I run a dead-simple, one-time, online fax service called JustFax Online[0].
While I don't have a recurring revenue as I operate one one-time payment, for the past months I have been consistently grossing over €500/mo.
This also brings tears to my eyes, as I remember[1] browsing these threads and being amazed (still am) by all the people who make side projects and make money from them, and at the same time thinking that I will never reach this milestone, and yet, here I am.
I don’t need to send a fax often, but when I do it’s a real pain. I’ll be bookmarking this.
I love that it doesn’t need an account and is a simple straightforward service, as if I was paying to use an actual fax machine somewhere. I wish nearly every service online was built this way.
It used to be possible to do this with a faxmodem; these days telephony is over IP, so there might be telco APIs for it. But, because it's a telco, that will be annoying and hidden.
(I slightly balked at the $5 initial price, but then realized: this is a desperation fee and I think for a lot of the users a clear fee for a clear one off service is the best deal. Anyone who wants to send 1,000 faxes will (a) be in the top 1% of fax users in their country if it's not Japan and (b) make their own arrangements. Also patio11's "charge more")
Software wise, if you have a PBX line (which the telco will change for) you can run Asterix and then https://www.asterisk.org/products/add-ons/fax-for-asterisk/ to send as many faxes as you like to the other person in your country with a fax machine.
Why would you need a PBX line to send faxes with Asterix? You'd just need a normal phone line with a plan that includes free ("long distance") calling to the whole country, right?
Yes, I use another service + add a ton of stuff on top related to reliability, payments, and file formats. However, I have toyed with the idea of implementing my own fax sending. Maybe when I will be able to live off my side projects, I will explore this idea further.
How do people find your service? It seems like there are a million "send a fax" online services out there so it would be difficult to get in front of potential customers.
Any thought of adding the ability to receive faxes too? I notice that most of the sending places don't offer that and it might be a difference if it's not too expensive.
I still have a 25 year old HP LaserJet printer that has a built in FAX function. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to use it since we gave up our landline about 20 years ago. Still prints well, however.
A friend and I host a monthly dinner club for people interested in ethnic cuisine. We work with a single restaurant each month to create an 8-12 course all inclusive price fixe menu. The food is served family style and is authentic to the region we are hosting. We typically host the dinners on a Tues or Wed when the restaurants in our region aren’t too busy and could use the extra business.
Since 2023 we’ve been to 44 restaurants. In 2025 we served 1,099 guests and generated $126k in revenue.
This is so cool! As someone who loves trying out new restaurants I need to ask: why would I go with you guys instead of going to the restaurants myself with a friend or partner? Looking around your website it seems to me that there's very large attendance, which in my mind means generally less focus on the food itself. Do you think one of the main factors is meeting new people/the sense of community? Anyway good job! I'm not sure what your margins are but it's probably more than 500/month! Congrats!
I think there’s quite a few reasons people come. I’m just going to bullet some of them out in no particular order:
- We do the work to find the restaurant and curate a menu, story, and theme. E.g., we might go to an Indian restaurant and focus the event on only the southern regional dishes.
- Many times we have dishes that are off menu specially for our event.
- Sense of community. We have quite a few regulars who have gotten to know each other. In 2025, 45 people reached their 20th or 30th event with us. Since we take over the whole restaurant there’s a little more freedom in how the space is used. Lots of new friendships have been forged.
- When you go to a restaurant with a friend or small group, you can only order so much. We’ve had events with upwards of 25 different bites. There’s really no better way to sample everything the restaurant has to offer.
- There’s a few people who say their partner are picky eaters, so they come to our event each month to have the opportunity to be a bit more adventurous. It’s an incredibly diverse group with a lot of different reasons to attend.
Out of curiosity, if you don't mind sharing, what is the sort of profit you see on that 126,000 as i'm assuming alot of that goes to paying the restaurants?
Most of it goes to paying for the meal. We make around a 20% margin. Our cost to operate the business is quite low, but we do invest a lot of our personal time into it. It’s a labor of love.
Our biggest cost center is when we guarantee a minimum number of seats and come up a little short. Doesn’t happen often, but when it does it eats into the margin fast.
My partner and I divide and conquer. He focuses on front of house and I handle the backoffice.
The process starts ~3 months before the event. We start by picking a theme or region. Then contact some restaurants that fit the criteria and pitch them the event. That kicks off the back and forth on cost and menu.
Around 4 weeks before the event we send a save the date + previous event recap email. We summarize the last event and tease the next event, without giving away the actual resturant or type of food.
Over the next week we prep the invite email and payment forms. This requires putting the dishes on our menu template, research and writing about the history of the dishes, the region, and the resturant. Some of this content also goes onto our website.
Three weeks out we send the invite, which is a lottery system. Members have 5 days to request a seat and place a credit card hold. 5 days later we run the lottery (I wrote some basic software to randomize assignment, conver the card auth to capture and release any cards that didn't get assigned a ticket). Then we send an email to everyone who got in with which night they recieved and another email to anyone who was waitlisted. Everyone is added to a spreadsheet to track.
1 week before the event we send a reminder email and a last chance to cancel before the ticket is non refundable.
At the event we play host and check each guest in and say hi to everyone. Then we give a prepared ~5 min intro about the food, restaurant, celebrate any milestone members, and make any general house keeping accounments. Our 20 club members get a branded apron.
At the event we take video and pictures. Over the course of the next 4 weeks we post dish pictures with descriptions and history of the dish on our instagram. We also make a 1-2 min recap video of the event which also goes on our instagram and website.
Separate from the actual event related work we have to manage the books, handle members emails, and review membership requests. More recently we started selling shirts, so there's a little work in managing that as well.
Love the communal aspect. Curious about the economics of this, how do you typically split revenue with the restaurant, and what’s the average ticket price per guest?
We negotiate a per seat all in cost with the restaurant inclusive of food, one drink, tip, and tax. We sell the tickets directly to our members and add some margin on top. Average ticket is $115.
5 days before the event we lock the head count with the restaurant. At this point the ticket is non refundable (we allow transfers). Then we pay the restaurant one lump sum. At the event the guests are only responsible for their bar tab (outside the one included drink), we don’t get a cut of that.
Sometimes we have seat minimums we need to hit and eat the cost if we are short (that rarely happens). We don’t allow ordering any other food outside of what’s on our menu.
Wow! I've thought so long about doing the same thing in London. I wouldn't do it to make money persay, but to meet amazing people and connect folks. Would love to chat sometime.
We never intended to make money. The first dinner was with 13 of our friends. We just organized the location and menu.
From there people started to tell their friends, who told others, then the local newspaper wrote about us, and people started talking about us on Facebook food groups and posting on Instagram. The community grew very organically, we never spent a penny on marketing. Most of the original 13 don’t come anymore, and we have grown into an incredibly diverse community.
This is a great project! I'm thinking about doing something similar. Do you have any bad experiences, things you would have done different, or are thinking about improving now?
Honestly, I can’t think of anything I would have done differently. Each stage of our growth came with some challenges and lessons. I think we did a pretty good job of internalizing and adapting. We definitely made some mistakes along the way, but nothing I regret doing and wouldn’t do again. Every mistake and lesson taught us something.
Feel free to email me if you run into any challenges. We might have already been through it!
great to hear! I'm getting a bit worried about possible legal issues - although that is because I might not be involved in every meeting so I'm worried about possible risks.
I sent you an email, my email handler is alanmeira. If you are too busy and can't waste time on this there is no problem tho, your post was quite motivating already.
I’m a little behind on email, I’ll reply later today.
I’ll answer some of the legal right now. First, we are at every event. Not sure how much it matters legally, but we are there as hosts and to drive the feeling of community. Without us, I don’t think the community has the same feel.
We also have an unbelievably respectful and mature community. After over 70 seatings we’ve never had an incident. We also have a code of conduct document we send all new members.
Second, we setup an LLC to shield us personally from legal liability.
Third, not to say that it shields us, but the restaurants also have insurance and are a better target for a lawsuit.
We are in the US, and at the end of the day anyone can sue anyone for anything. It’s just the reality and risk of the times. It hasn’t been a problem for us yet.
- We are lucky to have a passionate community who tell others about us.
- Sometimes we do shared reels with the restaurant, which helps drive some of their traffic to our social pages and website.
- There’s a few large local Facebook food groups which have driven membership.
- The largest driver of new membership came from coverage in the region newspaper. We credit that with the transition from 1 or 2 degrees of separation to people we had no connection to.
- There’s been a few influencers who have shown up and documented their experience. We didn’t pay for it. It drove a few members, but the quality of the newspaper and Facebook group members was higher.
I was hesitant to add my own but I think you might find it interesting as we make money not from clients but from grants.
We have IronCalc[1]. We don't make money from customers as we don't have a finalized product yet. But we have an ongoing grant from the NLnet[2].
You can have a look at the kind of projects they are granting money. It's always a source of inspiration.
That being said IronCalc takes a lot of time from me. Way more than a side project should.
The friction to try it out is already really low, I like that! But it could be even lower if instead of an image the interactive version is served right on the landing page. Great project!
- In terms of data, this is nothing compared to any site serving a bunch of images. The compute would differ, but loading speed shouldn't be an issue if you can render the HTML first, and hydrate it after page load. This static HTML would then also serve as fallback when Javascript is disabled.
- For a quick demo, I doubt you will lose people by embedding an older version. Serving a version of a few months ago seems like 80% of the work, with 20% of the effort, in terms of deployment.
Anyhow, nice to see government funds put to a good cause!
An audiobook streaming service that focuses on timeless classic works in the public domain.
I do everything from building the app to the audio engineering.
One thing I'm especially proud of is the restoration I did on the "War of the Worlds" 1938 Radio broadcast. I'm really happy with how it turned out. I've made it temporarily free to listen to [1] in case anyone is curious. You should compare it with the original [2] and let me know what you think.
Since there's been a reasonable amount of traffic due to this comment, I thought I'd leave a 50% coupon ($11.75 for yr one) for HN folks in case anyone is interested:
I just updated the home page (main nav & body content) to add a "Browse All Books" button that takes you into the app to view the current titles. Appreciate the feedback.
I’m seeing a lot of AI tells in the cover art (like for War of the Worlds) and book descriptions. Didn’t see any discussion of where the narration comes from on the site. Are all your audiobooks restorations of classic readings? Do you hire narrators to record new ones? Or is there AI involved there too?
All the audio is by real humans but I definitely use AI help on the descriptions and images, as graphic design and copywriting are not areas I’m competent in, and as a side gig currently I only have so much time.
A good chunk of the initial audio has been curated and re-engineered/enhanced from librivox, however I’m also working with voice actors to produce originals. For instance I just release A Christmas Carol which is original to our platform (also see Metamorphosis and Alice and Wonderland). More are coming every month but it takes time to develop real audio recordings with humans.
I appreciate your constructive feedback and welcome more!
When I read your first comment, I immediately thought that the audiobooks are voiced by AI. I'm really surprised to learn the opposite.
So you take existing recordings created before 1929 and remaster them? Are recordings (of books published pre-1929) which were created after 1929 in public domain too?
I don't even want to ask about producing and voice actors.. Really nice idea and realization!
There's a really awesome site called Librivox [1], where volunteers narrate books that are in the public domain. Those recordings are also in the public domain as well (this is just part of the Librivox thing). The quality of those recordings (both the narration, and the actual recording quality) varies quite a bit and most of them aren't at a quality I'd expect people to pay for and thus aren't useable for me. I've spent hours and hours sorting through those recordings finding the best ones (from a narration perspective) and then improving the recording/audio quality on them. Those recordings have all mostly been made in the last 20yrs, so they're not old recordings of the books. So, the value I add to the Librivox recordings are: curation/selection, audio enhancement, and a much better delivery mechanism (IMHO).
I'm also simultaneously building out our own library of original audio content by working with voice actors to get them recorded and proof read (this is a very expensive and time consuming process, but also very fun). One of the hardest parts is honestly the proofing process. Once I get finished narration files I have to compare them result with the actual script (as there are always mistakes) and request edits. I use whisper.cpp to transcribe them and then git and a few other scripts to compare the transcript with the actual book text.
I'll also add that I _do not_ use AI Audio narration because it just doesn't sound good IMHO, and I personally hate listening to it. I regularly run experiments to see what the current state of the tech is and it's still pretty far from where it needs to be IMO. I also don't love the idea of AI swallowing absolutely everything.
I’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.
It makes me so happy to see this genre taking off. We did "ABCs of Programming" [1] when our son was 2 at least partially because there weren't any real kid's books talking about what "dad does all day". Funnily enough it wasn't selling that well until I posted an article [2] on HN about my experience writing it. Then it did steady business for a few years
My kid got a copy of your first book as a gift a couple years ago. It's really fun to have on the shelf. The buttons are so satisfyingly clicky. Thanks!
Thank you! As it has become popular at baby showers to bring a book I always send my partner with the original 2. We have probably gifted 5 or 6 sets now.
Yeah, I’ve improved it a lot, but a lot of the books from the run I did 18 months ago get confused on the cover page thinking it’s open to the NOT page.
ooooh what was the fix? It seems so hard to rely on light for the page numbers! My niece was just doing "For Big Babies" in a dim room and my brother in law had to point his flashlight at it to keep it on the current page.
Last year, I came across NotebookLM and immediately noticed a pain point: importing the web pages I was browsing into NotebookLM required several steps. So in less than a day, I developed this Chrome extension: NotebookLM Web Importer[1], which allows for one-click importing.
As NotebookLM has gained popularity this year, my extension has also seen great growth. So, in July, I added paid premium features to unlock additional features. It exceeded my expectations and quickly went over $500 a month. It now has over 100,000 users and is still growing.
I really liked your extension having used it in the past. Great job and really useful! If you don't mind me asking, how do you manage the paid features from a technical point of view? Do you give paid users a token to enter in the extension which then activates certain features or is it something else?
Here’s my own side project that’s been earning a bit on the side:
I built DedupX, a macOS app for finding duplicate and visually similar files fast - especially useful for photographers and anyone with big local storage collections.
What it does
- Exact duplicate detection using incremental hashing so it doesn’t have to fully load huge files.
- Perceptual image matching finds similar images even if they’re resized or lightly edited (not just byte-for-byte duplicates).
- Native macOS integration with a Finder right-click scan.
Why I built it: My brother kept running out of space because of tons of photos, and every existing tool I tried either missed similar images or was slow and clunky - so I spent a couple of weekends building something that felt fast, accurate, and native.
Business side
- Free trial (no CC required).
- Paid tiers: ~$5.99/yr or ~$16.99 lifetime.
Got positive feedback and 100+ paying users shortly after launch. Been growing steadily ever since.
I haven’t been able to reproduce a freeze at 99% yet. If you’re willing, could you share a bit more detail (approx folder size / number of files, and whether CPU or memory spiked near the end)?
If you’re open to it, I’d also be happy to jump on a quick call or screen share to debug this together — totally optional. You can reach me at my support email mentioned in the About DedupX menu item. I’d really like to track this down and fix it.
Making this cross-platform is definitely a goal I wanna work on, but I lack knowledge of desktop app development on Windows and Linux.
I'm glad you think the app is cheap. Honestly I think the pricing is decent for the current set of features. I might revisit the price if I sneak in more features worthy of a higher price tag, but for now, it's good enough.
I mostly shared the launch post and ran promo campaigns on Reddit, ProductHunt, LinkedIn, Discord and even tried HN (got no replies here -‿-"). Since then, its mostly word of mouth.
Thanks to my customers' feedback, I've made a lot of improvements to the app as well. Feels good getting positive feedback and hearing from people about their use-cases. :)
I started making a daily logic puzzle called Clues by Sam in May and it's been stadily growing since. The number one thing people were asking for was more puzzles, so I started selling puzzle packs instead of monetizing with ads. The reception has been great, and the revenue has been enough for me to decline some consulting gigs and instead focus on improving the game.
I do Clues by Sam every day when I'm walking my dog before I start work, and I was particularly glad to have the daily mental workout this month, as I didn't have time for Advent of Code. Just bought both puzzle packs to support your great work!
Love it, I discovered it last week and bought a supporter pack after two days!
Everytime I get stuck I'm 100% sure you made a mistake... Until I find my own mistake
Thank you so much! Indeed, it's quite tempting to blame the game, but the algorithm that ensures all valid deductions are enabled hasn't been wrong a single time since it was finished in June. Often I don't believe it myself, but it always turns out to be smarter than me!
Oh, and perhaps worth mentioning that today's puzzle is not very representative of a regular puzzle, as usually the grid is filled with different professions and not reindeers!
It's a pretty normal mid week puzzle. They start easy on Monday and get harder towards Sunday. But don't be afraid to use hints to get started with the game! It gets easier with time!
I love it, just purchased a pack.
I've also found that it is a very great tool to test LLM, like take a screenshot of a half resolved game and feed it to ChatGPT with the rules and ask him to select the next target
It's a mix of things. For example, there's an algorithm that ensures all valid deductions are allowed (I'm not smart enough to ensure all of them manually!). But a good amount of manual work goes into each daily puzzle.
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 something fairly “boring” resonate once the UX is treated seriously.
Loved the design, looks better then the most tools I've tried. I'm using Prisma + Supabase in one of my side projects and having constant db issues. Can I integrate DB Pro? Will it replace Prisma or what?
So DB Pro is a local desktop database client for managing your databases and data. Prisma ORM it won't replace, but Prisma's browser-based data browser, yes it will absolutely replace that. It's not a replacement for Supabase, it works alongside it, if that answers your question?
I'm planning to extend DB Pro into much more than a database manager though, letting you build dashboards, workflows and workbooks.
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.
Yep, it’s built with Electron. Performance has been a big focus from day one, and it’s been really performant in all of my testing so far. The goal was a proper desktop-first experience with local performance and direct database access, rather than trying to force it into a web app. Although I do have plans to offer a self-hosted version as well.
- https://dave-bot.com -> a full-stack AI platform where you can generate videos, images, music, code, 3d objects with frontier Gen AI models.
- https://headsnap.io -> a platform that you can generate images of yourself based on 4 selfies.
- https://quantiq.live -> a service providing financial and historical data for stocks, as well as government trades.
- https://aivestor.tech -> an AI agent that picks small/midcap stocks and trades them using Alpaca API. It uses Reddit, news, polymarket, Google Trends and many other data sources to take investment decisions.
- @Polyglot_lingua_bot -> a voice-enabled Telegram-based bot that can help you learn new languages.
- https://select.supply -> a directory of carefully-curated and well-crafted products.
All of those allowed me to quit my day job and live a comfortable and flexible life. I still invest time in maintenance and adding new features, but I love coding, marketing and everything that comes with promoting and selling a SaaS (and I also have a serious addiction for Stripe notifications).
On top of that, I developed my own software agency where I help clients build and scale software (https://bitheap.ch).
Headsnap is such a scammy and/or crappy website. I paid to purchase credits for $5, tried to train a model to generate a headshot. Nothing. It just refreshes and comes back with nothing. Will not recommend.
When did you do it? The minimum package is $8. If you did this in the past, why didn't you reach out for support? I get more than 100 customers per day and rarely have issues.
ah now I see you generated your pics 8 minutes ago. You can now see them on your account page. I have a clear disclaimer that says it can take up to 30 mins to generate the photos and that you will get an email once the photos are ready.
Thanks! I wanted to implement something like that, but it's difficult to predict the progress since it's depending on how many requests are being handled in that exact moment, but it never got past 25 minutes, not even during peak hours. I am thinking of adding a modal saying that you can close the page and you will get notified over email when the photo generation is ready (the email part is already there).
I am not sure if this is a problem that should prompt an architecture change of that caliber. I use a distributed network of GPU-machines and each request is handled sequential. If all machines are busy, then the request goes into a queue already and is being picked up by the first machine that becomes available.
Also, the user got the pictures after just a few minutes and there is a clear disclaimer, and an email is being sent to the user once the pics are ready. On top of that, I have no complaints from other users about it. It's clear to me that the intent of the user was to cause some reputation harm, which I think didn't work. I also got an email from a person with the same first name (not sure if it's the same person tho) that they offer UX services for Headsnap.
You won't get consistency between pics with nano banana. I tried using it in Headsnap and the results weren't as good. Faces change drastically between pics.
Also the cost per pic with nano banana is 0.24 per pic, x 30 pictures that I generate for a pack, you would pay $7 (with big quality issues).
I find both of your stock apps (API and investment) quite interesting but both websites are eerily absent of any information outside of their respective purposes. Both websites are clean and the designs are nice but struggle on mobile it seems (I'm on Android, Brave browser, horizontal scroll seems to be buggy). I wish there was additional information outside of just what they do - I'd like to know more about the developer that created them, goals/ambitions for the future, that kind of thing. Right now, the investment app looks like a scam from an outside perspective. One page, limited information, nothing personal about it. How can I trust such a website with my hard earned cash? I think an improvement would be to have additional pages on who you are, why I should trust you, and what exactly I might get in return for my subscription. It's also probably important to make it clear that you cannot promise any long term profits from this app and that it is almost akin to gambling so users should be prepared to lose money.
thanks a lot for the feedback! That's a really good point!
When it comes to QuantiQ, I thought about targeting businesses. I already have 2 major clients and had plenty of demos with others. Usually they are not interested when taking a decision about reading pages on the website. Most of them are concentrated on finding out how you manage incidents, security policy, how do you handle improvement suggestions, SDLC, velocity etc. They anyway do their due diligence when it comes to the founder. But I totally understand your point. For B2C this is really important.
Already fixing the mobile navigation and adding some pages with more info about me.
I remove the photos only if requested by the user. The photos are removed immediately, as well as the account if that is requested too. I definitely do not use the pics for retraining or any other purpose, but just to serve them on the individual overview page of the user.
