlo.org ) and is thus on the most popular learning platforms in Germany. The company behind it is an NGO (= no profits) I cofounded and the platform is ad-free and doesn't cost anything. We get money through donations and other funds.

It's an exciting journey, I'm now at a point where I need to figure out how to actually make money on the web that doesn't come through donations and goodwill, but I think I can do it - why not, right?

By the way, you may also like the WYSIWYG editor I wrote - I also plan a static site generator based on it with a themeforest-y market place. Feel free to check those out:

* https://www.ory.am/sites/ * https://github.com/ory/editor

ps: It took me almost 2 years to get to 700$ at patreon and most of it comes from one sponsorship I'm very glad of. Their CTO texted me one day because he saw hydra on HN frontpage and he works in the identity space.

Care you explain your strategy?

Working on https://apibot.co, a testing and monitoring tool for REST APIs.

Many of our customers come from word of mouth plus talking to people. Its been very interesting to see the kind of tests that people built with our tool.

We're still technically in BETA although sales are going slow but smoothly. Send me a message if you are interested (fernandohur at apibot.co).

Selling pickaxes. Nice.

Nice to hear, I guess I'm on track. Thanks for the open answer!