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Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
51–60 of 575 posts
Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
#52I'm… Oh, making or losing $500/month? Never mind.
I think most ideas should start with the “equivalent” of a cgi bin script and domain name before going crazy with infrastructure. Scaling is so much more fun when customers are maxing out what you have now and improvements lead to direct customer impact.
Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
#53https://canine.sh - makes it dead simple to turn your Kubernetes environment into a Heroku like PaaS. Mainly used in organizations with developers who want to deploy to a corporate Kubernetes environment, but don’t want to deal with the complexities. It’s fully open source so we’re covered by sponsors, the largest being Portainer $5k+ / m from sponsorships. Makes it possible to keep the cloud offering totally free.
Holy cow! That’s exactly what I’ve been looking for my homelab.
Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
#54Formester started as a side hustle but today we make $7000/month. All I wanted was to build a good product which our users feel like using. Help them with exceptional customer service and build a team and a company worth waking up to.
But you didn’t say what you are making!
Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
#55https://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
What’s the sweet pup’s name?
Her name is Greta
Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
#56I’m still selling Computer Engineering for Babies. And I just launched a new book called Simple Machines Made Simple on Kickstarter a month or two ago. Both books are basically just simple interactive demos for kids and adults. https://hackylabs.com
I bought two copies of Computer Engineering For Babies for some close friends! They were absolutely delightful.
Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
#57https://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
Did you do any marketing for fivethreeone?
I started with some Apple Search ads which worked pretty well and then did some IG ads which worked well too. I haven’t done any in a while though. Bing and Google ads had really bad results
Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
#58https://dbpro.app I’m building DB Pro, a modern desktop database client for developers who want a fast, local-first workflow. I started in October 2025, launched v1 at the end of November, and just crossed $1k MRR. I also post devlogs of life building and marketing DB Pro and am about to post devlog #4. The latest one is here if anyone’s curious: https://youtu.be/-T4GcJuV1rM Still very early, but it’s been fun seeing…
Any reason why neon isn't supported even though it speaks the postgresql wire protocol?
It has some behaviour differences (connection handling, pooling, serverless constraints) that I want to support properly rather than “mostly works”. Right now I'm focused on making the core experience rock solid across the most common setups first. My focus has been UX and DevEx and it's working.
Neon support is on the roadmap though, and once I add it, it’ll be first-class rather than a checkbox integration.
Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
#59I 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?
Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
#60https://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.