Honestly looks like a scam and your description of it makes it even sound more like one. Most of those fields you return in that docs page have nothing to do with k or qs and are equity pricing data you are buying from another third party.
Not a knock just being honest as it looks like you just don’t know so maybe this helps. Here is an example of a real company that scrapes k/q docs.
Question was about financials. The service is not only limited to q forms, obviously. Historical data or government trades are not available there. So you want me to share with the Internet all my data sources just to prove you it's not a scam?
You seem to be trying to promote a service and throw weird accusations that the service looks like a scam without even trying it, which is shameful tbh.
Again no disrespect, it’s blunt honesty. I am not promoting anything. I live in the US and work at the intersection of finance and software. Your site has quite literally zero details on it. It’s a bunch of fluff on the landing page. Why would anyone signup without any information about what they are signing up for. Your response to a question about sourcing it’s odd. You only mention 10qs which you built a scraper for but the docs you linked to don’t really have much in the way of 10q data. Some surface metadata but none of the guts of a 10q. Most of the data you linked to is market data that you would have to be sourcing through a third party. It’s just an odd response for someone like me who works in the industry that you mention 10q but none of the data is really what I would consider 10q data.
Wish you luck but don’t take honest opinions from someone who buys significant amounts of financial data as someone trying to promote a service. Just linking someone I would consider a competitor to yours in the Edgar space.
The question is about financials and nothing you linked to is about financials.
No disrespect but still accuse someone of a scam, right?
I specified clearly in the description of this service that I deliver financials, historical or congress/senate trades. I think it's obvious for someone working in finance that the last two cannot be fetched from quarter or annual forms. Things like revenue, eps, ebitda, pre/post earning moves (those use last, open prices too), are strongly-related to 10Q though.
I really don't care whether you like the landing page or not. I have two B2B clients for this API and 0% churn so far, which is the best metric I need to track right now. I will stop responding to this thread since I don't think it's productive for any of us.
thanks a lot for the heads up! That menu shouldn't be available for users that are not logged in. I just pushed a change to hide it. You can check the prices at the bottom of the landing page, before I add a dedicated page for unauthenticated users.
LE: I just added the pricing page for unauthenticated users too.
Well-meaning feedback: on the front page, there's a pricing section lower down, which only mentions credits and doesn't give a price; the click-though goes to a login screen.
I found this so instantly frustrating that I rage-closed the page and came here to moan!
Reading the comments, I don't believe you're looking to implement a dark pattern and not show the price, but that's what seems to be happening currently.
Now I see the main pricing page, it's worth pointing out that the categories and prices there don't match with those on the front page: 'starter' with 30 headshots vs. 'novice' with 35; 'basic' with 60 headshots vs. 'proficient' with 70, etc.
Do you think it will become more difficult to make money on such services due to AI getting better and better at coding? Like, wouldn’t that make it easier for people to create competing services?
Or do you think this effect is counteracted with AI also opening up for new opportunities for creating services that would not otherwise be feasible pre AI?
I agree that development has become easier and the barrier for entry is generally lower due to AI. However, without distribution it's still pretty much impossible to get clients. You also need to have some engineering background since AI cannot solve everything for you.
Important to mention, IMHO not many people are willing to sacrifice their time and energy to start something that doesn't have a clear path to profitability.
That makes sense. And I guess distribution/marketing is an ever moving target in which those being the most clever and willing to put in the time and energy wins regardless of AI getting better?
Like, say AI makes distribution and marketing easier, now it’s easier for everyone, but they still compete for the same clients. So while your signal is getting stronger, so is the noise (the signal of all the other competitors). So those who put in the hours and smartness to «invent» a more clever marketing strategy are the ones able to break through the noise and reach the clients?
In other words, distribution/marketing is the bottleneck and the target is ever moving?
Exactly, and currently I'd say that AI is not too helpful with distribution/marketing. I still do copyrighting myself as with AI it really feels impersonal and "artificial". By distribution I also refer to social media following and users that trust you to test/buy your product. IMHO this is still the most challenging part to solve, as it takes a lot of time to improve your social media presence to reach a state where it's guaranteed that you will have customers from the moment of the launch of your product.
It's the most difficult part. In my experience paid ads do not work very well so I am not relying too much on those. I usually use social media with UGC videos created either by me or by content creators. I also reach out on Instagram, even dating apps, to users and pay them to use/promote a product.
Recently I started to use n8n automation to post on Twitter/LinkedIn, however I tend to keep those posts short since they are created with LLM's and do not seem authentic.
As for the SEO part, I usually upload search console extracts into Perplexity deep research and ask for actions on how to improve ranking for different keywords.
thanks! Most of these projects are hosted on Vercel, and I am extensively using their observability solution to get alerts when something unexpected happens. After some time you get to fix everything and you'll spend less time firefighting.
For customer queries, I usually respond myself. However when I am not available, I have a small team of freelancers that help me just with that. I played with LLMs for responding to questions, but it just didn't work out for me.
Occasionally $500/month, but more reliably $300/month in sales of my Video Hub App - lets users browse, search, tag, and organize videos on local / network drives. Aiming to have an 8th anniversary release February 2026.
* Focus on Windows users. Windows desktop share is 10x that of Mac and nowadays Windows users pay almost as willingly as Mac ones.
* Charge several times more.
* Redo the website. In particular get rid of 3D slant and on-hover animations, put larger high-res screenshots, explain each of them well (and not in gray on gray text), put up "Windows / Mac / Linux" in bold friendly and highly-visible letters. Better yet have separate Download buttons for each. Add version and last release date, next to the Download button. Have at-a-glance summary of features closer to the top of the page. Ditto for pricing and trialing details. Ideally, adjust windows chrome in the screenshots based on the web client's OS, i.e. show Windows screenshots to Windows visitors, Mac ones - to those coming from Macs, etc. The last thing you want to show Mac screenshots to Windows people, because it implies that the Windows version was an afterthought.
All in all, the site gives an amateurish/hobby project vibe, and the $5 price cements the impression. If you are to spruce things up a bit, you can potentially live off this app. At the very least and with not much of an effort you can double/triple what you make off it.
Thank you for all the suggestions! I like them and will try to implement at least a few in the coming year (I end up spending more time towards other exciting projects like writing a sci-fi novel and DIY remodeling my house).
With Mac screenshots on the site they won't tell much. Plus the point is that it's worth to actively cater to Windows users even if you don't have many at the moment.
To me, it would have been clearer to avoid the “Demo” button label altogether and be explicit about the different versions and OS targets. Also, I think the visual hierarchy of the two respective buttons is too subtle.
I launched Filestash [1] as my response to the infamous “Dropbox should just be FTP” comment. Once I had a decent FTP experience, I kept going: adding support for pretty much every storage protocol, plugins to expose Dropbox (or anything else) over FTP, SFTP, MCP, or S3, and all the features I wished Dropbox had, with plugins to customize everything.
The base product is open-source and I make money from custom builds, additional plugins, paid support, and the occasional extra feature for companies with specific needs. It's a bit more than noodle profitable but quite under a normal salary.
Where is the dropbox-part in this? This seems to be a filemanager for remote storages, which is kinda the opposite of dropbox, which is mainly a local service for syncing data. Or did the documentation missed explaining the sync-function?
What a blast from the past. I attempted to build a file-sharing tool for my team when we had video and images strewn across the org. I prototyped embedding filestash for the frontend.
It was basically a backend for generating STS credentials on the fly using a more ergonomic interface. It never went anywhere and I haven't thought about it in years, but I still believe it was a good idea that I just didn't have the organizational clout or time to push forward.
Edit: apparently I contributed at some point too? I *barely* remember that. Glad to see the project is still succeeding!
This could probably be more profitable for you with better tagline/explanation!
I have the context for what "that comment" was, might even be in the target audience, yet from the landing page I'm still not entirely sure what it actually does. Might be worth trying a few "it's like X but with Y" or "imagine if dropbox could Z" and other formulations on uninitiated people in your target audience?
It started as just an uptime checker for websites, eventually I added support for APIs and cron jobs, and automated status pages (you may have seen this one yesterday: https://hackernews.onlineornot.com/)
I started it in 2021, I give it two hours a day before work every workday, and I cut scope on most features to ensure they're shippable in two hours. Then I iterate. It works because it's default-alive. I keep a full time job to be able to build it exactly how I want.
Like my React blog, I started it knowing thousands of others were doing the same thing. I made a bet that my unique perspective would be useful to others, and it paid off.
Has been above $500/mo since 2022, growing steadily since (still a few years away from being able to replace my salary).
This interests me because I recently started building my own monitoring service but stopped because of the existing / entrenched competitors. While it was fun to build the PoC I got to a point where it was becoming "work" and I questioned the ROI. How did you decide to persevere despite this?
I had a habit of building for two hours a day, so I didn't have a lack of motivation or anything, but what boosted it most was getting better at sales and marketing to make it worth building.
My wife's Etsy shop (https://www.etsy.com/shop/LittleLanternShop) is starting to pick up. She is leaning into creating digital sewing patterns for decorative felt crafts. We have had Etsy success before with 3d printed products, but managing printers and fulfilling orders can be stressful and time consuming, and she was hoping to build up a more passive income stream. She made over $1000 in the past month, which beat both our expectations
(We'll get back into 3d printing once life slows down a _little_ bit again)
Any tips on that? My wife is starting her Etsy shop (https://www.etsy.com/shop/BravinaPrints) but she is not really getting any visits and still trying to figure out what kind of stuff she wants to draw.
Wanted to teach my little brother about logic gates. Saw that for him to truly grasp the idea of it, he needed some "hands on" experience to develop the intuition about it. I decided to develop a PCB board that basically turns-on-off the lights based on the inputs. He was like "cool" and kind of threw it in the corner. Rather than just leave it, I decided to further develop it and make it as a learning tool for myself as well(web design, marketing, BOM optimization etc).
Then I started to get feedback on the initial project which was quite helpful(universities, EEVBlog and colleagues) and based on that made a "Logic Trainer" which is like very advanced version of the initial idea. It has so many features and it kind of has taken off in a sense that 2 universities want to buy it for themselves. Also I didn't expect it but most people who buy it do it for their kids. IMHO its way too complicated for kids, but practice and feedback that I have gotten shows that it really isn't.
I haven't made any profits from the project yet (due to high development cost) but hopefully in the future it help to pay my rent :).
https://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, growing about 10-20% per month with minimal marketing, exceeding all expectations I had for the project when I set out
You can get great results with nano banana nowadays (ex: "convert this image to a coloring page") - I'd say we focus on 1. consistency with our base style from image to image, 2. likeness (still really tough to get 100% right but we've come a long way since our MVP) and 3. offering fun alternatives (South Park inspired coloring pages, Minecraft style, etc)
We also handle all the post-processing (upscaling, image cleaning, etc) that you need in order to get great printed results - with Gemini (Nano Banana) or ChatGPT you've got to pull each image out, possibly remove the watermark, set the curves/levels in photoshop/gimp, upscale it, etc then print the page - you can just hit Export and download a pdf ready to print from our site
I run https://aliveai.app a large uncensored (i.e. adult) AI image and video generator.
It started as a small side project but slowly grew every month and recently exploded to well over 50k USD revenue per month. It's fun to have a large community of paying users but honestly I never thought out of all my side projects this one will make it.
I am still a one man show managing everything from development, marketing, customer support and content moderation. If I am honest the money is nice but I am severely burnt out and not sure if I can or want to do this much longer. It is a 24/7 job and I miss the days where I can just sit down and code a nice feature that people will like. Also looking at NSFW content all day kind of messes with your mental health.
I had some discussions of potential buyers but selling something for less than its monthly revenue seems crazy so I am still here trying to do my best and waiting for the right exit.
Hey! Would you consider trialing some help, even part-time initially, and pro-bono, to see how it goes? As a developer since childhood, and product manager for most of my career, with (I dare say) some out-of-the-box, simplicity, "cheap is best" professional deviation, and sex-positivity in my personal and artistic life, maybe there's something we can get together on? Give me a shout! zenojevski at gmail dot com, or https slash slash zeno dot love. At the very least we can have some fun and maybe keep writing :D Zeno
wish you a good exit and return back to days when you did that: "I miss the days where I can just sit down and code a nice feature that people will like"
Thank you for the post. It once again reminded me how important it is to choose a pet project that aligns with your personal values.
For a while I was looking for a non-technical co-founder, but I found it difficult to find someone who is both skilled and motivated in the adult content domain.
I am currently rewriting the user role and permission system with the goal of introducing a moderator role in the future that has limited, moderator-only access rights. At the moment, there are only admin and regular user roles.
Even with this in place I am unsure where to advertise for an NSFW content moderator position.
That's interesting! I didn't know this could be such a barrier. Is this because of the potential impact on mental health? Or just because people wouldn't like to be publicly associated with NSFW content in any way?
While job hunting years ago, I got approached by a company running adult websites. They seemed to be pretty relaxed about it and they were multiple candidates for the position. There were advertising through LinkedIn as just any similar small business.
Why would you ever admit to such a thing? Don’t you have any shame?
It’s odd you admit looking at NSFW content all day messes with your mental health but I guess it’s ok since you make 50k and the women in your life aren’t having AI porn generated of them.
I am looking at the content for moderation purposes and customer support. Not sure why saying that this affects me mentally should be a bad thing.
Also maybe you missunderstood what AliveAi.app is. It is strictly a on-platform AI generation. We do not allow editing of user uploaded content (i.e. deepfake) for obvious reasons.
“ I am looking at the content for moderation purposes and customer support.”
Commendable to roll up your sleeves and wade through the mess you created I suppose.
“We do not allow editing of user uploaded content”
Wait until you find out how these models are trained!
It‘s making about $700 on iOS and $300 on Android, solely from $2.99 IAPs for the later missions in the game (the first 2 missions are free).
I think a main reason for this is that escape rooms (and games) don’t „saturate“: you play them only once, because then you know the solutions. So another escape room (place, game, app) doesn’t cannibalize the market - it may rather strengthen the others by fostering it as a group activity.
I also put 0$ into ads- it solely spreads itself by being a group activity (3-5 people are best) and through its mission editor (people can make their own missions, used in school and for birthdays etc).
Humadroid (https://humadroid.io) - AI-Assisted SOC 2 & ISO 27001 compliance for small teams. $125/month flat (for now, during beta).
Recently crossed the $500/month mark after a painful pivot from HR tech earlier this year. The whole thing started because I did ISO 27001 back in 2019 and was completely lost - overpaid for consultants, got lost with policies and controls, figured it out the hard way.
Passed SOC 2 Type I earlier this year using only Humadroid (yes, dogfooding a compliance tool through an actual audit was... an experience).
Currently finishing automated evidence collection (AWS and GitHub integrations first). Pretty proud of that one - compliance shouldn't mean "panic-screenshot everything before audit."
Really cool stuff, I thought about launching something similar earlier this year, there's definitely a market there. I see a lot of AI-ative startups coming up against compliance requirements way earlier than before, with much smaller teams, and most existing solutions just need too much from you as you engage.
How do you see yourself against someone like delve.co?
Honestly, Delve is great. Them and Compai are leading the front of modern AI-assisted compliance right now. I'm chasing them.
What I'm trying to do differently is depth of context. Humadroid learns about your company first - how you operate, your stack, your processes. From there it generates control descriptions that are actually actionable for your setup, and policies that need minimal review rather than a full rewrite.
Whether that's enough differentiation? Ask me in a year.
The big difference is context-awareness. Vanta/Drata give you templates and checklists. Humadroid starts by understanding your company - what you actually do, how you operate, your tech stack.
From there, the AI generates policies that are yours, not generic docs with [COMPANY NAME] placeholders. Same with control descriptions - they're specific and actionable for your setup, not "implement access control" with no context. It also identifies risks based on what you actually do and helps build business continuity plans around your real critical processes.
You still review everything (it's compliance, not magic), but you're editing 80% done work instead of staring at a blank template wondering where to start.
The price difference is real too, but honestly that's a side effect of being early and solo - not the core value prop.
Gotcha. And then how does that translate into the audit process? Because Vanta/Drata have auditors they work with regularly, there's a bit of an incentive on both sides to use these templates because then it speeds up that part tremendously. I can't imagine the auditors being happy about really diving into hyper bespoke documents for every audit.
Your product seems great for actually doing the spirit of these frameworks (reducing risk, improving controls and processes etc.). However from what I've seen the reality of these audits is it's a box ticking exercise for everyone involved, and so improving the efficiency there tends to be the goal. How do you position yourself in that?
Also hope this doesn't come off too critical, it's just something I've been through recently and love seeing new things! I'd definitely add a vanta/drata comparison to your website though as that is inevitable.
Honestly, great questions - this is either good exercise for me or actionable feedback. Both valuable.
Right now I recommend auditors but don't have formal partnerships. Vanta/Drata's auditor relationships are... let's say on the edge of conflicted? I don't want to go that route. And at $250/month I can't play the referral game anyway (Vanta pays hundreds per referral - that math doesn't work for me).
What I can do is democratize access. I've watched too many small teams get excited about SOC 2, then ghost once they see the total cost - $15k+ for the platform, $20k+ for consultants, $15k+ for auditors. I want the barrier low enough that smaller businesses can actually get certified and compete with bigger players.
On the checkbox vs. real security thing - you're right, it's tricky. I don't want to be another "generate docs, tick boxes, forget until next audit" platform. But targeting smaller businesses actually helps here - when you're a 10-person company, management is in the compliance process, not just signing off on someone else's work. It tends to stick better.
That said, sometimes I wonder if I help too much. My System Description assistant is almost unfair - what used to take weeks now takes minutes. Is that checkbox-enabling or democratizing? Genuinely not sure.
And yes - "vs Vanta/Drata" pages are going on the list. You're not the first to ask.
Not yet - but literally finishing this week. Promised a customer I'd ship it before Christmas, so that's been my deadline.
AWS and GitHub integrations first. It auto-fetches and verifies the data (where applicable), creating read-only evidence snapshots. No manual screenshots or "I swear this config was set correctly" moments during audits.
Part of the standard price - no integration tier upsell.
This is a perfect example of taking a simple idea and elevating it/ executing it well. Well done!
As someone that has used 531 for a while, I thought an app like this would not add much value. I mean, we can all track our progress in a spreadsheet. But I must say that it looks great.
Thank you! I created it literally because I thought updating spreadsheets on my phone was too clunky. And yeah having the rest timer with notification was useful to keep the pace.
Nice! I used to use it when doing BBB 5/3/1. Sadly I stalled and got depressed.
Recently started GZCLP after getting sad at how bad I started to look with no activity
My one complaint was that there weren’t more sophisticated training regiments. I didn’t work 5/2 weeks so I just went to the gym every other day and I just clicked whatever in the app when working out, while I would prefer to track my days. Otherwise solid app, thanks for the hard work.
Supporting more sophisticated training regiments is exactly what I’m trying to achieve with Vis. Would love your feedback on it if you got any (email in profile)
I assume you have some kind of partnership with Jim Wendler?
The periodization sounds really cool but the success of the app I would think is based entirely on the good marketing Wendler and Elitefts did with 5/3/1.
Wow this is pretty cool. I am working on my first mobile app. what tips can you give. I am planning to build in public on twitter, substack and share my coding process here on HN.
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
Launched "Cadence: Guitar Theory" (https://cadenceguitar.com/) a guitar learning app with a focus on music theory in September.
Currently right above that $500/month when including lifetime purchases.
Had a sizeable bump in October thanks to blowing up on here which also gave me an app store boost so thanks guys :)
I'm working on new lessons at the moment, after that I'll probably try to improve on the animations and sound effects to give the app more "juice", should be a fun thing to work on.
Also still trying to figure out marketing and how to get visibility overall...
I'm reading this because of the newsletter! HN is a time sink so the newsletter lifts only items worthy of attention to my email. Been a sub for many years. Thank you!
I subscribed last december after knowing about it in last year's version of this thread.
It is great and gives a very good summary of the HN week, I love it!
Everything comes and goes. HN is no exception.
With that in mind does it matter for you? Are you here because HN is at its peak? If commenting here makes you life better a bit keep doing that. If not then just don't and go somewhere else. Or stop using the internet altogether and just became goat farmer. Do what makes you happy and not what crowd thinks will make you happy!
it is a very interesting observation and I did some calculation and it seems that every 8 seconds, one hackernews comment is made
I feel like the reason why it has peaked is that when hackernews was created, it probably had both youngsters and experienced alike since it was the hot new thing once but over time it matured and I think that very few young people are here and I doubt that there are surveys for hackernews median age
I am one of the youngsters and honestly I joined because of youtube (fireship -> primagen -> theo t3 -> hackernews)
And I feel like the reason hackernews doesnt feel attractive to youth is probably because of attention span, like only recently I saw someone create a thread about what clicks on hackernews or not as if its a game and I do feel like hackernews isnt conventional social media and our whole new generation has never really understood something beyond conventional social media
To me, it was unstimulating at first (which in retrospect is a good thing), like just large amounts of texts and texts in comments and I didn't understand the situation
And I don't think hackernews should change. Once I got the hang of it, it became one of the most interesting websites to me personally.
But don't worry I think that the spirit of hackernews/tinkering is still there in youngsters whom I see in their own ways, people (my age) are definitely being fed up and are taking steps like clippy and other interesting stuff that one can argue go similar to tinkering/curiosity of computers
I will have to admit that even my attention span was "cooked" and I don't think it was something extremely because I have talked about it but like, as a youngster the culture is changing so fast sometimes like, after I was on hackernews for a long time, I do not feel talking internet slang but that does alienate me sometimes because people my age have low attention span and when I used to send long messages to my friends they were kinda responding like, "aint nobody reading ts" or even on platforms like discord, I genuinely felt like a left out person because all people my age had slang or something and I didn't
Nowadays I do not feel this way because this is the person I am and I kinda see opportunities for myself which are unique to myself because of hackernews and the tinkering curiosity it has given me but still I just wanted to share a perspective about something that had troubled me once.
Neat. Consider building a version that is usable outdoors and clearly visible from further away in daylight, and at night, and you might be able to offer it to some public transport companies in various countries, that are still using devices running Windows to display transport schedules. Market them using digital sovereignty and sustainability angles.
It came out of a project that I did [1] from which I wanted to see what it takes to turn that into an actual product[2]. Hardware is a while other game than software especially in low quantity as you still need to deal with things like CE.
And in the process of bringing on a co-founder and building a full desktop/mobile app so you can track what you are reading, what you loved, and we can use that data to deeply personalize your recommendations (as I am frustrated with Goodreads as I don't think they even try to do this well).
Just a call a number and practice a cold call with a bot. People seemed to like it when I built it so I made a free and paid tier. Getting like 3-5 new users per day without really doing anything.
Thank you. I'm not doing any marketing at all. In fact I noticed about a third of the traffic comes from ChatGPT of all places. I guess that's just from the SEO. But users keep trying it out, maybe because it's really simple to start. Just call the number.
Neat! We made a similar thing years ago in the pre-AI era, with strong focus on detection of how the planned workouts were executed rather than making plan adjustments just on a single scalar metric (e.g. TSS). Didn't really go anywhere unfortunately.
Nice! Curious, what metrics did you land on? IF, VI, duration, etc., or an interval detector? That is the unfortunate thing about the serious cyclist industry; it's tiny! Not worth pursuing as a business unless the TAM is expanded broadly
Congrats. This sounds like a great way to build a "wrapper" product. Gather clean data on a particular niche and keep it in one place. Have something that's good at processing that data. No matter what "startup killers" the big boys release, it's still resilient and valuable.
TR's "AI" claims are a bit of a stretch. It basically just monitors fatigue and will ramp down a prescribed workout to ensure you don't overtrain.
The workouts themselves are templates chosen from a list and do not adapt to the rider as an individual. It plugs in a standard periodization schedule with flexible dates.
Repth uses AI for everything with a few guardrails. You pick a peak date, describe your peak event, weekly availability, and ftp.
Repth then generates a macro plan, and the next week of workouts. As you perform, it will monitor for compliance and adjust the prescription depending on your compliance and feedback. All of it is unique per user, optimized for the demands of the specific event.
Overall, TR's approach is fine. Any plan can work as long as you stick to it. I built Repth simply to replace my (human) coach in 2022 and in that regard it has been a huge success
How did you promote it? I find myself in the same market but for planning based on route weather and fitness conditions w/ https://brezza.cc - It is very hard.
Haven't promoted it at all, beyond having a marketing site live on the web with competent SEO. I should say, it's not hugely popular or anything. But considering that I only built it for my own needs, I look at it more as art than craft. In that way, it can only be a success.
https://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!
I almost built something like this a short time ago. Some devices/softwares (in my case it was the Supernote calendar app) only allow for one calendar as a source, and I had to merge my work and personal calendars to show up in my device. :)
BudgetSheet ( https://www.budgetsheet.com ) -> $6k MRR avg. for the year. Will likely have my first $10k month in January.
Live Bank Transactions + Google Sheets. Links accounts with Plaid to track transactions and balances over time with some helpful templates. All the data is yours in your own spreadsheet to do with what you want.
Revenue is somewhat seasonal. Most revenue comes in Q1+Q2 and trails off in Q3+Q4. Used by individuals and small businesses that love spreadsheets and want to manage their own finances.
Not really sure how to answer this, because there are varying degrees of "self hosted" vs. "cloud hosted".
This is a Next.js app hosted on Render.com, which is a managed VPS offering similar to Heroku. BudgetSheet is also of course completely reliant on Google Cloud though with Google Apps Script and the Workspace Marketplace where it is listed.
Oh, it's you! One of my favorite channels on YouTube. Learnt Alpaca and TA-Liband backtesting from you and also built my screener with your vids. Awesome content always. I am looking to go through the IB ones soon.
This is a huge success!!! Im also in this field, never thought that you could collect so many people on this niche topic!
If you say: some affiliates - think about getting a sponsoring partner for some B2B stuff, and speak the advertorial by yourself(!), one slot per one video/show.
In my country we have a small but good&nerdy startup podcast run by two guys - they do advertising this way, mainly B2B tech stuff (accounting software etc.) - in an interview recently, they unveiled their numbers - per slot (20-25 seconds) they get 8k - 10k. And they have a couple of slots per month.
I quit my job a couple years back to work on this app full-time, as well as its companion flashcard app, Manabi Flashcards. The goal is to help you learn through immersion and eventually replace some of your flashcard reviews time with reading (once I finish auto-reviews for flashcards)
What's special about it? Manabi Reader became popular as an Japanese-focused alternative to services like LingQ in that it locally tracks and analyzes all the words and kanji you read and study. It shows you which words are new and which you're currently learning via flashcards, so you can easily find content that suits your level and see what flashcards to prioritize adding.
It also passively accumulates an on-device (and in your personal iCloud) corpus of example sentences from your reading. It’s also one of few ways to mine sentences including pitch accent directly into Anki on iPhone.
I had built this part-time while working over many years (starting with flashcards and then the reader app) but going full-time gave me the time to do a full rewrite: SwiftUI, native iOS + macOS, and an offline-first architecture that syncs with iCloud and my server in the background.
Although it has a companion SRS algorithm (FSRS) flashcard app, it's also excellent for mining Anki cards. This works with AnkiMobile on iOS and AnkiConnect on desktop.
You can use it like a web browser for the web, or subscribe to RSS feeds. It comes with a bunch of curated content by level. Recently I added EPUB support, pitch accents, and note-taking with todos.
I'm now almost done adding a manga mode via Mokuro, and Netflix/streaming video support via realtime captioning of audio streams.
To scale this with UGC/influencer market I need to make it more beginner friendly. Currently it assumes you can read kana at least.
Just signed our 3rd customer with TrueCast (600€/month) (https://www.truecast.fr/), which is Granola for tech and non-tech recruiters. Rather than replacing recruiters in the HR process, we want to give them real time hard skills knowledge superpowers so they can better assess candidates before submitting them to their teams. We are convinced that recruiting should remain human-first.
There’s also a bot option, for self-conducted interviews, mostly used for open applications for some pre-filtering.
We are still unsure on how to enter such market, so we are doing direct networking atm, if you guys have an idea on how you’d do it or want a free trial of the product we’d love having a chat with you about it.
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]
The experiment is end-user mediated wealth redistribution from large corporations by leveraging reimbursement mechanisms, and so far I'm content with the results
Started as Pay-per-use service (upload the file and receive an email with transcript). Now we also offer subscription based service for media library, AI summaries, chat Q&A, insights/highlights.
I’ve created Pixie, a platform to employ and track your kids work. For families with a business, it helps reduce tax burden and fund a child’s Roth.
I’m a physician with some 1099 income, built the platform myself because my kids help with my side projects, and have since onboarded CPAs who now offer it to their clients. I saved 5k this year on my own taxes by employing my kids and it has funded their Roth.
Soon after launching, I crossed the $500/month mark.
This is neat, I appreciate that even if I can't use the service, i still learned something new about what's possible. Gonna keep it in the back-pocket for sharing with friends.
Also reminded me of when Justin Jackson talked about how he hired his kids for help with real projects and the positives from it https://justinjackson.ca/flipping-tables
When Twitter killed off third-party apps, the browser extension I'd been developing ever since "New Twitter" launched in 2019 suddenly became one of the few ways to make Twitter more tolerable to use, and the number of users of the Chrome version tripled from 30k to 90k in a fortnight (mostly in Japan).
When they confirmed third-party apps had been killed on purpose and jacked up the price of the API to discourage new ones, I started selling it on the App Store the next week and it's made more than $500 per month ever since.
Before the end of the year I'm hoping to roll out a single paid subscription which works across all my extensions when you sign up for it, which enables syncing settings across all your browsers and devices, unlocks additional subscriber-only features, and will enable creation of extension-specific APIs if there are future features which require one. Between Control Panel for Twitter and https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-youtube I have ~390,000 users, so, y'know, please like and subscribe.
That will _eventually_ include my free Hacker News extension ( https://soitis.dev/comments-owl-for-hacker-news ) so things like new comment counts, user notes and muted users can sync across every browser and device you use Hacker News on.
If that takes off, I hope to make the App Store versions free and figure out how to give anyone who bought it 3 months of the subscription per extension they bought as a thank-you. If anyone's done something like that before, I'd be happy to hear about it via any communication method in my HN profile!
Route weather forecasting based on date/time, speed/pace, ideal conditions in Settings. As also go/no go callout windows, AI nutrition/gear list.
Deterministic engine of fitness readiness, being able to see progress and fitness and overall body health.
Used it for: Skiing, hiking, cycling. Any outing with a route.
Import a route from Strava, RideWithGPS, GPX/FIT, Apple fitness. Plan for weather forecasting!
Fitness readiness is obtained from metrics collected from a smart watch.
I actually turned it free recently. But barely reached over 400 MRR then started dropping. Consumer market is hard and I'm more interested in learning about AI and a full stack side project.
I built ChatKeeper because I wanted to treat my ChatGPT history like a local knowledge base, with local-first access to my data.
It’s a command-line tool (GUI in progress) that takes a full ChatGPT .zip export and syncs it with local Markdown files. You can move and rename them freely and they will stay in sync on future runs.
It pairs well with tools like Obsidian and lets you link your own notes to specific conversations or even points within them.
Revenue is modest but growing month over month. It’s a one-time purchase, not a subscription.
Most users so far are researchers and other ChatGPT power users who already live in Markdown or want to do things like curate and compress the context of very long-running conversations.
Yep, you're not the only one, and I want to add support for more formats/LLMs. Right now ChatKeeper's internals are very ChatGPT-specific, but I have a plan to change that and Claude (which I also use frequently) will be the first one I add support for.
I 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!
Just a small comment, as I don't know if you're planning to wrap up or keep maintaining the product...
I can't find the pricing of the product on the site, I only find that I get '10 free credits', but I don't know how much a credit is and what can I do with it.
Home page says it's one credit per diagram, but then the docs say it's a certain amount of credits per modification (that could be correct or not, I guess...)
I usually skip if I can't find the price, but it could also happen that people create the trial account, spends quickly the credits, then they find the price and it doesn't fit them. Of course, there's always people coming just for the free credits.
I don't know if this is helpful to you or not, but I hope so :)
Thank you so much, that is a fair point! It's part of a series of mistakes I made, the product started out as a free to try and only showed the pricing after the user used up all their credits (I didn't even have a landing page back then). I'll update the landing page to make this clear!
how do you deal with continuous Google-degrading-risk?
I stopped a site lately i ran for 10 years, because Google changed the ranking so often over the years, finally traffic drowned nearly completely like 1k visitors per month, it was so frustrating so I just stopped the webserver after so many years.
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.
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.
1. Churn isn't as bad as I would have thought. There is also the use case for someone who has a job and wants to find the next one. But yea if someone wants to only use for 1 month, that is expected
2. I think companies (or the ATS's they use) might object to reposting a job listing on my site but I'm not doing that. You can search/sort/filter jobs but in order to view the job posting you will open a link back to the original job.
Back when I was in the Air Force, I hated the UX for referencing Air Force publications on mobile. So I created an iOS app called AFI Explorer [0] which has continued to get hundreds of downloads every month for the past 5 years.
Since I’ve been shifting more towards platform engineering work in my career, the best reward abut this side hustle isn’t the financial benefit, but is the opportunity to stay grounded in software dev. I love seeing the changing APIs each year with the new iOS updates. And the seasonal approach to doing updates is always fun too.
Still in MVP mode - but it already made some sales.
What's different about it from similar solutions is the way you can get data from an Excel file (most other companies have the JSON and CSV figured out).
It supports Excel style addressing so it's pretty flexible on how you reach for the data inside a PowerPoint template (access every sheet, every cell, named range or table to use it in merging process).
People use it for various kinds of use-cases - creating certificates, automating pricing offers, delivering employee feedback forms, preparing market research presentations and even subtitles for a theatrical play.
Not quite a side project, but I launched CoPlay about 3 years ago. Slow but steady growth up to 6k MRR for 2025. I think we will just about double that in 2026.
CoPlay is a platform for managing fleets of gaming consoles, users and subscriptions for pediatric hospitals. Think of it as an mdm for Xbox devices/users that does managed subscriptions
i'm solving the "sitting is new smoking" problem. Basically an app that uses your webcam and local AI models to predict if you are sitting + your sitting posture, so you don't develop neck pain.
Really cool! Huge fan of maps - it looks like there is some amount of processing, so you have that automated or are you manually editing details? Also any advice on someone just getting into engraving?
I can usually get a map shipped out within a day of the order (depending on what time you order at). I'll have you give me the custom map information here:
My Mac App Store only scanning app (https://www.pdfscannerapp.com/) still makes approximately this much a month after nearly 15 years on the store (I published it on day one when the store was realeased) - all updates since then have been free, so I'm just selling to new customers.
It's a hobby project that keeps me into Apple platform development and allows me to work on it in bursts (like the last update for Liquid Glass) and then let it rest for a while (if Apple doesn't break any APIs).
My wife runs https://www.saviament.com/, an open-access educational website in Catalan. She also sells printable content following the same style as the website, which has exploded in popularity this year and has become a decent source of income.
But a session is ~8 hours, so I stopped and use that time to study or work a job outside my field that has health benefits that is less fun than playing Texas Hold 'Em.
Launched Standly, a standing desk companion app on iOS and Max in Feb 2025. Steadily grew it by talking to people on reddit and in person. Mostly word of mouth sales and ASO. Initially it was only for mac but launching iOS has been good. Most downloads coming from organic search. Most people like it to build stamina for standing and stretching while working, especially those with lower back pain. Most customers are from EU.
I made https://meetinghouse.cc as a way for twitter people to put themselves on a map and write a bio, and what they're looking for. It's a way to find and be found, if you want to see who's interesting nearby for friends, dating, new parents meeting new parents, etc.
Pins cost $12, there are 474 pins placed so far. This keeps the quality high (there are no spam pins, only real people) but will fundamentally limit the growth, I think.
> but will fundamentally limit the growth, I think.
Thank goodness. We need more small social media with inherently limited scope to protect from the manipulative garbage coming out of big social media companies.
Because I was frustrated of the pricing and feature list of TrainingPeaks, I've built my own training planning and analytics platform for endurance athletes (and coaches too!).
It is called Tredict (https://www.tredict.com.) and it covers almost everything for runners, cyclists and swimmers over training effort forecasting and prediction, a comprehensive training log, training plans, workout planning, Vo2Max calculation, FTP assessments and collaboration with other athletes and coaches, equipment tracking and so on and so on. Quite a lot of things TrainingPeaks offers too.
It has integrations for sending and execution of planned workouts to your watch with Garmin, Wahoo, Suunto, Coros, icTrainer and it receives executed trainings or health data from Polar, Dropbox, Oura, Withings and others!
I think I did more then 15 oAuth integrations in total over Tredict's existens?
And the platform offers an oAuth2 API for 3-party integrations on its own.
The payment model is a pre-paid model for 12 months of write access to your calendar.
It brings ~500-600 Euros (before taxes) a month since 6 years.
Nice! The site looks very clean, good job! I recently bought a Garmin and I was looking into analytics-heavy training platform since I'm doing a lot of different sports so I can't just go for a 10k training plan or something. I ended up going with intervals.icu, how is tredict different from it? It appears a little tighter on the visual maybe? Anyway good job!
Thank you. Tbh I cannot tell too many difference to intervals.icu, last time I had a look was 2 years ago or so. I remember it lacked some things, but this could have changed. I think Tredict is a little bit more on the straight forward site, just looks cleaner, visually and also from the workflow, also more performant. But this is of course opinionated as I am the inventor of Tredict. I have deep respect for Intervals too. You just could use both for a certain amount of time to see which one fits better for you. :-)
I run Brick Ranker a website that tracks the value of LEGO sets and minifigures. You can also signup and catalogue your own collection so that you can track it's value or just see what you own.
It makes around $500 a month from a mixture of adsense and affiliate schemes. Would be good if I was making more but I've automated most it so I spend maybe 1 hour on it a month.
https://www.youhere.org: "Want to know who showed up?" is the tag line. It's an app-based attendance service for teachers/coaches/band directors/conference organizers, etc. I'm a teacher and it scratches an itch I had (students not showing up to class). Been hitting the $500/month more and more often now (even after server fees).
I 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.
Not sure if blogging, collecting blogs, and interviewing people about blogging is considered a side project but ever now and again, depending on how generous the people on the other side are, I hit 500/month in donations.
Everything I do is free for everyone but for the past few years I’ve been running an entirely optional membership program that starts at $1/month.
I’m (probably naively) a big believer in kindness and I keep refusing to monetize what I do in any other way.
I designed a pocket music instrument. I partnered with a company in China called Seeedstudio, they do the manufacturing, shipping, customer handling, etc. and I receive royalties on each sale. I varies from month to month, but above the 500$/month on 2025 :)
I love to be able to focus on the design and not the practicalities of selling a hardware product!
I'm a recording electronic musician and clicked through with interest. Maybe I overlooked it, but I didn't see where I could hear how it sounds. It should be so obvious that I can't miss it, so even if it's there, I'd suggest making the link more prominent.
I had medical debt to dispute, which requires certified mail. Every time the debt was resold I had to print, sign, stuff an envelope, and go to the post office again.
I built it so people could push back without the logistics.
Then I realized that nobody wants to deal with mailing at all and certified mail is used for way more than debt disputes, so I expanded it into a general legal-notice service.
https://unrav.io . Lets users reshape any article, paper, or video into the form that actually helps them think, mind-maps, summaries, podcasts, or interactive Q&A. Launched as part of the Bolt.new hackathon in August and growing steadily. Going from a 100% vibe coded web app to a full production system has been quite a ride!
I've got 2 that are kind of intermingled. Each averages a little over $500/mo on their own though.
Sportsbook API (https://sportsbookapi.com/) - A single API to get odds data from a number of US Sportsbooks
Odds Assist Pro (http://pro.oddsassist.com/) - An odds scanner tool that shows both current odds and things like arbitrage, plus ev, middles. This actually started as just a UI for me to quickly do sanity checks on the API data and eventually grew into a full site. The site is on a subdomain of a site my business partner had built long before we met, so it's kind of positioned as the plus version of that site.
API revenue is really stable and has been pretty consistent slow growth. Pro's revenue is all over the place since it's almost all referrals and promos with big spikes around major sporting events. Probably averages at least $500/mo if you look at the entire year.
Sadly not $500/mo, but I do get a few sales on https://dailychinesestories.com each month. It's as simple as it sounds - a story in Chinese at your HSK level for your preferred themes once a day.
I run drawcharts[1], which is a tool to help you build good looking hand-drawn style charts. It is not very expensive so I am currently making around 500 a year from it.
Also, as someone who likes to go to conferences and meet and connect with people, I found it hard connecting to 50 people at a conference on Linkedin and then reaching back out to them.
So I build LinkedMemo[2] which is a CRM on "top" of Linkedin. You scan a profile, the profile is automatically saved and enriched in the CRM with a quick note.
I put sponsor information on my open source project, and it has been giving me $600/mo in the past few months. There are only a few thousand stars on GitHub, but it's already the most popular tool in a paticular niche area.
There are 5%-ish code are contributed by other people, I feel really bad for not sharing the money with them. Anyway, I wish that GitHub offers the option to sponsor a project, not one single maintainer.
Did not intend to at first, but having quit Windows, I had to replace the Access application I had built with an accountant friend of mine to manage my small business. Looking around the web, I could not find something I liked.
I ended up re-writing the thing as an SaaS for my own use, but then figured that if I'm using it, others might want to, and all I had to do was to add an 'id_client' field to the database. It turns out to be a bit more complicated than that, as users tend to come with different needs, and to think of ways of using your app you did not anticipate.
Also, when I tell an accountant that I wrote an accounting application, his eyes pop, his head tilts slightly, and he appears to be evaluating whether I'm the dangerous kind of crazy before ending the conversation. Must be due to the horrors they have to deal with all day.
It's a hard sell, revenue is closer to $500/year than $500/month, because I have very low fees and very small clients. But I take great pride in counting one accountant using it in his professional practice. It's also great fun to tune as the number of lines grows, however odd this may sound.
Formester 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.
This is huge, actually I have used this before the free version, is this a 'side-project' or do you have some staff because it seems a big operation. Nice job.
I built a timesheet / activity report management app years ago.
In the French freelancing market, there’s a specific administrative hurdle: the Compte Rendu d’Activité (CRA). It’s a signed activity report that acts as the "source of truth" for billing. Most people use messy Excel sheets. I built Timizer to solve my own frustration with this workflow. What started as a side project for my friends eventually caught the eye of larger agencies. It’s now a nice $1k/month SaaS.
I recently translated the app in English so I can address larger markets, but I have no idea if this activity report is even a thing in foreign markets, like US, UK,...And if somebody has the answer here I would love to talk about it :)
I've been 3D printing accessories for the Volkswagen ID. Buzz since July. I started by modeling and printing a couple of things that I wanted, then added a couple of items that other owners have talked about on various subreddits and Facebook groups. I'm now moving about $750 worth of items a month. http://buzzprintco.etsy.com
A platform for digital asset management, review and workflow. Current features focus primarily on review of images aimed at automotive configurators.
The problem is generic, however, our USP is we have a couple of enterprise customers that upload packs of 60k+ assets for a round, and thus we aim to help discover what demonstrably changed.
A bit like Github, only working with images, videos, and other digital assets rather than text files.
I run Packetriot: https://packetriot.com, which is an alternative to ngrok. It's been in operation for 6-ish years and reached $500/month in year two. It doesn't replace my salary (yet) but that's what I'm working toward. Thankful to have thousands of users and some big companies using our services or self-hosting our server.
This is a fun space to work in but there's lot of small competitors and opensource alternatives. In the first few years it was sometimes demotivating, but at some point I began seeing competitors bow out and Packetriot kept getting better and better each year.
This year I published a lot of updates across the platform. Our UX is better with a new web-based UI for our client and all of the features of the platform can be managed in the client UI. No more going back forth between the client and user portal.
I'm planning on releasing a community edition of our server in 2026 so that anyone can use our network server for free, for personal use or to evaluate for commercial use.
Super Fine Cuts, super low run custom "vinyl" records. I have been working on automating some processing but currently it is all manual.
Had an overwhelming response as people are finding it mostly though ChatGPT which has been very interesting as I did a soft launch to friends only and no marketing.
I recently exited a Shopify App which was making ~800$ MRR and just shipped my first AI Chrome extension. It dubs YouTube videos into 82+ languages and offers more controls for better youtube experience
I was an accountant for 3 years before I switched my career to be a programmer, then I kept coding for 10+ years in big tech companies and had always wanted to build a product on my own. Eventually, I found the niche to combine my finance knowledge and my iOS skills into this App and happily building for a few years.
ah sorry currently there is no share data feature although I've heard this feature request from time to time, I probably should consider implementing this later. The premium membership can be shared with family members though -- one purchase for all members.
We're a group of developers who worked together years ago. We meet a few times a year, but scheduling is always a hassle with endless back-and-forth trying to align everyone's calendars. Frustrated by this, I built Troviamo to solve it automatically. I know similar tools exist, but this one is modern and tailored to exactly what we needed.
I built a receipt organizer and tracker app on iOS in May this year and now it has just past $200 in monthly recurring revenue and >$500 in December. Before this I have been collecting my own receipts and scanning them into a private website I built for myself, then one day I was like, why don't I make it into an app so it is easier to use and I can share it with others?
It's just been a month since I set up a proper website, and I've already received my first $ 500 in a side gig. The jobs started before I set up the website.
I help businesses automate their admin work if they already use Google Workspace products using App Script and Typescript.
As the domain (hopefully) indicates, A REST API for the FFmpeg service. So far, it's been a plain API, but now it's adding MCPs and AI endpoints, so you don't have to remember ffmpeg commands.
I'm developing Wallpunch, a censorship resistant VPN for people in China, Iran, and Russia. Userbase is pretty small as I'm still polishing things up, but I hope to expand my marketing efforts a lot in 2026!
I have a variety of education (books, courses) and run fintech SaaS, which combined are finally providing around $2K/month in profits since around July this year (for a long time, was hovering around that $500 mark)
My first successful SaaS, The Wheel Screener, a screener optimized for selling options: https://wheelscreener.com
And, just launched in November, but already profitable, VannaCharm, a dashboard to view and watch in real time dealer hedging metrics: https://vannacharm.com
Looking to launch 1-2 more SaaS in 2026, trying to get to the point where I can do this full-time, let's get it folks!
My long-running website damninteresting.com and its affiliated projects (e.g., omiword.com) earn me a combined ~$700/month profit on average. Donations have been declining, however, so I don't know if I'll be piping up in next year's thread.
I love your website. I stumble upon it again every other year and I'm always amazed by the quality of the content and writing. I was reading your articles on my Windows Mobile phone, ages ago!
Have you also had a decline in traffic in the last 18 months? It seems like the entire independent web is getting strangled out.
Thanks! We had our 20th birthday earlier this year, so we've certainly been around for some vintage devices. Over the years our primary audience moved from desktop web browsers to mostly mobile readers, and now our largest audience is podcast listeners.
Site traffic is indeed down in recent years. The largest decline was when Facebook introduced "boosting," and stopped showing our posts to 90%+ of our Facebook followers overnight. I despise advertising, so I was unwilling to cave to their demand to "boost" our posts into ads. I'd have been happy to pay a reasonable monthly fee to reach our audience there, but that option was never available.
That big dip in traffic came with a big dip in donations, and as a consequence I eventually had to move from a part-time day job to full-time. The sharp reduction in free my time led to a sharp reduction in original content on Damn Interesting, which further shrunk the pool of people willing to donate.
This is a spiral that some would classify as "death," if I were willing to let it die. But it settled into an equilibrium where it pays for itself, makes a modest profit, and remains rewarding. Frankly I'd probably still do it even if donations dried up entirely, the research and writing give me a sense of purpose that would be difficult to replace.
I used to hope that a wealthy benefactor would discover us, and decide to fully fund our project for a few years, giving us space to realize more of the project's potential. But such offers come with strings attached, and I don't have the stomach for most of those. Perhaps I am broken.
I love this site - have you considered monetizing with like e-books or other offline offerings, if you don't already?
Also, your traffic might not be counting those of us like myself who use an RSS feed (a la Feedly) - those links don't go to your site, they just go to, well, the link. =)
Thanks! We do indeed have a sort of e-book monetization; donating above certain thresholds gives one access to download an e-book version of our entire catalog.
And true enough that RSS traffic is largely uncounted, but there are many other indications of reduced visitor count--server-side logs, comment count on original content, number of email subscribers, and that sort of thing.
This is how I fear my own website will be if the trend continues. Platforms gave, and now they're taking away.
At least what you have built will endure. Even if your invested just enough to keep the lights on, you would still have a trove of fascinating content. It's something to be proud of.
I made Whenish cause i was frustrated with apps taking you outside of group chats to schedule events and find out dates when people are available. Whenish is an iMessage extension app and it works pretty nicely so far.
recently got my first user feedback email which was really exciting!
hope to figure out how marketing works to get some more users and hopefully double downloads + sales next year.
That's a good idea, thanks. I always wanted to help folks unite to defeat corrupt boards so maybe r/fuc*HOAs would be a good subreddit to advertise for that.
Hey, thanks for asking! I used those Facebook and Google ad credits you always get when you sign-up for something, ran two postcard campaigns sent directly to HOA presidents, paid to rank higher on Capterra, hired an SEO firm for 2 years, was in a Valpak insert, and ran an ad in The Chicago Cooperator for 6 months. The Capterra campaign was by far the best ROI, but still too expensive to make sense in the long term.
My assumption would be the best marketing, given you are a team of 1, would be demand capture campaigns. And it seems that your Capterra results bear that out.
But, your SEO agency would probably have focused on high intent keywords for demand capture, and presumably that didn’t work so well.
Anyway, seems like an interesting marketing challenge targeting a niche market that frankly I don’t know much about.
I wonder if you could target HOA management agencies rather than the association presidents. I know that many HOAs are managed externally at least from an operational perspective. That said, I know so little about the market…
This is great, thank you! I had to look up "demand capture campaigns" and that makes a lot of sense. Yes, I totally agree that property managers can be a source of growth. I'm very lucky to have a property manager user out of Michigan helping guide me with what she would need from a property management perspective. Their needs are just different enough that it will require some serious dev work and I'm "so very tired", haha. Everyone wants the equivalent of QuickBooks built-in to the software. I need something to bring back my enthusiasm from years ago.
Got two websites but the second one is basically a clone of the first with better visuals and better tech stack that I actually want to work on
https://aieasypic.com - 3k per month (declining cause not working on it a lot, just maintenance)
https://bestphoto.ai - 2k per month (increasing cause of better SEO)
Now trying my hand at an actual non-consumer product, not that b2b but something to make making ads easy because that’s where I find myself getting stuck on when doing fb ads or TikTok organic stuff : https://admakeai.com
Building version 3 of a front-end SaaS application that services proprietary models for analyzing securities, events/catalysts, etc. I am taking what I have learned from 5 years of users asking questions and basically redoing everything.
This version will hopefully provide a bot free / pump free replacement for iHub, StockTwits, Twitter, etc. to people who manage money professionally or otherwise.
Assuming I get more free time to finish it that is.
Version 2 is live here.
www.gravityanalytica.com
The two products Chat and Horizon both make more than $500/month individually.
This is a just side project. I run a family office.
For those of you who are in your 20s keep it up. In your 40s getting free time can be a real challenge.
For projects of this size, what legal/financial structure do you use? Particularly of interest for what Australians do, but any stories would be good.
When I've looked, a sole trader with liability and cyber insurance seemed reasonable (maybe $2k/yr), but a Pty ltd with the same would probably be safer ($5k/yr).
It all comes down to what the risk of being sued is though. I'm sure selling games wouldn't require this.
I started making this game several years ago, sporadically, abandoning it for month-long periods, but after posting it here a few times in Show NH I got the encouragement I needed to publish it to itch.io, then to Steam.
This month it crossed the $500/month mark by far, but it was a long road to get it to a state where it can actually be an interesting enough game to make money.
I'm curious, what happens if you allow much more unlimited zoning to begin with in a city? Do you have ways to model decreasing regulatory burden for new development?
Making almost exactly $500/mo on an Anki extension that embeds AI / text to speech / image gen deeply into the app, allowing you to generate example sentences, audio, explanations, etc, for whatever you’re studying, in bulk.
Still holding off on the show HN post for now; have a few more features and QoL things I’d like to add first.
It’s been an enormously gratifying project and I hear from users all around the world who have feature requests for their specific use cases. Easily the most fun I’ve had working on a project.
Almost all of my customers so far have been directly from the central Anki plugin directory. I made sure to use lots of SEO friendly terms / buzzwords in the title so that when people ctrl+f for AI or ChatGPT, they find mine.
My next steps I think are to better incentivize leaving reviews so that it ranks higher on the add-on list, and then launch it on various language learning subreddits. There’s a whole cottage industry of Anki influencers on YouTube as well (absurd, I know), so that’s another channel eventually.
My product NumeroMoney (https://www.numeromoney.com) is the first I've built that makes over $500, and it's grown surprisingly quickly. I built it because I needed something simpler that the existing solutions I could find for understanding our families spending (YNAB etc were geared too much towards budgeting). It helps users to import and categorize bank statement transactions in a way that makes it really easy to make decisions about household spending.
Hey! Late to the party, but a friend and I have been plugging away at CineQuote https://cinequote.net a daily movie quote guessing game that uses audio quotes.
We've been running the web site for a few years now (just past 1000 daily games!) and we just launched iOS and Android apps in the last couple months! Its been quite a learning experience for sure!
We handcraft each game my pulling audio quotes from different media available on the internet and also from the original sources. We also have a workflow to pull clips from clip.cafe via their API (with a workflow process to extract the audio only and generate subtitles and other cool stuff) but we usually still trim and normalize those by hand too.
I run a side project n0c0de.com [1] ... thats no-code with two zeroes
I develop apps for experienced operators who want to start their own business.
It averages well over $500 / month in side income. Typically about $3-5K depending on the amount of time I have.
I spent perhaps a decade pushing going independent due to inability to get a product ready. I ended up learning the skills and now to solve that pain point for others.
bewCloud [0] is a simpler alternative to Nextcloud if you don't use a lot of its customization options.
This year I got a grant from NLNet [1] for it, which averaged to over $500 / month. I also have some customers for it, but not close to that at all, which I'd rather have, as more sustainable way to keep improving it.
I run a podcast app for flip phones called PodLP. Revenue hasn’t always been $500/month, but averaged over the past 5 years it’s been over $500. It’s been primarily from sponsorships (podcasts get featured on the homepage to get more listeners), although next year looks more uncertain so I’m looking at other avenues.
I wrote a book about modern HTML & CSS to create website with as little javascript as possible.
I made almost 5k$ the first month, now I do 300-500$/month with it.
Here’s the link: https://theosoti.com/you-dont-need-js/
I am the co-creator of ShoppingScraper. Convert an EAN / GTIN to pricing information, product specs, content or image. API-based and rapid with pricing and barcode data.
The website needs some love, but the webapp is going well.
This year I've been working on AccelPrompt--> https://accelprompt.xyz , a tool to generate instructions for different AIs, but I haven't been able to monetize it yet :(
Started Find Boxes in 2024, it's a project and inventory management tool for audio visual companies. Took longer than expected to get the first customers, but I'm a bit above $300 a month now. I hope to cross the $500 a month mark sometime next year.
Cool app but i feel 35$/year is a cost that is not justified for me, specially that i can extract the ingredients and the steps of any recipe from a video recipe in chatgpt, and then save it in notes.
How did you make a bot that can send iMessages? I want to make a service on my Mac that can send notifications through iMessage. (preferable multiple chats, different topics for different notification types)
My parter and I made a fun erotic story generator called Smitten (https://smittenstories.com ) during the valentine's day weekend as a way for couples to spice things up.
Initially it was running on donations, but with model costs rising we had to add a paywall. I have a full time job but it's still fun to run this on the side by spending few hours on it over the weekends!
I've been helping with a small portfolio of Slack apps under the brand https://happybara.io, including Nightowl (multi-DM broadcast for Slack, like BCC for email), and Channitor (channel management & auto-archiving).
It's been a really interesting journey making mistakes & learning from them.
One mistake that made me feel foolish:
I assumed no one would ever pay for one of the apps. A paywall was added "just in case" -> boom, customers almost immediately started signing up. I felt incredibly silly after that, especially for the number of times I've read on HN and similar sites "your work is valuable" and "charge more".
This is cool! I looked into building a slack app myself, I'm curious: how are you liking the slack store and its policies? Was starting out difficult? I vaguely remember having to have your app installed in multiple workspaces already before being listed in the store
I sell the canvas space within https://www.minigenitals.com to private parties looking to settle scores. Between the coffee's I'm bought and averaging out the monthly "ad buys", it's just over $500/month, usually 3 or 4 $50 2-day campaigns a month and then a bunch of satisfied fans, apparently ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ We recently had to reset the coffee account due to phishing, but otherwise it's been a riot. I think there are a few backed up in the IA
I recently open-sourced my first ever tool! and I'm super excited about it guys
It's an HTTP request replay and comparison tool in Go. You can replay real traffic, compare multiple environments, detect broken endpoints, generate HTML/JSON reports, and analyze latency
It’s currently at v0.4, so I’d love any feedback, suggestions, or ideas for improvements. (Be gentle, I haven’t used Go professionally, however it’s my main language for personal projects )
I run a dead-simple, one-time, online fax service called JustFax Online[0]. While I don't have a recurring revenue as I operate one one-time payment, for the past months I have been consistently grossing over €500/mo.
This also brings tears to my eyes, as I remember[1] browsing these threads and being amazed (still am) by all the people who make side projects and make money from them, and at the same time thinking that I will never reach this milestone, and yet, here I am.
[0]: https://justfaxonline.com [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39110194#39141819
Thanks for making a service where people can pay for a thing to happen, rather than an account and subscription and …
I often get frustrated at how hard it can be to give someone money to perform a service I want them to do and they want to be paid to do.
Thank you very much. I try to focus on making usable software without enshittifying them.
I don’t need to send a fax often, but when I do it’s a real pain. I’ll be bookmarking this.
I love that it doesn’t need an account and is a simple straightforward service, as if I was paying to use an actual fax machine somewhere. I wish nearly every service online was built this way.
This is the coolest thing I've seen on this thread. Single purpose and a very nice, crystal clear homepage.
Thank you! I appreciate the feedback!
That's super cool, how do you run it? Are you using some other service under the hood, and just abstract their annoying pricing model?
It used to be possible to do this with a faxmodem; these days telephony is over IP, so there might be telco APIs for it. But, because it's a telco, that will be annoying and hidden.
UK: OFCOM are phasing out the fax support requirement https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-and-broadband/telecoms-infra...
(I slightly balked at the $5 initial price, but then realized: this is a desperation fee and I think for a lot of the users a clear fee for a clear one off service is the best deal. Anyone who wants to send 1,000 faxes will (a) be in the top 1% of fax users in their country if it's not Japan and (b) make their own arrangements. Also patio11's "charge more")
Software wise, if you have a PBX line (which the telco will change for) you can run Asterix and then https://www.asterisk.org/products/add-ons/fax-for-asterisk/ to send as many faxes as you like to the other person in your country with a fax machine.
Why would you need a PBX line to send faxes with Asterix? You'd just need a normal phone line with a plan that includes free ("long distance") calling to the whole country, right?
https://developers.telnyx.com/docs/programmable-fax/send-a-f... I use Telnyx. (Mainly because I also use them for voice.)
https://www.pamfax.biz/en/developers/introduction/
https://developers.ringcentral.com/fax-api
Yes, I use another service + add a ton of stuff on top related to reliability, payments, and file formats. However, I have toyed with the idea of implementing my own fax sending. Maybe when I will be able to live off my side projects, I will explore this idea further.
How do people find your service? It seems like there are a million "send a fax" online services out there so it would be difficult to get in front of potential customers.
It's a very tough market. Before I started I found a handful of services, and saw some services appear after I started.
I focus on SEO mainly. Most users come from search engines and LLMs. Some users are returning customers.
Any thought of adding the ability to receive faxes too? I notice that most of the sending places don't offer that and it might be a difference if it's not too expensive.
TIL you can still buy fax machines!
I still have a 25 year old HP LaserJet printer that has a built in FAX function. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to use it since we gave up our landline about 20 years ago. Still prints well, however.
It's still included on some office multifunctional printer/scanner machines.
We have one in our office.
doesn't look like stripe, do you use stripe as a payment provider ? or something else.
i am in the middle of a project using stripe and looking for alternatives
It's Stripe, and I'm happy with them. What did you not like about Stripe?
What did you not like about stripe?
Very cool. Love how simple it is, no bullshit.
A friend and I host a monthly dinner club for people interested in ethnic cuisine. We work with a single restaurant each month to create an 8-12 course all inclusive price fixe menu. The food is served family style and is authentic to the region we are hosting. We typically host the dinners on a Tues or Wed when the restaurants in our region aren’t too busy and could use the extra business.
Since 2023 we’ve been to 44 restaurants. In 2025 we served 1,099 guests and generated $126k in revenue.
https://www.deadchefssociety.com/
This is so cool! As someone who loves trying out new restaurants I need to ask: why would I go with you guys instead of going to the restaurants myself with a friend or partner? Looking around your website it seems to me that there's very large attendance, which in my mind means generally less focus on the food itself. Do you think one of the main factors is meeting new people/the sense of community? Anyway good job! I'm not sure what your margins are but it's probably more than 500/month! Congrats!
I think there’s quite a few reasons people come. I’m just going to bullet some of them out in no particular order:
- We do the work to find the restaurant and curate a menu, story, and theme. E.g., we might go to an Indian restaurant and focus the event on only the southern regional dishes.
- Many times we have dishes that are off menu specially for our event.
- Sense of community. We have quite a few regulars who have gotten to know each other. In 2025, 45 people reached their 20th or 30th event with us. Since we take over the whole restaurant there’s a little more freedom in how the space is used. Lots of new friendships have been forged.
- When you go to a restaurant with a friend or small group, you can only order so much. We’ve had events with upwards of 25 different bites. There’s really no better way to sample everything the restaurant has to offer.
- There’s a few people who say their partner are picky eaters, so they come to our event each month to have the opportunity to be a bit more adventurous. It’s an incredibly diverse group with a lot of different reasons to attend.
Out of curiosity, if you don't mind sharing, what is the sort of profit you see on that 126,000 as i'm assuming alot of that goes to paying the restaurants?
Most of it goes to paying for the meal. We make around a 20% margin. Our cost to operate the business is quite low, but we do invest a lot of our personal time into it. It’s a labor of love.
Our biggest cost center is when we guarantee a minimum number of seats and come up a little short. Doesn’t happen often, but when it does it eats into the margin fast.
> we do invest a lot of our personal time into it
What's the process like?
My partner and I divide and conquer. He focuses on front of house and I handle the backoffice.
The process starts ~3 months before the event. We start by picking a theme or region. Then contact some restaurants that fit the criteria and pitch them the event. That kicks off the back and forth on cost and menu.
Around 4 weeks before the event we send a save the date + previous event recap email. We summarize the last event and tease the next event, without giving away the actual resturant or type of food.
Over the next week we prep the invite email and payment forms. This requires putting the dishes on our menu template, research and writing about the history of the dishes, the region, and the resturant. Some of this content also goes onto our website.
Three weeks out we send the invite, which is a lottery system. Members have 5 days to request a seat and place a credit card hold. 5 days later we run the lottery (I wrote some basic software to randomize assignment, conver the card auth to capture and release any cards that didn't get assigned a ticket). Then we send an email to everyone who got in with which night they recieved and another email to anyone who was waitlisted. Everyone is added to a spreadsheet to track.
1 week before the event we send a reminder email and a last chance to cancel before the ticket is non refundable.
At the event we play host and check each guest in and say hi to everyone. Then we give a prepared ~5 min intro about the food, restaurant, celebrate any milestone members, and make any general house keeping accounments. Our 20 club members get a branded apron.
At the event we take video and pictures. Over the course of the next 4 weeks we post dish pictures with descriptions and history of the dish on our instagram. We also make a 1-2 min recap video of the event which also goes on our instagram and website.
Separate from the actual event related work we have to manage the books, handle members emails, and review membership requests. More recently we started selling shirts, so there's a little work in managing that as well.
Great idea. One note: I had to hunt around on the website for a while to find out what geographical area you were operating in.
Love the communal aspect. Curious about the economics of this, how do you typically split revenue with the restaurant, and what’s the average ticket price per guest?
We negotiate a per seat all in cost with the restaurant inclusive of food, one drink, tip, and tax. We sell the tickets directly to our members and add some margin on top. Average ticket is $115.
5 days before the event we lock the head count with the restaurant. At this point the ticket is non refundable (we allow transfers). Then we pay the restaurant one lump sum. At the event the guests are only responsible for their bar tab (outside the one included drink), we don’t get a cut of that.
Sometimes we have seat minimums we need to hit and eat the cost if we are short (that rarely happens). We don’t allow ordering any other food outside of what’s on our menu.
I am also curious on that
Wow! I've thought so long about doing the same thing in London. I wouldn't do it to make money persay, but to meet amazing people and connect folks. Would love to chat sometime.
We never intended to make money. The first dinner was with 13 of our friends. We just organized the location and menu.
From there people started to tell their friends, who told others, then the local newspaper wrote about us, and people started talking about us on Facebook food groups and posting on Instagram. The community grew very organically, we never spent a penny on marketing. Most of the original 13 don’t come anymore, and we have grown into an incredibly diverse community.
Happy to chat, email is in my profile.
I host Supper Clubs in London :)
This is a great project! I'm thinking about doing something similar. Do you have any bad experiences, things you would have done different, or are thinking about improving now?
Honestly, I can’t think of anything I would have done differently. Each stage of our growth came with some challenges and lessons. I think we did a pretty good job of internalizing and adapting. We definitely made some mistakes along the way, but nothing I regret doing and wouldn’t do again. Every mistake and lesson taught us something.
Feel free to email me if you run into any challenges. We might have already been through it!
great to hear! I'm getting a bit worried about possible legal issues - although that is because I might not be involved in every meeting so I'm worried about possible risks.
I sent you an email, my email handler is alanmeira. If you are too busy and can't waste time on this there is no problem tho, your post was quite motivating already.
I’m a little behind on email, I’ll reply later today.
I’ll answer some of the legal right now. First, we are at every event. Not sure how much it matters legally, but we are there as hosts and to drive the feeling of community. Without us, I don’t think the community has the same feel.
We also have an unbelievably respectful and mature community. After over 70 seatings we’ve never had an incident. We also have a code of conduct document we send all new members.
Second, we setup an LLC to shield us personally from legal liability.
Third, not to say that it shields us, but the restaurants also have insurance and are a better target for a lawsuit.
We are in the US, and at the end of the day anyone can sue anyone for anything. It’s just the reality and risk of the times. It hasn’t been a problem for us yet.
Thank you very much for taking the time to answer!
This is awesome, how did you get the word out and market/advertise?
We’ve never paid for marketing or advertising.
- We are lucky to have a passionate community who tell others about us.
- Sometimes we do shared reels with the restaurant, which helps drive some of their traffic to our social pages and website.
- There’s a few large local Facebook food groups which have driven membership.
- The largest driver of new membership came from coverage in the region newspaper. We credit that with the transition from 1 or 2 degrees of separation to people we had no connection to.
- There’s been a few influencers who have shown up and documented their experience. We didn’t pay for it. It drove a few members, but the quality of the newspaper and Facebook group members was higher.
this actually is a great idea!
I was hesitant to add my own but I think you might find it interesting as we make money not from clients but from grants.
We have IronCalc[1]. We don't make money from customers as we don't have a finalized product yet. But we have an ongoing grant from the NLnet[2]. You can have a look at the kind of projects they are granting money. It's always a source of inspiration.
That being said IronCalc takes a lot of time from me. Way more than a side project should.
[1]: https://www.ironcalc.com
[2]: https://nlnet.nl/project/IronCalc/
The friction to try it out is already really low, I like that! But it could be even lower if instead of an image the interactive version is served right on the landing page. Great project!
Yes, Dani the designer involved in the project, keeps saying that. There are two things that stops me from doing that:
* It would make the landing page a bit heavier * I would need to synchronize deployments somehow
But I guess I should do that sooner rather than later.
Thanks!
Just my two cents, but:
- In terms of data, this is nothing compared to any site serving a bunch of images. The compute would differ, but loading speed shouldn't be an issue if you can render the HTML first, and hydrate it after page load. This static HTML would then also serve as fallback when Javascript is disabled.
- For a quick demo, I doubt you will lose people by embedding an older version. Serving a version of a few months ago seems like 80% of the work, with 20% of the effort, in terms of deployment.
Anyhow, nice to see government funds put to a good cause!
Top-three time-sucks?
Thanks for sharing! Awesome.
This is lovely! I'm surprised I had never heard of it before today
This is very cool indeed. Is there anything similar for ppt presentations that you know of?
No, not really.
https://soundreads.io/
An audiobook streaming service that focuses on timeless classic works in the public domain.
I do everything from building the app to the audio engineering.
One thing I'm especially proud of is the restoration I did on the "War of the Worlds" 1938 Radio broadcast. I'm really happy with how it turned out. I've made it temporarily free to listen to [1] in case anyone is curious. You should compare it with the original [2] and let me know what you think.
[1] https://app.soundreads.io/discover/item/war-of-the-worlds [2] https://archive.org/details/WarOfTheWorlds1938RadioBroadcast...
Since there's been a reasonable amount of traffic due to this comment, I thought I'd leave a 50% coupon ($11.75 for yr one) for HN folks in case anyone is interested:
http://app.soundreads.io/purchase/annual?prefilled_promo_cod...
You should surface the library of content to public visitors. I would be more likely to convert if I knew that you had the content I wanted.
I just updated the home page (main nav & body content) to add a "Browse All Books" button that takes you into the app to view the current titles. Appreciate the feedback.
Thanks for the feedback!
Do you think adding a button to the homepage/marketing page that says something to the effect of "See all our content" that redirected you here:
https://app.soundreads.io/
Do you think that would do the trick?
I’m seeing a lot of AI tells in the cover art (like for War of the Worlds) and book descriptions. Didn’t see any discussion of where the narration comes from on the site. Are all your audiobooks restorations of classic readings? Do you hire narrators to record new ones? Or is there AI involved there too?
All the audio is by real humans but I definitely use AI help on the descriptions and images, as graphic design and copywriting are not areas I’m competent in, and as a side gig currently I only have so much time.
A good chunk of the initial audio has been curated and re-engineered/enhanced from librivox, however I’m also working with voice actors to produce originals. For instance I just release A Christmas Carol which is original to our platform (also see Metamorphosis and Alice and Wonderland). More are coming every month but it takes time to develop real audio recordings with humans.
I appreciate your constructive feedback and welcome more!
When I read your first comment, I immediately thought that the audiobooks are voiced by AI. I'm really surprised to learn the opposite.
So you take existing recordings created before 1929 and remaster them? Are recordings (of books published pre-1929) which were created after 1929 in public domain too?
I don't even want to ask about producing and voice actors.. Really nice idea and realization!
There's a really awesome site called Librivox [1], where volunteers narrate books that are in the public domain. Those recordings are also in the public domain as well (this is just part of the Librivox thing). The quality of those recordings (both the narration, and the actual recording quality) varies quite a bit and most of them aren't at a quality I'd expect people to pay for and thus aren't useable for me. I've spent hours and hours sorting through those recordings finding the best ones (from a narration perspective) and then improving the recording/audio quality on them. Those recordings have all mostly been made in the last 20yrs, so they're not old recordings of the books. So, the value I add to the Librivox recordings are: curation/selection, audio enhancement, and a much better delivery mechanism (IMHO).
I'm also simultaneously building out our own library of original audio content by working with voice actors to get them recorded and proof read (this is a very expensive and time consuming process, but also very fun). One of the hardest parts is honestly the proofing process. Once I get finished narration files I have to compare them result with the actual script (as there are always mistakes) and request edits. I use whisper.cpp to transcribe them and then git and a few other scripts to compare the transcript with the actual book text.
I'll also add that I _do not_ use AI Audio narration because it just doesn't sound good IMHO, and I personally hate listening to it. I regularly run experiments to see what the current state of the tech is and it's still pretty far from where it needs to be IMO. I also don't love the idea of AI swallowing absolutely everything.
I appreciate the feedback and compliment!
[1] https://librivox.org/
So it's kind of like what Standard Ebooks is to Project Gutenberg.
Thank you for describing the process and best of luck with soundreads!
Thanks, this is good to hear!
I’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
It makes me so happy to see this genre taking off. We did "ABCs of Programming" [1] when our son was 2 at least partially because there weren't any real kid's books talking about what "dad does all day". Funnily enough it wasn't selling that well until I posted an article [2] on HN about my experience writing it. Then it did steady business for a few years
[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/1548489778 [2] https://arthur-johnston.com/hacker_writes_a_childrens_book/
I got gifted Computer Engineering for Babies and big Babies last Christmas in preparation for having our first child :) They are great!
One of my favorites! The baby likes it. The grandparents are confused by it.
Literally the first book I bought for my hellspawn. We had fun working out the mechanisms.
My kid got a copy of your first book as a gift a couple years ago. It's really fun to have on the shelf. The buttons are so satisfyingly clicky. Thanks!
Thanks for buying it!!
Computer Engineering for Babies is great! I also added on my directory of well-crafted products: https://select.supply/product/computer-engineering-for-big-b...
I bought two copies of Computer Engineering For Babies for some close friends! They were absolutely delightful.
Thank you! As it has become popular at baby showers to bring a book I always send my partner with the original 2. We have probably gifted 5 or 6 sets now.
We are excited for the next version.
This is insanely good. Can't wait for grandchild :)
I am commenting on this so i will fi d it easy when i will need to buy a present for one of my friends’ babies. :)
Bought probably 6 copies between the first and second. Love this book! First gets stuck in NOT mode sometimes but it’s chill.
Yeah, I’ve improved it a lot, but a lot of the books from the run I did 18 months ago get confused on the cover page thinking it’s open to the NOT page.
ooooh what was the fix? It seems so hard to rely on light for the page numbers! My niece was just doing "For Big Babies" in a dim room and my brother in law had to point his flashlight at it to keep it on the current page.
I always see your ads. My first baby is expected to be born next year and I cannot wait to buy it for her
This is amazing! Do you ever run a sale (christmas, boxing day, etc)?
I have this book for my kid and love it!
Oh man this sounds so cool!! Ive always wanted to make a childrens book.
Last year, I came across NotebookLM and immediately noticed a pain point: importing the web pages I was browsing into NotebookLM required several steps. So in less than a day, I developed this Chrome extension: NotebookLM Web Importer[1], which allows for one-click importing. As NotebookLM has gained popularity this year, my extension has also seen great growth. So, in July, I added paid premium features to unlock additional features. It exceeded my expectations and quickly went over $500 a month. It now has over 100,000 users and is still growing.
[1] https://notebooklm-web-importer.com
I really liked your extension having used it in the past. Great job and really useful! If you don't mind me asking, how do you manage the paid features from a technical point of view? Do you give paid users a token to enter in the extension which then activates certain features or is it something else?
It is account based, and I'm using Clerk for the auth.
That sounds awesome. Can you please talk about which premium options you added?
Wow, this is awesome. How did you market this? 100,000 users is a lot.
Here’s my own side project that’s been earning a bit on the side:
I built DedupX, a macOS app for finding duplicate and visually similar files fast - especially useful for photographers and anyone with big local storage collections.
What it does
- Exact duplicate detection using incremental hashing so it doesn’t have to fully load huge files.
- Perceptual image matching finds similar images even if they’re resized or lightly edited (not just byte-for-byte duplicates).
- Native macOS integration with a Finder right-click scan.
Why I built it: My brother kept running out of space because of tons of photos, and every existing tool I tried either missed similar images or was slow and clunky - so I spent a couple of weekends building something that felt fast, accurate, and native.
Business side
- Free trial (no CC required).
- Paid tiers: ~$5.99/yr or ~$16.99 lifetime.
Got positive feedback and 100+ paying users shortly after launch. Been growing steadily ever since.
Link: https://maheepk.net/projects/dedupx/
Froze at 99% scan completion on M1 Max, 64GB RAM, 14.8.2.
Sorry about that - thanks for reporting it.
I haven’t been able to reproduce a freeze at 99% yet. If you’re willing, could you share a bit more detail (approx folder size / number of files, and whether CPU or memory spiked near the end)?
If you’re open to it, I’d also be happy to jump on a quick call or screen share to debug this together — totally optional. You can reach me at my support email mentioned in the About DedupX menu item. I’d really like to track this down and fix it.
Please double your prices, at minimum. (And port to Linux, so I can use it. Just CLI would be great.)
Making this cross-platform is definitely a goal I wanna work on, but I lack knowledge of desktop app development on Windows and Linux.
I'm glad you think the app is cheap. Honestly I think the pricing is decent for the current set of features. I might revisit the price if I sneak in more features worthy of a higher price tag, but for now, it's good enough.
How do you market it, through social-media or are there dedicated channels for sharing awareness for such Mac Apps, if you don't mind sharing?
I mostly shared the launch post and ran promo campaigns on Reddit, ProductHunt, LinkedIn, Discord and even tried HN (got no replies here -‿-"). Since then, its mostly word of mouth.
Thanks to my customers' feedback, I've made a lot of improvements to the app as well. Feels good getting positive feedback and hearing from people about their use-cases. :)
Links: [1]: Launch Post: https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1ok5zaq/comment/nm... [2]: ProductHunt: https://www.producthunt.com/products/dedupx [3]: Promo campaign on Reddit for Black Friday: https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1paarc2/dedupx_50_... [4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45763117
Smart and affordable app.
Glad you like it :)
https://cluesbysam.com
I started making a daily logic puzzle called Clues by Sam in May and it's been stadily growing since. The number one thing people were asking for was more puzzles, so I started selling puzzle packs instead of monetizing with ads. The reception has been great, and the revenue has been enough for me to decline some consulting gigs and instead focus on improving the game.
I do Clues by Sam every day when I'm walking my dog before I start work, and I was particularly glad to have the daily mental workout this month, as I didn't have time for Advent of Code. Just bought both puzzle packs to support your great work!
I don't know how you're able to focus while walking the dog, but good job! And thank you!
Love it, I discovered it last week and bought a supporter pack after two days! Everytime I get stuck I'm 100% sure you made a mistake... Until I find my own mistake
Thank you so much! Indeed, it's quite tempting to blame the game, but the algorithm that ensures all valid deductions are enabled hasn't been wrong a single time since it was finished in June. Often I don't believe it myself, but it always turns out to be smarter than me!
Oh, and perhaps worth mentioning that today's puzzle is not very representative of a regular puzzle, as usually the grid is filled with different professions and not reindeers!
Is it representative of the regular difficulty because if so it... doesn't bode well for me.
The concept is really cool though. I like it!
Thank you!
It's a pretty normal mid week puzzle. They start easy on Monday and get harder towards Sunday. But don't be afraid to use hints to get started with the game! It gets easier with time!
Hi,
When one clicks on 'Play tutorials', the text at the bottom reads :
>Start by follow the instructions
Should be 'Start by following the instructions', I believe?
Indeed! Thank you, fixed!
Really loved it. Well done. 1000+ organic visits in 6+ months - awesome traction.
Do you want to put your CTA (puzzle packs) somewhere "higher" - closer to gameplay?
I love it, just purchased a pack. I've also found that it is a very great tool to test LLM, like take a screenshot of a half resolved game and feed it to ChatGPT with the rules and ask him to select the next target
Thank you so much! Also, you might find this interesting regarding testing LLMs: https://www.nicksypteras.com/blog/cbs-benchmark.html
turn out Claude Sonnet 4.5 is far better as resolving those as ChatGPT 5.2
Thank you for the link, I loved today's puzzle and will now be a regular user
Are the puzzles generated algorithmically or manually?
It's a mix of things. For example, there's an algorithm that ensures all valid deductions are allowed (I'm not smart enough to ensure all of them manually!). But a good amount of manual work goes into each daily puzzle.
I love the puzzles, I played once and already got the Pack #1, it's a great game! As soon as I finish #1, I will for sure get #2!
Awesome! Thank you so much!
It's fun! Congrats!
Hi Sam
Hi there!
https://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 something fairly “boring” resonate once the UX is treated seriously.
Loved the design, looks better then the most tools I've tried. I'm using Prisma + Supabase in one of my side projects and having constant db issues. Can I integrate DB Pro? Will it replace Prisma or what?
So DB Pro is a local desktop database client for managing your databases and data. Prisma ORM it won't replace, but Prisma's browser-based data browser, yes it will absolutely replace that. It's not a replacement for Supabase, it works alongside it, if that answers your question?
I'm planning to extend DB Pro into much more than a database manager though, letting you build dashboards, workflows and workbooks.
I've been trying to connect to Supabase, got help from an agent to but couldn't resolve the issue and connect :/
What’s actually broken
DB Pro:
Enforces strict TLS verification
Uses its own certificate trust bundle
Does not:
read macOS System Keychain reliably
allow custom CA injection
allow “require but don’t verify”
Supabase pooler requires either:
trusting Supabase’s CA, or
allowing non-verified SSL
DB Pro supports neither.
So it fails with:
self signed certificate in certificate chain
This is a product limitation / bug in DB Pro.
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.
What did you use to build the frontend? It looks cool!
Hi! When will Windows/Linux be available? I'm growing weary of DB Browser for SQLite.
Windows and Linux are both launching next week (just in time for Xmas!)
semrush shows that your organic visits significantly increased this week. Well done. Great product. Succes!
Looks cool and congrats on the $1k MRR! Is the app built with electron?
Thanks!
Yep, it’s built with Electron. Performance has been a big focus from day one, and it’s been really performant in all of my testing so far. The goal was a proper desktop-first experience with local performance and direct database access, rather than trying to force it into a web app. Although I do have plans to offer a self-hosted version as well.
How do you enforce licensing? Did you build your own solution?
I built and run several SaaS platforms:
- https://dave-bot.com -> a full-stack AI platform where you can generate videos, images, music, code, 3d objects with frontier Gen AI models.
- https://headsnap.io -> a platform that you can generate images of yourself based on 4 selfies.
- https://quantiq.live -> a service providing financial and historical data for stocks, as well as government trades.
- https://aivestor.tech -> an AI agent that picks small/midcap stocks and trades them using Alpaca API. It uses Reddit, news, polymarket, Google Trends and many other data sources to take investment decisions.
- @Polyglot_lingua_bot -> a voice-enabled Telegram-based bot that can help you learn new languages.
- https://select.supply -> a directory of carefully-curated and well-crafted products.
All of those allowed me to quit my day job and live a comfortable and flexible life. I still invest time in maintenance and adding new features, but I love coding, marketing and everything that comes with promoting and selling a SaaS (and I also have a serious addiction for Stripe notifications).
On top of that, I developed my own software agency where I help clients build and scale software (https://bitheap.ch).
Headsnap is such a scammy and/or crappy website. I paid to purchase credits for $5, tried to train a model to generate a headshot. Nothing. It just refreshes and comes back with nothing. Will not recommend.
When did you do it? The minimum package is $8. If you did this in the past, why didn't you reach out for support? I get more than 100 customers per day and rarely have issues.
ah now I see you generated your pics 8 minutes ago. You can now see them on your account page. I have a clear disclaimer that says it can take up to 30 mins to generate the photos and that you will get an email once the photos are ready.
You probably need to add some visual indicator that the generation is ongoing. A progress bar is ideal, but those can be hard to feed with real data.
Thanks! I wanted to implement something like that, but it's difficult to predict the progress since it's depending on how many requests are being handled in that exact moment, but it never got past 25 minutes, not even during peak hours. I am thinking of adding a modal saying that you can close the page and you will get notified over email when the photo generation is ready (the email part is already there).
Doesn't have to be accurate. Just always set it to 30mins if it will never go past that. Most people will be pleased it finished sooner.
Maybe a queue then?
I am not sure if this is a problem that should prompt an architecture change of that caliber. I use a distributed network of GPU-machines and each request is handled sequential. If all machines are busy, then the request goes into a queue already and is being picked up by the first machine that becomes available.
Also, the user got the pictures after just a few minutes and there is a clear disclaimer, and an email is being sent to the user once the pics are ready. On top of that, I have no complaints from other users about it. It's clear to me that the intent of the user was to cause some reputation harm, which I think didn't work. I also got an email from a person with the same first name (not sure if it's the same person tho) that they offer UX services for Headsnap.
Thirty minutes? Polaroid film could do it in five.
30 pictures? I doubt that
Polaroid paralellises well.
anyway it's just a disclaimer. It never took more than 25 minutes and the fastest generation was 3 minutes for >30 pics.
you can just do it with nano banana for 1/100 the price
You won't get consistency between pics with nano banana. I tried using it in Headsnap and the results weren't as good. Faces change drastically between pics. Also the cost per pic with nano banana is 0.24 per pic, x 30 pictures that I generate for a pack, you would pay $7 (with big quality issues).
I find both of your stock apps (API and investment) quite interesting but both websites are eerily absent of any information outside of their respective purposes. Both websites are clean and the designs are nice but struggle on mobile it seems (I'm on Android, Brave browser, horizontal scroll seems to be buggy). I wish there was additional information outside of just what they do - I'd like to know more about the developer that created them, goals/ambitions for the future, that kind of thing. Right now, the investment app looks like a scam from an outside perspective. One page, limited information, nothing personal about it. How can I trust such a website with my hard earned cash? I think an improvement would be to have additional pages on who you are, why I should trust you, and what exactly I might get in return for my subscription. It's also probably important to make it clear that you cannot promise any long term profits from this app and that it is almost akin to gambling so users should be prepared to lose money.
thanks a lot for the feedback! That's a really good point!
When it comes to QuantiQ, I thought about targeting businesses. I already have 2 major clients and had plenty of demos with others. Usually they are not interested when taking a decision about reading pages on the website. Most of them are concentrated on finding out how you manage incidents, security policy, how do you handle improvement suggestions, SDLC, velocity etc. They anyway do their due diligence when it comes to the founder. But I totally understand your point. For B2C this is really important.
Already fixing the mobile navigation and adding some pages with more info about me.
Do you delete the uploaded photos after you've finished processing? The privacy policy does not make this clear.
https://headsnap.io/privacy
Alternately that their presence doesn't grant any rights for other use would be a good clause which I didn't spot.
I remove the photos only if requested by the user. The photos are removed immediately, as well as the account if that is requested too. I definitely do not use the pics for retraining or any other purpose, but just to serve them on the individual overview page of the user.
What's your source and/or quality of the financial data? How much do you cover? What data fields do you provide?
I fetch those from 10-Q forms through an internal scraper I built. The response is quite big, you can check it out here: https://www.quantiq.live/docs
Nice! Makes me wonder how many other businesses are possible to build, on top of govt data.
Honestly looks like a scam and your description of it makes it even sound more like one. Most of those fields you return in that docs page have nothing to do with k or qs and are equity pricing data you are buying from another third party.
Not a knock just being honest as it looks like you just don’t know so maybe this helps. Here is an example of a real company that scrapes k/q docs.
https://sec-api.io/docs
Question was about financials. The service is not only limited to q forms, obviously. Historical data or government trades are not available there. So you want me to share with the Internet all my data sources just to prove you it's not a scam?
You seem to be trying to promote a service and throw weird accusations that the service looks like a scam without even trying it, which is shameful tbh.
Again no disrespect, it’s blunt honesty. I am not promoting anything. I live in the US and work at the intersection of finance and software. Your site has quite literally zero details on it. It’s a bunch of fluff on the landing page. Why would anyone signup without any information about what they are signing up for. Your response to a question about sourcing it’s odd. You only mention 10qs which you built a scraper for but the docs you linked to don’t really have much in the way of 10q data. Some surface metadata but none of the guts of a 10q. Most of the data you linked to is market data that you would have to be sourcing through a third party. It’s just an odd response for someone like me who works in the industry that you mention 10q but none of the data is really what I would consider 10q data.
Wish you luck but don’t take honest opinions from someone who buys significant amounts of financial data as someone trying to promote a service. Just linking someone I would consider a competitor to yours in the Edgar space.
The question is about financials and nothing you linked to is about financials.
No disrespect but still accuse someone of a scam, right?
I specified clearly in the description of this service that I deliver financials, historical or congress/senate trades. I think it's obvious for someone working in finance that the last two cannot be fetched from quarter or annual forms. Things like revenue, eps, ebitda, pre/post earning moves (those use last, open prices too), are strongly-related to 10Q though.
I really don't care whether you like the landing page or not. I have two B2B clients for this API and 0% churn so far, which is the best metric I need to track right now. I will stop responding to this thread since I don't think it's productive for any of us.
Again only honest feedback. As someone who would be a potential client your site looks like a scam. Good luck!
I get 404 when I look for pricing of headsnap - https://headsnap.io/pricing
thanks a lot for the heads up! That menu shouldn't be available for users that are not logged in. I just pushed a change to hide it. You can check the prices at the bottom of the landing page, before I add a dedicated page for unauthenticated users.
LE: I just added the pricing page for unauthenticated users too.
Well-meaning feedback: on the front page, there's a pricing section lower down, which only mentions credits and doesn't give a price; the click-though goes to a login screen.
I found this so instantly frustrating that I rage-closed the page and came here to moan!
Reading the comments, I don't believe you're looking to implement a dark pattern and not show the price, but that's what seems to be happening currently.
Now I see the main pricing page, it's worth pointing out that the categories and prices there don't match with those on the front page: 'starter' with 30 headshots vs. 'novice' with 35; 'basic' with 60 headshots vs. 'proficient' with 70, etc.
thanks a lot! Will update on the main page so it matches with the actual pricing tiers.
LE: done :D
Hey, I was looking to try this out but I was getting a 404 on the signup page. Just a heads up.
Thanks for that! I just checked and it seems to be working. Can you maybe try again?
Looks to be working now, thanks.
Do you think it will become more difficult to make money on such services due to AI getting better and better at coding? Like, wouldn’t that make it easier for people to create competing services?
Or do you think this effect is counteracted with AI also opening up for new opportunities for creating services that would not otherwise be feasible pre AI?
I agree that development has become easier and the barrier for entry is generally lower due to AI. However, without distribution it's still pretty much impossible to get clients. You also need to have some engineering background since AI cannot solve everything for you.
Important to mention, IMHO not many people are willing to sacrifice their time and energy to start something that doesn't have a clear path to profitability.
That makes sense. And I guess distribution/marketing is an ever moving target in which those being the most clever and willing to put in the time and energy wins regardless of AI getting better?
Like, say AI makes distribution and marketing easier, now it’s easier for everyone, but they still compete for the same clients. So while your signal is getting stronger, so is the noise (the signal of all the other competitors). So those who put in the hours and smartness to «invent» a more clever marketing strategy are the ones able to break through the noise and reach the clients?
In other words, distribution/marketing is the bottleneck and the target is ever moving?
Exactly, and currently I'd say that AI is not too helpful with distribution/marketing. I still do copyrighting myself as with AI it really feels impersonal and "artificial". By distribution I also refer to social media following and users that trust you to test/buy your product. IMHO this is still the most challenging part to solve, as it takes a lot of time to improve your social media presence to reach a state where it's guaranteed that you will have customers from the moment of the launch of your product.
That headshot project looks completely AI generated. The landing page is a full-fledged AI template.
You mean the frontend? What makes it entirely AI-generated in your view? Even if it were, would that be a problem for you or you're just envious?
Wow! how do you make marketing for so many projects?
It's the most difficult part. In my experience paid ads do not work very well so I am not relying too much on those. I usually use social media with UGC videos created either by me or by content creators. I also reach out on Instagram, even dating apps, to users and pay them to use/promote a product.
Recently I started to use n8n automation to post on Twitter/LinkedIn, however I tend to keep those posts short since they are created with LLM's and do not seem authentic.
As for the SEO part, I usually upload search console extracts into Perplexity deep research and ask for actions on how to improve ranking for different keywords.
really inspiring! Any tips on how you manage incidents and customer queries?
thanks! Most of these projects are hosted on Vercel, and I am extensively using their observability solution to get alerts when something unexpected happens. After some time you get to fix everything and you'll spend less time firefighting.
For customer queries, I usually respond myself. However when I am not available, I have a small team of freelancers that help me just with that. I played with LLMs for responding to questions, but it just didn't work out for me.
Occasionally $500/month, but more reliably $300/month in sales of my Video Hub App - lets users browse, search, tag, and organize videos on local / network drives. Aiming to have an 8th anniversary release February 2026.
$5 per copy (Windows, Max, Linux; keep forever) https://videohubapp.com/
MIT open source (build your own copy) https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App
A bit of unsolicited advice -
* Focus on Windows users. Windows desktop share is 10x that of Mac and nowadays Windows users pay almost as willingly as Mac ones.
* Charge several times more.
* Redo the website. In particular get rid of 3D slant and on-hover animations, put larger high-res screenshots, explain each of them well (and not in gray on gray text), put up "Windows / Mac / Linux" in bold friendly and highly-visible letters. Better yet have separate Download buttons for each. Add version and last release date, next to the Download button. Have at-a-glance summary of features closer to the top of the page. Ditto for pricing and trialing details. Ideally, adjust windows chrome in the screenshots based on the web client's OS, i.e. show Windows screenshots to Windows visitors, Mac ones - to those coming from Macs, etc. The last thing you want to show Mac screenshots to Windows people, because it implies that the Windows version was an afterthought.
All in all, the site gives an amateurish/hobby project vibe, and the $5 price cements the impression. If you are to spruce things up a bit, you can potentially live off this app. At the very least and with not much of an effort you can double/triple what you make off it.
Thank you for all the suggestions! I like them and will try to implement at least a few in the coming year (I end up spending more time towards other exciting projects like writing a sci-fi novel and DIY remodeling my house).
Are you open to working with a janitor-like minority partner?
Woudln't OP be able to tell what the platform split is just based on his internal download metrics?
With Mac screenshots on the site they won't tell much. Plus the point is that it's worth to actively cater to Windows users even if you don't have many at the moment.
Did you bother to look at the source code? It's Electron-based, so the effort for supporting more than one OS isn't very high.
Curious how you manage licensing?
When a person buys, they get the download links in the mail; the installers work without any license keys, so buy once, use forever.
Intel macs only?
Not OP, but it looks like the wording of their downloads page (https://videohubapp.com/en/download/) is slightly confusing:
- Clicking “Demo” (for macOS) points to the 3.2.0 ARM version
- Clicking “Intel Mac” points to the 3.1.0 (!) Intel version
The Github release page appears to list all available versions: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App/releases
To me, it would have been clearer to avoid the “Demo” button label altogether and be explicit about the different versions and OS targets. Also, I think the visual hierarchy of the two respective buttons is too subtle.
Hey thanks!
I launched Filestash [1] as my response to the infamous “Dropbox should just be FTP” comment. Once I had a decent FTP experience, I kept going: adding support for pretty much every storage protocol, plugins to expose Dropbox (or anything else) over FTP, SFTP, MCP, or S3, and all the features I wished Dropbox had, with plugins to customize everything.
The base product is open-source and I make money from custom builds, additional plugins, paid support, and the occasional extra feature for companies with specific needs. It's a bit more than noodle profitable but quite under a normal salary.
[1] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash
Where is the dropbox-part in this? This seems to be a filemanager for remote storages, which is kinda the opposite of dropbox, which is mainly a local service for syncing data. Or did the documentation missed explaining the sync-function?
What a blast from the past. I attempted to build a file-sharing tool for my team when we had video and images strewn across the org. I prototyped embedding filestash for the frontend.
It was basically a backend for generating STS credentials on the fly using a more ergonomic interface. It never went anywhere and I haven't thought about it in years, but I still believe it was a good idea that I just didn't have the organizational clout or time to push forward.
Edit: apparently I contributed at some point too? I *barely* remember that. Glad to see the project is still succeeding!
[1] https://github.com/subdavis/workspaces-io
This could probably be more profitable for you with better tagline/explanation!
I have the context for what "that comment" was, might even be in the target audience, yet from the landing page I'm still not entirely sure what it actually does. Might be worth trying a few "it's like X but with Y" or "imagine if dropbox could Z" and other formulations on uninitiated people in your target audience?
I found a typo: "Apply fined grained access control to keep your shared content under control." should be "fine-grained access control".
There: https://www.filestash.app/smb-client.html
The faux screenshot of HN tickled me.
https://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.
Is canine for kubernetes as coolify is for docker? Lovely!
You know what, that’s a better way to describe it than I’ve ever been able to come up with!
API Reference returns a 404 btw
https://docs.canine.sh/swagger/page.html
Yeah, it’s currently https://canine.sh/api-docs
Been trying to find time to fix the issue on the other side
Holy cow! That’s exactly what I’ve been looking for my homelab.
Give me a shout if you need help setting it up!
On the discord, or chris@ canine<dot>sh
I run OnlineOrNot - https://OnlineOrNot.com
It started as just an uptime checker for websites, eventually I added support for APIs and cron jobs, and automated status pages (you may have seen this one yesterday: https://hackernews.onlineornot.com/)
I started it in 2021, I give it two hours a day before work every workday, and I cut scope on most features to ensure they're shippable in two hours. Then I iterate. It works because it's default-alive. I keep a full time job to be able to build it exactly how I want.
Like my React blog, I started it knowing thousands of others were doing the same thing. I made a bet that my unique perspective would be useful to others, and it paid off.
Has been above $500/mo since 2022, growing steadily since (still a few years away from being able to replace my salary).
This interests me because I recently started building my own monitoring service but stopped because of the existing / entrenched competitors. While it was fun to build the PoC I got to a point where it was becoming "work" and I questioned the ROI. How did you decide to persevere despite this?
I had a habit of building for two hours a day, so I didn't have a lack of motivation or anything, but what boosted it most was getting better at sales and marketing to make it worth building.
2024 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42373343
2023 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38467691
2022 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34190421
2021 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29667095
2020 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24947167
2019 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20899863
2018 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17790306
2017 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15148804
My wife's Etsy shop (https://www.etsy.com/shop/LittleLanternShop) is starting to pick up. She is leaning into creating digital sewing patterns for decorative felt crafts. We have had Etsy success before with 3d printed products, but managing printers and fulfilling orders can be stressful and time consuming, and she was hoping to build up a more passive income stream. She made over $1000 in the past month, which beat both our expectations
(We'll get back into 3d printing once life slows down a _little_ bit again)
Any tips on that? My wife is starting her Etsy shop (https://www.etsy.com/shop/BravinaPrints) but she is not really getting any visits and still trying to figure out what kind of stuff she wants to draw.
Nice one! I love the Our Lady of Lourdes patterns.
Yeah, these are super fun! Good luck!
How have you promoted it so far?
Wanted to teach my little brother about logic gates. Saw that for him to truly grasp the idea of it, he needed some "hands on" experience to develop the intuition about it. I decided to develop a PCB board that basically turns-on-off the lights based on the inputs. He was like "cool" and kind of threw it in the corner. Rather than just leave it, I decided to further develop it and make it as a learning tool for myself as well(web design, marketing, BOM optimization etc).
Then I started to get feedback on the initial project which was quite helpful(universities, EEVBlog and colleagues) and based on that made a "Logic Trainer" which is like very advanced version of the initial idea. It has so many features and it kind of has taken off in a sense that 2 universities want to buy it for themselves. Also I didn't expect it but most people who buy it do it for their kids. IMHO its way too complicated for kids, but practice and feedback that I have gotten shows that it really isn't. I haven't made any profits from the project yet (due to high development cost) but hopefully in the future it help to pay my rent :).
Check out the website at https://logicgat.es
https://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, growing about 10-20% per month with minimal marketing, exceeding all expectations I had for the project when I set out
Well done! How does it compare to using built-in image models like nano banana?
You can get great results with nano banana nowadays (ex: "convert this image to a coloring page") - I'd say we focus on 1. consistency with our base style from image to image, 2. likeness (still really tough to get 100% right but we've come a long way since our MVP) and 3. offering fun alternatives (South Park inspired coloring pages, Minecraft style, etc)
We also handle all the post-processing (upscaling, image cleaning, etc) that you need in order to get great printed results - with Gemini (Nano Banana) or ChatGPT you've got to pull each image out, possibly remove the watermark, set the curves/levels in photoshop/gimp, upscale it, etc then print the page - you can just hit Export and download a pdf ready to print from our site
This is fantastic, a perfect example. Good stuff!
I run https://aliveai.app a large uncensored (i.e. adult) AI image and video generator.
It started as a small side project but slowly grew every month and recently exploded to well over 50k USD revenue per month. It's fun to have a large community of paying users but honestly I never thought out of all my side projects this one will make it.
I am still a one man show managing everything from development, marketing, customer support and content moderation. If I am honest the money is nice but I am severely burnt out and not sure if I can or want to do this much longer. It is a 24/7 job and I miss the days where I can just sit down and code a nice feature that people will like. Also looking at NSFW content all day kind of messes with your mental health.
I had some discussions of potential buyers but selling something for less than its monthly revenue seems crazy so I am still here trying to do my best and waiting for the right exit.
Hey! Would you consider trialing some help, even part-time initially, and pro-bono, to see how it goes? As a developer since childhood, and product manager for most of my career, with (I dare say) some out-of-the-box, simplicity, "cheap is best" professional deviation, and sex-positivity in my personal and artistic life, maybe there's something we can get together on? Give me a shout! zenojevski at gmail dot com, or https slash slash zeno dot love. At the very least we can have some fun and maybe keep writing :D Zeno
wish you a good exit and return back to days when you did that: "I miss the days where I can just sit down and code a nice feature that people will like"
Thank you for the post. It once again reminded me how important it is to choose a pet project that aligns with your personal values.
Have you considered hiring someone to reduce the load of repetitive tasks?
For a while I was looking for a non-technical co-founder, but I found it difficult to find someone who is both skilled and motivated in the adult content domain.
I am currently rewriting the user role and permission system with the goal of introducing a moderator role in the future that has limited, moderator-only access rights. At the moment, there are only admin and regular user roles.
Even with this in place I am unsure where to advertise for an NSFW content moderator position.
That's interesting! I didn't know this could be such a barrier. Is this because of the potential impact on mental health? Or just because people wouldn't like to be publicly associated with NSFW content in any way?
While job hunting years ago, I got approached by a company running adult websites. They seemed to be pretty relaxed about it and they were multiple candidates for the position. There were advertising through LinkedIn as just any similar small business.
Hi dubme1, ping me info at "eez" + "ness" dot com, re: convo on sale options.
Why would you ever admit to such a thing? Don’t you have any shame? It’s odd you admit looking at NSFW content all day messes with your mental health but I guess it’s ok since you make 50k and the women in your life aren’t having AI porn generated of them.
I am looking at the content for moderation purposes and customer support. Not sure why saying that this affects me mentally should be a bad thing.
Also maybe you missunderstood what AliveAi.app is. It is strictly a on-platform AI generation. We do not allow editing of user uploaded content (i.e. deepfake) for obvious reasons.
“ I am looking at the content for moderation purposes and customer support.” Commendable to roll up your sleeves and wade through the mess you created I suppose.
“We do not allow editing of user uploaded content” Wait until you find out how these models are trained!
About 8 years in, Escape Team steadily keeps growing, which surprises me (I didn’t add any new missions for about 5 years):
https://www.escape-team.com
It‘s making about $700 on iOS and $300 on Android, solely from $2.99 IAPs for the later missions in the game (the first 2 missions are free).
I think a main reason for this is that escape rooms (and games) don’t „saturate“: you play them only once, because then you know the solutions. So another escape room (place, game, app) doesn’t cannibalize the market - it may rather strengthen the others by fostering it as a group activity.
I also put 0$ into ads- it solely spreads itself by being a group activity (3-5 people are best) and through its mission editor (people can make their own missions, used in school and for birthdays etc).
Curious to see where it goes next!
The link to your community built missions is down.
Uh-oh, thank you!
Humadroid (https://humadroid.io) - AI-Assisted SOC 2 & ISO 27001 compliance for small teams. $125/month flat (for now, during beta).
Recently crossed the $500/month mark after a painful pivot from HR tech earlier this year. The whole thing started because I did ISO 27001 back in 2019 and was completely lost - overpaid for consultants, got lost with policies and controls, figured it out the hard way.
Passed SOC 2 Type I earlier this year using only Humadroid (yes, dogfooding a compliance tool through an actual audit was... an experience).
Currently finishing automated evidence collection (AWS and GitHub integrations first). Pretty proud of that one - compliance shouldn't mean "panic-screenshot everything before audit."
Really cool stuff, I thought about launching something similar earlier this year, there's definitely a market there. I see a lot of AI-ative startups coming up against compliance requirements way earlier than before, with much smaller teams, and most existing solutions just need too much from you as you engage.
How do you see yourself against someone like delve.co?
Honestly, Delve is great. Them and Compai are leading the front of modern AI-assisted compliance right now. I'm chasing them.
What I'm trying to do differently is depth of context. Humadroid learns about your company first - how you operate, your stack, your processes. From there it generates control descriptions that are actually actionable for your setup, and policies that need minimal review rather than a full rewrite.
Whether that's enough differentiation? Ask me in a year.
What's the USP over something like Vanta/Drata (aside the cost being much lower currently)?
The big difference is context-awareness. Vanta/Drata give you templates and checklists. Humadroid starts by understanding your company - what you actually do, how you operate, your tech stack.
From there, the AI generates policies that are yours, not generic docs with [COMPANY NAME] placeholders. Same with control descriptions - they're specific and actionable for your setup, not "implement access control" with no context. It also identifies risks based on what you actually do and helps build business continuity plans around your real critical processes.
You still review everything (it's compliance, not magic), but you're editing 80% done work instead of staring at a blank template wondering where to start.
The price difference is real too, but honestly that's a side effect of being early and solo - not the core value prop.
Gotcha. And then how does that translate into the audit process? Because Vanta/Drata have auditors they work with regularly, there's a bit of an incentive on both sides to use these templates because then it speeds up that part tremendously. I can't imagine the auditors being happy about really diving into hyper bespoke documents for every audit.
Your product seems great for actually doing the spirit of these frameworks (reducing risk, improving controls and processes etc.). However from what I've seen the reality of these audits is it's a box ticking exercise for everyone involved, and so improving the efficiency there tends to be the goal. How do you position yourself in that?
Also hope this doesn't come off too critical, it's just something I've been through recently and love seeing new things! I'd definitely add a vanta/drata comparison to your website though as that is inevitable.
Honestly, great questions - this is either good exercise for me or actionable feedback. Both valuable.
Right now I recommend auditors but don't have formal partnerships. Vanta/Drata's auditor relationships are... let's say on the edge of conflicted? I don't want to go that route. And at $250/month I can't play the referral game anyway (Vanta pays hundreds per referral - that math doesn't work for me).
What I can do is democratize access. I've watched too many small teams get excited about SOC 2, then ghost once they see the total cost - $15k+ for the platform, $20k+ for consultants, $15k+ for auditors. I want the barrier low enough that smaller businesses can actually get certified and compete with bigger players.
On the checkbox vs. real security thing - you're right, it's tricky. I don't want to be another "generate docs, tick boxes, forget until next audit" platform. But targeting smaller businesses actually helps here - when you're a 10-person company, management is in the compliance process, not just signing off on someone else's work. It tends to stick better.
That said, sometimes I wonder if I help too much. My System Description assistant is almost unfair - what used to take weeks now takes minutes. Is that checkbox-enabling or democratizing? Genuinely not sure.
And yes - "vs Vanta/Drata" pages are going on the list. You're not the first to ask.
Not clear on site if it integrates third parties for test automation.
Not yet - but literally finishing this week. Promised a customer I'd ship it before Christmas, so that's been my deadline.
AWS and GitHub integrations first. It auto-fetches and verifies the data (where applicable), creating read-only evidence snapshots. No manual screenshots or "I swear this config was set correctly" moments during audits.
Part of the standard price - no integration tier upsell.
https://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
This is a perfect example of taking a simple idea and elevating it/ executing it well. Well done!
As someone that has used 531 for a while, I thought an app like this would not add much value. I mean, we can all track our progress in a spreadsheet. But I must say that it looks great.
This stuff is inspiring to see..
Thank you! I created it literally because I thought updating spreadsheets on my phone was too clunky. And yeah having the rest timer with notification was useful to keep the pace.
Thank you for building this! I've been using the app for almost a year after I switched to the Boring But Big routine.
You’re very welcome. I’ve used it for more than 500 workouts myself, but now that I have young kids, I don’t have the time to do 5/3/1 anymore.
Nice! I used to use it when doing BBB 5/3/1. Sadly I stalled and got depressed.
Recently started GZCLP after getting sad at how bad I started to look with no activity
My one complaint was that there weren’t more sophisticated training regiments. I didn’t work 5/2 weeks so I just went to the gym every other day and I just clicked whatever in the app when working out, while I would prefer to track my days. Otherwise solid app, thanks for the hard work.
Supporting more sophisticated training regiments is exactly what I’m trying to achieve with Vis. Would love your feedback on it if you got any (email in profile)
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.
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
I assume you have some kind of partnership with Jim Wendler?
The periodization sounds really cool but the success of the app I would think is based entirely on the good marketing Wendler and Elitefts did with 5/3/1.
"This app isn't available for your device because it was made for an older version of Android"
Using android 15 on a Nothing Phone 1. Any chance to get it working?
Yeah that shouldn’t be happening. I’ll take a look today
Looks really good, will try it.
What is your revenue split, tip vs non tips? I've always wondered if putting a tip button on a free app could generate significant income.
Tips are insignificant compared to the paid features. On iOS for the last 6 months I made $5090. $31 was tip.
That being said, it feels really nice that people like it so much they’re willing to pay extra.
Wow this is pretty cool. I am working on my first mobile app. what tips can you give. I am planning to build in public on twitter, substack and share my coding process here on HN.
It is a carpooling app.
Don’t rely on organic App Store traffic until you’ve hit a certain size.
This app is not available for your device
I have a Pixel 6 Pro. That's not thaat old.
Let me check why that is.
That's proper old
4 years. We really should support devices that old. Unless you really need features only available in newer models (which 99% of apps don't)
A Nexus 6 is proper old.
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
What’s the sweet pup’s name?
Her name is Greta
Launched "Cadence: Guitar Theory" (https://cadenceguitar.com/) a guitar learning app with a focus on music theory in September.
Currently right above that $500/month when including lifetime purchases. Had a sizeable bump in October thanks to blowing up on here which also gave me an app store boost so thanks guys :)
I'm working on new lessons at the moment, after that I'll probably try to improve on the animations and sound effects to give the app more "juice", should be a fun thing to work on. Also still trying to figure out marketing and how to get visibility overall...
Still doing https://hackernewsletter.com/ after 15 years thanks to many of you.
I'm reading this because of the newsletter! HN is a time sink so the newsletter lifts only items worthy of attention to my email. Been a sub for many years. Thank you!
Thanks for doing this. This is the only newsletter I want to read every week.
Are you making money just from sponsors or something else too?
Yeah, just sponsors. I hope to use it as an outlet for other projects in the near future.
I subscribed last december after knowing about it in last year's version of this thread. It is great and gives a very good summary of the HN week, I love it!
That is great to hear, thanks for being a subscriber!
How are you making money on this side project?
freshly subscribed - had a peek in the archives, noticed a link to curpress.com that appears to be offline.
So, if these posts come at the same time each year, and IDs are consecutive, then
And the delta is Has HN peaked?Everything comes and goes. HN is no exception. With that in mind does it matter for you? Are you here because HN is at its peak? If commenting here makes you life better a bit keep doing that. If not then just don't and go somewhere else. Or stop using the internet altogether and just became goat farmer. Do what makes you happy and not what crowd thinks will make you happy!
Crafting CSVs is what makes me happy.
it is a very interesting observation and I did some calculation and it seems that every 8 seconds, one hackernews comment is made
I feel like the reason why it has peaked is that when hackernews was created, it probably had both youngsters and experienced alike since it was the hot new thing once but over time it matured and I think that very few young people are here and I doubt that there are surveys for hackernews median age
I am one of the youngsters and honestly I joined because of youtube (fireship -> primagen -> theo t3 -> hackernews)
And I feel like the reason hackernews doesnt feel attractive to youth is probably because of attention span, like only recently I saw someone create a thread about what clicks on hackernews or not as if its a game and I do feel like hackernews isnt conventional social media and our whole new generation has never really understood something beyond conventional social media
To me, it was unstimulating at first (which in retrospect is a good thing), like just large amounts of texts and texts in comments and I didn't understand the situation
And I don't think hackernews should change. Once I got the hang of it, it became one of the most interesting websites to me personally.
But don't worry I think that the spirit of hackernews/tinkering is still there in youngsters whom I see in their own ways, people (my age) are definitely being fed up and are taking steps like clippy and other interesting stuff that one can argue go similar to tinkering/curiosity of computers
I will have to admit that even my attention span was "cooked" and I don't think it was something extremely because I have talked about it but like, as a youngster the culture is changing so fast sometimes like, after I was on hackernews for a long time, I do not feel talking internet slang but that does alienate me sometimes because people my age have low attention span and when I used to send long messages to my friends they were kinda responding like, "aint nobody reading ts" or even on platforms like discord, I genuinely felt like a left out person because all people my age had slang or something and I didn't
Nowadays I do not feel this way because this is the person I am and I kinda see opportunities for myself which are unique to myself because of hackernews and the tinkering curiosity it has given me but still I just wanted to share a perspective about something that had troubled me once.
Apologies for the yap and have a nice day!
Awesome! I found it interesting. Keep doing that :)
I'm pretty sure that the peak b/w 2020 and 2023 was a temporary boost induced by COVID-19.
Unclear until you also count comment count on the threads, because number of posts is consistent but engaging with the posts may have gone up
We're on the verge of an unprecedented economic crisis.
I made a public transportation departure board (for Switzerland) for your home or business.
https://stationdisplay.com/
Very attractive hardware. I'd like to own one and I live in an unrelated country. Great work.
Neat. Consider building a version that is usable outdoors and clearly visible from further away in daylight, and at night, and you might be able to offer it to some public transport companies in various countries, that are still using devices running Windows to display transport schedules. Market them using digital sovereignty and sustainability angles.
This is pretty cool, can I ask why you decided to ship hardware and not a subscription to a dashboard that people could put on any mounted monitor?
It came out of a project that I did [1] from which I wanted to see what it takes to turn that into an actual product[2]. Hardware is a while other game than software especially in low quantity as you still need to deal with things like CE.
[1] https://sschueller.github.io/posts/vbz-fahrgastinformation/
[2] https://sschueller.github.io/posts/turning-a-project-into-a-...
Most likely because those dashboards are available for free from your local public transport operator.
Fun project!
What type of customers do you have?
I'm building a book recommendation app that tries to make it fun to explore books through what other people loved to read -> https://shepherd.com/
Some examples of pages we've built over the years using all the interviews we do with authors: https://shepherd.com/bboy/2025 https://shepherd.com/bookshelf/authoritarianism https://shepherd.com/best-books/if-you-want-to-be-a-mathemat...
And in the process of bringing on a co-founder and building a full desktop/mobile app so you can track what you are reading, what you loved, and we can use that data to deeply personalize your recommendations (as I am frustrated with Goodreads as I don't think they even try to do this well).
https://building.shepherd.com/roadmap/ *early beta coming in late January
Fun to work on :)
lovely, bookmarked!
I run a Substack where I show programmers how to turn advanced math papers into C and Python code.
I'm a math guy who codes and I do it for fun. I'm shocked people are interested in this stuff.
LeetArxiv Substack: https://leetarxiv.substack.com/
Fantastic work. Flying the Kenyan flag high!
This is fantastic and it really looks like a passion-fueled side project.
Trump defunded my math PhD so I got a programmer job just to pay the bills. The Substack lets me do what I love.
Thanks for this comment!
Cold call training aka 'exposure therapy'
https://coldcallgym.com
Just a call a number and practice a cold call with a bot. People seemed to like it when I built it so I made a free and paid tier. Getting like 3-5 new users per day without really doing anything.
This is pretty unique and amazing. How are you marketing this all the way to $500/mo.?
Thank you. I'm not doing any marketing at all. In fact I noticed about a third of the traffic comes from ChatGPT of all places. I guess that's just from the SEO. But users keep trying it out, maybe because it's really simple to start. Just call the number.
https://www.repth.com, an AI cycling coach that I vibe-coded back when gpt-3.5 was hot and vibe coding wasn't yet a thing. We've come a long way!
Free for athletes, but I license the underlying "coach" logic to actual, human coaches.
Neat! We made a similar thing years ago in the pre-AI era, with strong focus on detection of how the planned workouts were executed rather than making plan adjustments just on a single scalar metric (e.g. TSS). Didn't really go anywhere unfortunately.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1725424103/summit-train...
Nice! Curious, what metrics did you land on? IF, VI, duration, etc., or an interval detector? That is the unfortunate thing about the serious cyclist industry; it's tiny! Not worth pursuing as a business unless the TAM is expanded broadly
Congrats. This sounds like a great way to build a "wrapper" product. Gather clean data on a particular niche and keep it in one place. Have something that's good at processing that data. No matter what "startup killers" the big boys release, it's still resilient and valuable.
How does this compare to Trainer Road?
TR's "AI" claims are a bit of a stretch. It basically just monitors fatigue and will ramp down a prescribed workout to ensure you don't overtrain.
The workouts themselves are templates chosen from a list and do not adapt to the rider as an individual. It plugs in a standard periodization schedule with flexible dates.
Repth uses AI for everything with a few guardrails. You pick a peak date, describe your peak event, weekly availability, and ftp.
Repth then generates a macro plan, and the next week of workouts. As you perform, it will monitor for compliance and adjust the prescription depending on your compliance and feedback. All of it is unique per user, optimized for the demands of the specific event.
Overall, TR's approach is fine. Any plan can work as long as you stick to it. I built Repth simply to replace my (human) coach in 2022 and in that regard it has been a huge success
How did you promote it? I find myself in the same market but for planning based on route weather and fitness conditions w/ https://brezza.cc - It is very hard.
Haven't promoted it at all, beyond having a marketing site live on the web with competent SEO. I should say, it's not hugely popular or anything. But considering that I only built it for my own needs, I look at it more as art than craft. In that way, it can only be a success.
love that response, congrats!
https://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?
I almost built something like this a short time ago. Some devices/softwares (in my case it was the Supernote calendar app) only allow for one calendar as a source, and I had to merge my work and personal calendars to show up in my device. :)
BudgetSheet ( https://www.budgetsheet.com ) -> $6k MRR avg. for the year. Will likely have my first $10k month in January.
Live Bank Transactions + Google Sheets. Links accounts with Plaid to track transactions and balances over time with some helpful templates. All the data is yours in your own spreadsheet to do with what you want.
Revenue is somewhat seasonal. Most revenue comes in Q1+Q2 and trails off in Q3+Q4. Used by individuals and small businesses that love spreadsheets and want to manage their own finances.
Is this self hosted or giving the cloud the keys to the kingdom?
Not really sure how to answer this, because there are varying degrees of "self hosted" vs. "cloud hosted".
This is a Next.js app hosted on Render.com, which is a managed VPS offering similar to Heroku. BudgetSheet is also of course completely reliant on Google Cloud though with Google Apps Script and the Workspace Marketplace where it is listed.
Been doing a YouTube channel on Python for Finance for quite a while and make some affiliate revenue: https://youtube.com/@parttimelarry
Oh, it's you! One of my favorite channels on YouTube. Learnt Alpaca and TA-Liband backtesting from you and also built my screener with your vids. Awesome content always. I am looking to go through the IB ones soon.
Jesus, 130k++ subscribers, WOW!!!!
This is a huge success!!! Im also in this field, never thought that you could collect so many people on this niche topic!
If you say: some affiliates - think about getting a sponsoring partner for some B2B stuff, and speak the advertorial by yourself(!), one slot per one video/show. In my country we have a small but good&nerdy startup podcast run by two guys - they do advertising this way, mainly B2B tech stuff (accounting software etc.) - in an interview recently, they unveiled their numbers - per slot (20-25 seconds) they get 8k - 10k. And they have a couple of slots per month.
haha, getting downvoted for applauding someone who built a successful product, while I judged based on my own professional experience?
:-))
I released a game on Steam, and work on it a few hours every day. Income each month varies but is consistently above $500.
Link to game if anyone is interested: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2250550/Tornado_Research_...
Manabi Reader - learn Japanese by reading
More than $500/month. It currently sustains my full-time focus
https://reader.manabi.io
I quit my job a couple years back to work on this app full-time, as well as its companion flashcard app, Manabi Flashcards. The goal is to help you learn through immersion and eventually replace some of your flashcard reviews time with reading (once I finish auto-reviews for flashcards)
What's special about it? Manabi Reader became popular as an Japanese-focused alternative to services like LingQ in that it locally tracks and analyzes all the words and kanji you read and study. It shows you which words are new and which you're currently learning via flashcards, so you can easily find content that suits your level and see what flashcards to prioritize adding.
It also passively accumulates an on-device (and in your personal iCloud) corpus of example sentences from your reading. It’s also one of few ways to mine sentences including pitch accent directly into Anki on iPhone.
I had built this part-time while working over many years (starting with flashcards and then the reader app) but going full-time gave me the time to do a full rewrite: SwiftUI, native iOS + macOS, and an offline-first architecture that syncs with iCloud and my server in the background.
Although it has a companion SRS algorithm (FSRS) flashcard app, it's also excellent for mining Anki cards. This works with AnkiMobile on iOS and AnkiConnect on desktop.
You can use it like a web browser for the web, or subscribe to RSS feeds. It comes with a bunch of curated content by level. Recently I added EPUB support, pitch accents, and note-taking with todos.
I'm now almost done adding a manga mode via Mokuro, and Netflix/streaming video support via realtime captioning of audio streams.
To scale this with UGC/influencer market I need to make it more beginner friendly. Currently it assumes you can read kana at least.
Just signed our 3rd customer with TrueCast (600€/month) (https://www.truecast.fr/), which is Granola for tech and non-tech recruiters. Rather than replacing recruiters in the HR process, we want to give them real time hard skills knowledge superpowers so they can better assess candidates before submitting them to their teams. We are convinced that recruiting should remain human-first.
There’s also a bot option, for self-conducted interviews, mostly used for open applications for some pre-filtering.
We are still unsure on how to enter such market, so we are doing direct networking atm, if you guys have an idea on how you’d do it or want a free trial of the product we’d love having a chat with you about it.
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
Nice licensing
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
I like this, bookmarked in case I'll ever be forced by work into MICROS~1 operating systems again.
VideoToBe.com - Transcription & Chat for Audio/Video (board meetings, lecture notes, churches summons etc.)
Started as Pay-per-use service (upload the file and receive an email with transcript). Now we also offer subscription based service for media library, AI summaries, chat Q&A, insights/highlights.
Makes between $200 to $600 per month.
https://videotobe.com
Tips for sub growth in transcription space?
I’ve created Pixie, a platform to employ and track your kids work. For families with a business, it helps reduce tax burden and fund a child’s Roth.
I’m a physician with some 1099 income, built the platform myself because my kids help with my side projects, and have since onboarded CPAs who now offer it to their clients. I saved 5k this year on my own taxes by employing my kids and it has funded their Roth.
Soon after launching, I crossed the $500/month mark.
Link:https://trypixie.com
This is neat, I appreciate that even if I can't use the service, i still learned something new about what's possible. Gonna keep it in the back-pocket for sharing with friends.
Also reminded me of when Justin Jackson talked about how he hired his kids for help with real projects and the positives from it https://justinjackson.ca/flipping-tables
I love working with my kids. They help out, feel accomplished, and its bonding time.
Very cool idea, I feel like awareness of this even being possible has to be quite low.
That’s the challenge. Educating consumers.
It’s completely legal and even listed by IRS. [0]
It’s important to be compliant and do it in an easy to use manner.
[0] https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
What is the maximum amount a kid can earn yearly?
No limit but for staying under them paying tax it’s the standard deduction (15k). And you can only contribute $7500 (2026) to their Roth.
A reasonable amount depends on their age but somewhere between 7500-15000 is a good amount and maximizes benefits.
I'm selling browser extensions on the App Store, but the main money-maker is currently https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-twitter
When Twitter killed off third-party apps, the browser extension I'd been developing ever since "New Twitter" launched in 2019 suddenly became one of the few ways to make Twitter more tolerable to use, and the number of users of the Chrome version tripled from 30k to 90k in a fortnight (mostly in Japan).
When they confirmed third-party apps had been killed on purpose and jacked up the price of the API to discourage new ones, I started selling it on the App Store the next week and it's made more than $500 per month ever since.
Before the end of the year I'm hoping to roll out a single paid subscription which works across all my extensions when you sign up for it, which enables syncing settings across all your browsers and devices, unlocks additional subscriber-only features, and will enable creation of extension-specific APIs if there are future features which require one. Between Control Panel for Twitter and https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-youtube I have ~390,000 users, so, y'know, please like and subscribe.
That will _eventually_ include my free Hacker News extension ( https://soitis.dev/comments-owl-for-hacker-news ) so things like new comment counts, user notes and muted users can sync across every browser and device you use Hacker News on.
If that takes off, I hope to make the App Store versions free and figure out how to give anyone who bought it 3 months of the subscription per extension they bought as a thank-you. If anyone's done something like that before, I'd be happy to hear about it via any communication method in my HN profile!
Route weather forecasting based on date/time, speed/pace, ideal conditions in Settings. As also go/no go callout windows, AI nutrition/gear list. Deterministic engine of fitness readiness, being able to see progress and fitness and overall body health.
Used it for: Skiing, hiking, cycling. Any outing with a route.
Import a route from Strava, RideWithGPS, GPX/FIT, Apple fitness. Plan for weather forecasting! Fitness readiness is obtained from metrics collected from a smart watch.
I actually turned it free recently. But barely reached over 400 MRR then started dropping. Consumer market is hard and I'm more interested in learning about AI and a full stack side project.
https://brezza.cc/
https://martiansoftware.com/chatkeeper/
I built ChatKeeper because I wanted to treat my ChatGPT history like a local knowledge base, with local-first access to my data.
It’s a command-line tool (GUI in progress) that takes a full ChatGPT .zip export and syncs it with local Markdown files. You can move and rename them freely and they will stay in sync on future runs.
It pairs well with tools like Obsidian and lets you link your own notes to specific conversations or even points within them.
Revenue is modest but growing month over month. It’s a one-time purchase, not a subscription.
Most users so far are researchers and other ChatGPT power users who already live in Markdown or want to do things like curate and compress the context of very long-running conversations.
I’ve been looking for something like this for Claude
Yep, you're not the only one, and I want to add support for more formats/LLMs. Right now ChatKeeper's internals are very ChatGPT-specific, but I have a plan to change that and Claude (which I also use frequently) will be the first one I add support for.
I've started using this: https://github.com/jhlee0409/claude-code-history-viewer
so far so good...
I earned more than $500 a month once: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lyoc/last-year-of-carbo...
This game was developed by my friends and I during college, then we Kickstarted a few years after.
Sales have dwindled since, but I still like the game. So much so that I turned it into a free web app. Still a WIP but it's maybe 75/80% there.
Play for free here, you will need to make an account: https://lastyearofcarbon.com
Buy a copy here, but you should play the game first to see if you like it: https://lyoc.shop
I 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!
Just a small comment, as I don't know if you're planning to wrap up or keep maintaining the product...
I can't find the pricing of the product on the site, I only find that I get '10 free credits', but I don't know how much a credit is and what can I do with it.
Home page says it's one credit per diagram, but then the docs say it's a certain amount of credits per modification (that could be correct or not, I guess...)
I usually skip if I can't find the price, but it could also happen that people create the trial account, spends quickly the credits, then they find the price and it doesn't fit them. Of course, there's always people coming just for the free credits.
I don't know if this is helpful to you or not, but I hope so :)
Thank you so much, that is a fair point! It's part of a series of mistakes I made, the product started out as a free to try and only showed the pricing after the user used up all their credits (I didn't even have a landing page back then). I'll update the landing page to make this clear!
how do you deal with continuous Google-degrading-risk?
I stopped a site lately i ran for 10 years, because Google changed the ranking so often over the years, finally traffic drowned nearly completely like 1k visitors per month, it was so frustrating so I just stopped the webserver after so many years.
I think the sustainable way is to put more and more backlinks out there, more blog posts, etc. I actually suffered from it too.
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.
I'm…
Oh, making or losing $500/month?
Never mind.
Only $500? Time to increase the number of nodes in your side projects Kubernetes cluster.
Misery loves company. I am certainly intrigued to see what is out there.
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.
its just about turnover ;-)
https://www.unlistedjobs.com/
26.3% of jobs found on company websites are not advertised on any job boards but found using this tool.
The app scrapes company's directly (24/7) and give the user:
- a head start over other job seekers
- access to thousands of jobs not listed anywhere else
- daily job filter emails with ability to be highly curated to reduce noise
1. What is the churn like? Don't people cancel after finding a job?
2. Has any company objected to scraping?
1. Churn isn't as bad as I would have thought. There is also the use case for someone who has a job and wants to find the next one. But yea if someone wants to only use for 1 month, that is expected
2. I think companies (or the ATS's they use) might object to reposting a job listing on my site but I'm not doing that. You can search/sort/filter jobs but in order to view the job posting you will open a link back to the original job.
Back when I was in the Air Force, I hated the UX for referencing Air Force publications on mobile. So I created an iOS app called AFI Explorer [0] which has continued to get hundreds of downloads every month for the past 5 years.
Since I’ve been shifting more towards platform engineering work in my career, the best reward abut this side hustle isn’t the financial benefit, but is the opportunity to stay grounded in software dev. I love seeing the changing APIs each year with the new iOS updates. And the seasonal approach to doing updates is always fun too.
[0]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/afi-explorer/id1564964107
I'm building a "mail merge for PowerPoint": - https://pptxmailmerge.com
Still in MVP mode - but it already made some sales.
What's different about it from similar solutions is the way you can get data from an Excel file (most other companies have the JSON and CSV figured out).
It supports Excel style addressing so it's pretty flexible on how you reach for the data inside a PowerPoint template (access every sheet, every cell, named range or table to use it in merging process).
People use it for various kinds of use-cases - creating certificates, automating pricing offers, delivering employee feedback forms, preparing market research presentations and even subtitles for a theatrical play.
Not quite a side project, but I launched CoPlay about 3 years ago. Slow but steady growth up to 6k MRR for 2025. I think we will just about double that in 2026.
CoPlay is a platform for managing fleets of gaming consoles, users and subscriptions for pediatric hospitals. Think of it as an mdm for Xbox devices/users that does managed subscriptions
https://coplay.io/
https://slouchsniper.com
i'm solving the "sitting is new smoking" problem. Basically an app that uses your webcam and local AI models to predict if you are sitting + your sitting posture, so you don't develop neck pain.
I sell laser cut decorative maps
TheMapsGuy.com
Really cool! Huge fan of maps - it looks like there is some amount of processing, so you have that automated or are you manually editing details? Also any advice on someone just getting into engraving?
Very cool! Also very high value! Suspect you could raise prices.
What's your laser setup? 80-100W CO2 laser?
I use a CO2 laser yeah
If you use LightBurn, hi from the team!
Wow! I was using LightBurn this evening for some holiday presents. Hello from a very thankful MacOS user.
Wow, lovely cartography and lovely works of art! And so many cities to choose from!
These look nice. If I request a custom city, how long would it take?
I can usually get a map shipped out within a day of the order (depending on what time you order at). I'll have you give me the custom map information here:
preview.themapsguy.com
These are gorgeous. Nice work.
Thank you, I appreciate it! :)
My Mac App Store only scanning app (https://www.pdfscannerapp.com/) still makes approximately this much a month after nearly 15 years on the store (I published it on day one when the store was realeased) - all updates since then have been free, so I'm just selling to new customers. It's a hobby project that keeps me into Apple platform development and allows me to work on it in bursts (like the last update for Liquid Glass) and then let it rest for a while (if Apple doesn't break any APIs).
My wife runs https://www.saviament.com/, an open-access educational website in Catalan. She also sells printable content following the same style as the website, which has exploded in popularity this year and has become a decent source of income.
Molt bé!
I play poker.
I buy in for 500 and can make 1-200 a session.
But a session is ~8 hours, so I stopped and use that time to study or work a job outside my field that has health benefits that is less fun than playing Texas Hold 'Em.
Launched Standly, a standing desk companion app on iOS and Max in Feb 2025. Steadily grew it by talking to people on reddit and in person. Mostly word of mouth sales and ASO. Initially it was only for mac but launching iOS has been good. Most downloads coming from organic search. Most people like it to build stamina for standing and stretching while working, especially those with lower back pain. Most customers are from EU.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/standly-standing-desk-timer/id...
I made https://meetinghouse.cc as a way for twitter people to put themselves on a map and write a bio, and what they're looking for. It's a way to find and be found, if you want to see who's interesting nearby for friends, dating, new parents meeting new parents, etc.
Pins cost $12, there are 474 pins placed so far. This keeps the quality high (there are no spam pins, only real people) but will fundamentally limit the growth, I think.
> but will fundamentally limit the growth, I think.
Thank goodness. We need more small social media with inherently limited scope to protect from the manipulative garbage coming out of big social media companies.
I keep zooming but the profile pictures never get bigger!
Because I was frustrated of the pricing and feature list of TrainingPeaks, I've built my own training planning and analytics platform for endurance athletes (and coaches too!). It is called Tredict (https://www.tredict.com.) and it covers almost everything for runners, cyclists and swimmers over training effort forecasting and prediction, a comprehensive training log, training plans, workout planning, Vo2Max calculation, FTP assessments and collaboration with other athletes and coaches, equipment tracking and so on and so on. Quite a lot of things TrainingPeaks offers too. It has integrations for sending and execution of planned workouts to your watch with Garmin, Wahoo, Suunto, Coros, icTrainer and it receives executed trainings or health data from Polar, Dropbox, Oura, Withings and others! I think I did more then 15 oAuth integrations in total over Tredict's existens? And the platform offers an oAuth2 API for 3-party integrations on its own.
The payment model is a pre-paid model for 12 months of write access to your calendar. It brings ~500-600 Euros (before taxes) a month since 6 years.
https://www.tredict.com
Nice! The site looks very clean, good job! I recently bought a Garmin and I was looking into analytics-heavy training platform since I'm doing a lot of different sports so I can't just go for a 10k training plan or something. I ended up going with intervals.icu, how is tredict different from it? It appears a little tighter on the visual maybe? Anyway good job!
Thank you. Tbh I cannot tell too many difference to intervals.icu, last time I had a look was 2 years ago or so. I remember it lacked some things, but this could have changed. I think Tredict is a little bit more on the straight forward site, just looks cleaner, visually and also from the workflow, also more performant. But this is of course opinionated as I am the inventor of Tredict. I have deep respect for Intervals too. You just could use both for a certain amount of time to see which one fits better for you. :-)
I run Brick Ranker a website that tracks the value of LEGO sets and minifigures. You can also signup and catalogue your own collection so that you can track it's value or just see what you own.
It makes around $500 a month from a mixture of adsense and affiliate schemes. Would be good if I was making more but I've automated most it so I spend maybe 1 hour on it a month.
https://brickranker.com
I run a keywords research tool, it scans posts across social media sites like bluesky, mastodon, hackernews, etc.
KeywordsPal.com
It's actually super interesting the technical aspects to scan 50k posts a day for as cheap as possible. I write about it here: https://keywordspal.com/blog/building-multi-platform-content...
I also built it as a result of being unsatisfied with f5bot
https://www.youhere.org: "Want to know who showed up?" is the tag line. It's an app-based attendance service for teachers/coaches/band directors/conference organizers, etc. I'm a teacher and it scratches an itch I had (students not showing up to class). Been hitting the $500/month more and more often now (even after server fees).
I 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.
interesting! how is it going? what’s the average price tag for such projects?
Not sure if blogging, collecting blogs, and interviewing people about blogging is considered a side project but ever now and again, depending on how generous the people on the other side are, I hit 500/month in donations.
Everything I do is free for everyone but for the past few years I’ve been running an entirely optional membership program that starts at $1/month.
I’m (probably naively) a big believer in kindness and I keep refusing to monetize what I do in any other way.
I designed a pocket music instrument. I partnered with a company in China called Seeedstudio, they do the manufacturing, shipping, customer handling, etc. and I receive royalties on each sale. I varies from month to month, but above the 500$/month on 2025 :)
I love to be able to focus on the design and not the practicalities of selling a hardware product!
https://minichord.com/
I'm a recording electronic musician and clicked through with interest. Maybe I overlooked it, but I didn't see where I could hear how it sounds. It should be so obvious that I can't miss it, so even if it's there, I'd suggest making the link more prominent.
kitecourier.com - the end-to-end certified mail platform that makes sending legal notices as easy as sending email.
Revenue is very spiky. Some months ~$10k, some ~$100.
Inspired by this Patrick McKenzie thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7135833
Certified mail is weirdly powerful leverage. I decided to productize that.
https://www.kitecourier.com/pricing is returning 404 page
Fixed, thanks!
How do you handle the logistics? I presume you aren't printing and mailing everything manually...
https://lob.com handles printing/mailing
Nice! Thanks.
how do you get customers?
Just inbound for now. We haven’t really launched yet. Most customers find us on bing.
That's original. How'd you come up with an idea for that?
I had medical debt to dispute, which requires certified mail. Every time the debt was resold I had to print, sign, stuff an envelope, and go to the post office again.
I built it so people could push back without the logistics.
Then I realized that nobody wants to deal with mailing at all and certified mail is used for way more than debt disputes, so I expanded it into a general legal-notice service.
https://unrav.io . Lets users reshape any article, paper, or video into the form that actually helps them think, mind-maps, summaries, podcasts, or interactive Q&A. Launched as part of the Bolt.new hackathon in August and growing steadily. Going from a 100% vibe coded web app to a full production system has been quite a ride!
This is such a cool idea; i am afraid in a few years people will stop watching full videos, instead they will ask ai bots to summarise it.
I've got 2 that are kind of intermingled. Each averages a little over $500/mo on their own though.
Sportsbook API (https://sportsbookapi.com/) - A single API to get odds data from a number of US Sportsbooks
Odds Assist Pro (http://pro.oddsassist.com/) - An odds scanner tool that shows both current odds and things like arbitrage, plus ev, middles. This actually started as just a UI for me to quickly do sanity checks on the API data and eventually grew into a full site. The site is on a subdomain of a site my business partner had built long before we met, so it's kind of positioned as the plus version of that site.
API revenue is really stable and has been pretty consistent slow growth. Pro's revenue is all over the place since it's almost all referrals and promos with big spikes around major sporting events. Probably averages at least $500/mo if you look at the entire year.
Awesome sites!
I 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.
My portfolio of iOS apps ends up at an average of $500/mo.
Most are older, still functional but rarely updated. A few of the newer ones include:
https://daylightgoals.com - Time in daylight tracker, using Apple Watch/HealthKit as the data source.
https://airlauncher.app - App launcher for visionOS - was much bigger last year before Apple added the ability to organize your apps.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ibuzz/id304684758?ls=1&mt=8 - iBuzz - I built this app in a day 15 years ago, it still makes about $100/mo from ads and removing ads. Just a simple buzzer soundboard app.
How’s the developer experience on AVP? Any surprises, positive or negative?
Did you find the tooling and documentation from Apple sufficient?
Sadly not $500/mo, but I do get a few sales on https://dailychinesestories.com each month. It's as simple as it sounds - a story in Chinese at your HSK level for your preferred themes once a day.
AI?
Yes
I run drawcharts[1], which is a tool to help you build good looking hand-drawn style charts. It is not very expensive so I am currently making around 500 a year from it.
Also, as someone who likes to go to conferences and meet and connect with people, I found it hard connecting to 50 people at a conference on Linkedin and then reaching back out to them. So I build LinkedMemo[2] which is a CRM on "top" of Linkedin. You scan a profile, the profile is automatically saved and enriched in the CRM with a quick note.
[1]: https://drawcharts.xyz [2]: https://linkedmemo.com
I put sponsor information on my open source project, and it has been giving me $600/mo in the past few months. There are only a few thousand stars on GitHub, but it's already the most popular tool in a paticular niche area.
What are the reasons to use a throw away account and neither mention the product nor the niche area?
There are 5%-ish code are contributed by other people, I feel really bad for not sharing the money with them. Anyway, I wish that GitHub offers the option to sponsor a project, not one single maintainer.
Show it off!
I built an accounting app :
https://compta.libremen.com
Did not intend to at first, but having quit Windows, I had to replace the Access application I had built with an accountant friend of mine to manage my small business. Looking around the web, I could not find something I liked.
I ended up re-writing the thing as an SaaS for my own use, but then figured that if I'm using it, others might want to, and all I had to do was to add an 'id_client' field to the database. It turns out to be a bit more complicated than that, as users tend to come with different needs, and to think of ways of using your app you did not anticipate.
Also, when I tell an accountant that I wrote an accounting application, his eyes pop, his head tilts slightly, and he appears to be evaluating whether I'm the dangerous kind of crazy before ending the conversation. Must be due to the horrors they have to deal with all day.
It's a hard sell, revenue is closer to $500/year than $500/month, because I have very low fees and very small clients. But I take great pride in counting one accountant using it in his professional practice. It's also great fun to tune as the number of lines grows, however odd this may sound.
Formester 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!
https://formester.com/ Easiest way to build powerful forms
This is huge, actually I have used this before the free version, is this a 'side-project' or do you have some staff because it seems a big operation. Nice job.
I built a timesheet / activity report management app years ago.
In the French freelancing market, there’s a specific administrative hurdle: the Compte Rendu d’Activité (CRA). It’s a signed activity report that acts as the "source of truth" for billing. Most people use messy Excel sheets. I built Timizer to solve my own frustration with this workflow. What started as a side project for my friends eventually caught the eye of larger agencies. It’s now a nice $1k/month SaaS.
I recently translated the app in English so I can address larger markets, but I have no idea if this activity report is even a thing in foreign markets, like US, UK,...And if somebody has the answer here I would love to talk about it :)
My website is here : https://timizer.io
I've been 3D printing accessories for the Volkswagen ID. Buzz since July. I started by modeling and printing a couple of things that I wanted, then added a couple of items that other owners have talked about on various subreddits and Facebook groups. I'm now moving about $750 worth of items a month. http://buzzprintco.etsy.com
https://renderapp.io/
A platform for digital asset management, review and workflow. Current features focus primarily on review of images aimed at automotive configurators.
The problem is generic, however, our USP is we have a couple of enterprise customers that upload packs of 60k+ assets for a round, and thus we aim to help discover what demonstrably changed.
A bit like Github, only working with images, videos, and other digital assets rather than text files.
I run Packetriot: https://packetriot.com, which is an alternative to ngrok. It's been in operation for 6-ish years and reached $500/month in year two. It doesn't replace my salary (yet) but that's what I'm working toward. Thankful to have thousands of users and some big companies using our services or self-hosting our server.
This is a fun space to work in but there's lot of small competitors and opensource alternatives. In the first few years it was sometimes demotivating, but at some point I began seeing competitors bow out and Packetriot kept getting better and better each year.
This year I published a lot of updates across the platform. Our UX is better with a new web-based UI for our client and all of the features of the platform can be managed in the client UI. No more going back forth between the client and user portal.
I'm planning on releasing a community edition of our server in 2026 so that anyone can use our network server for free, for personal use or to evaluate for commercial use.
Around 3K/m with my side projects: https://tools.dsebastien.net
Revenue from courses, apps, community, books...
Still not able to pay myself anything though
Super Fine Cuts, super low run custom "vinyl" records. I have been working on automating some processing but currently it is all manual.
Had an overwhelming response as people are finding it mostly though ChatGPT which has been very interesting as I did a soft launch to friends only and no marketing.
https://superfinecuts.com/
Now that is cool! What is pricing?
I recently exited a Shopify App which was making ~800$ MRR and just shipped my first AI Chrome extension. It dubs YouTube videos into 82+ languages and offers more controls for better youtube experience
I’d love your feedback - https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/atlas-ai-youtube-du...
I created Multy 5 years ago. Thanks to a post on HN at that time, it was a small success (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25870504)
Since then, I continue to maintain the website and I have around 50k lists, 8k users, and around 400€ MRR (ads and subscriptions).
I'd love to see more users, but I'm glad of what I did with multy !
If you want to check: https://multy.me
how do you deal with spam/abuse?
Dashboard and moderation. I created an admin dashboard to check users and lists and can easily delete / ban users.
Right now it's fine with the number of lists created per day
I have been building an iOS net worth tracker app as a side project for more than 5 years now:
https://www.percento.app
I was an accountant for 3 years before I switched my career to be a programmer, then I kept coding for 10+ years in big tech companies and had always wanted to build a product on my own. Eventually, I found the niche to combine my finance knowledge and my iOS skills into this App and happily building for a few years.
Can I share data with my partner? I’ve been looking for a way to help my partner understand where we at money-wise.
ah sorry currently there is no share data feature although I've heard this feature request from time to time, I probably should consider implementing this later. The premium membership can be shared with family members though -- one purchase for all members.
We're a group of developers who worked together years ago. We meet a few times a year, but scheduling is always a hassle with endless back-and-forth trying to align everyone's calendars. Frustrated by this, I built Troviamo to solve it automatically. I know similar tools exist, but this one is modern and tailored to exactly what we needed.
https://troviamo.app
How's this different than the good old Doodle everyone uses in europe at least?
https://doodle.com/en/
I work on https://theblue.social which provides Bluesky native tools and cross-posting tools.
I make between $400 ~ $600/mo between these two:
Disk Prices on eBay - https://unli.xyz/diskprices/
Digital Film Stock - https://unli.xyz/digitalfilmstock/
Both are very similar... just a lot of regex (200+ expressions) to parse eBay item titles and descriptions
I built a receipt organizer and tracker app on iOS in May this year and now it has just past $200 in monthly recurring revenue and >$500 in December. Before this I have been collecting my own receipts and scanning them into a private website I built for myself, then one day I was like, why don't I make it into an app so it is easier to use and I can share it with others?
https://receipt-genie.com
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/receipt-organizer-receiptgenie...
https://abot.app/ currently at ~$2k/m, down from 4k a few years ago.
It's just been a month since I set up a proper website, and I've already received my first $ 500 in a side gig. The jobs started before I set up the website.
I help businesses automate their admin work if they already use Google Workspace products using App Script and Typescript.
https://mereth.dev/
https://ffmpeg-api.com
As the domain (hopefully) indicates, A REST API for the FFmpeg service. So far, it's been a plain API, but now it's adding MCPs and AI endpoints, so you don't have to remember ffmpeg commands.
I do a few apps that get about this, but the one most interesting to the audience here is a scientific calculator for iOS, iPadOS and macOS
https://jacobdoescode.com/technicalc
One time payment, no subscriptions or IAPs
I'm developing Wallpunch, a censorship resistant VPN for people in China, Iran, and Russia. Userbase is pretty small as I'm still polishing things up, but I hope to expand my marketing efforts a lot in 2026!
https://wallpunch.net/
How are you going to accept payments for this without outing yourself and becoming a target to authorities in those countries?
Company is registered anonymously in another country. I also offer crypto payment options.
Site is dead
Really? What country are you connecting from? It should be accessible in China, US, Europe etc.
I have a variety of education (books, courses) and run fintech SaaS, which combined are finally providing around $2K/month in profits since around July this year (for a long time, was hovering around that $500 mark)
My first successful SaaS, The Wheel Screener, a screener optimized for selling options: https://wheelscreener.com
A sister spin-off LEAPS Screener, for buying LEAPS options: https://leapsscreener.com
And, just launched in November, but already profitable, VannaCharm, a dashboard to view and watch in real time dealer hedging metrics: https://vannacharm.com
Looking to launch 1-2 more SaaS in 2026, trying to get to the point where I can do this full-time, let's get it folks!
My long-running website damninteresting.com and its affiliated projects (e.g., omiword.com) earn me a combined ~$700/month profit on average. Donations have been declining, however, so I don't know if I'll be piping up in next year's thread.
If you’ve recently dipped below, definitely still post.
I personally would still want to see your comment.
I love your website. I stumble upon it again every other year and I'm always amazed by the quality of the content and writing. I was reading your articles on my Windows Mobile phone, ages ago!
Have you also had a decline in traffic in the last 18 months? It seems like the entire independent web is getting strangled out.
Thanks! We had our 20th birthday earlier this year, so we've certainly been around for some vintage devices. Over the years our primary audience moved from desktop web browsers to mostly mobile readers, and now our largest audience is podcast listeners.
Site traffic is indeed down in recent years. The largest decline was when Facebook introduced "boosting," and stopped showing our posts to 90%+ of our Facebook followers overnight. I despise advertising, so I was unwilling to cave to their demand to "boost" our posts into ads. I'd have been happy to pay a reasonable monthly fee to reach our audience there, but that option was never available.
That big dip in traffic came with a big dip in donations, and as a consequence I eventually had to move from a part-time day job to full-time. The sharp reduction in free my time led to a sharp reduction in original content on Damn Interesting, which further shrunk the pool of people willing to donate.
This is a spiral that some would classify as "death," if I were willing to let it die. But it settled into an equilibrium where it pays for itself, makes a modest profit, and remains rewarding. Frankly I'd probably still do it even if donations dried up entirely, the research and writing give me a sense of purpose that would be difficult to replace.
I used to hope that a wealthy benefactor would discover us, and decide to fully fund our project for a few years, giving us space to realize more of the project's potential. But such offers come with strings attached, and I don't have the stomach for most of those. Perhaps I am broken.
I love this site - have you considered monetizing with like e-books or other offline offerings, if you don't already?
Also, your traffic might not be counting those of us like myself who use an RSS feed (a la Feedly) - those links don't go to your site, they just go to, well, the link. =)
Thanks! We do indeed have a sort of e-book monetization; donating above certain thresholds gives one access to download an e-book version of our entire catalog.
And true enough that RSS traffic is largely uncounted, but there are many other indications of reduced visitor count--server-side logs, comment count on original content, number of email subscribers, and that sort of thing.
This is how I fear my own website will be if the trend continues. Platforms gave, and now they're taking away.
At least what you have built will endure. Even if your invested just enough to keep the lights on, you would still have a trove of fascinating content. It's something to be proud of.
while not exactly $500/month, my side project Whenish (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/whenish/id6745035749) makes me some beer money.
I made Whenish cause i was frustrated with apps taking you outside of group chats to schedule events and find out dates when people are available. Whenish is an iMessage extension app and it works pretty nicely so far.
recently got my first user feedback email which was really exciting!
hope to figure out how marketing works to get some more users and hopefully double downloads + sales next year.
https://www.condoally.com/ and https://www.hoaally.org/ - Simple yet powerful tools for running small/self-managed HOAs.
The site is 15 years old now and pretty solid. I dreamed much more for it, but I still can't figure out the marketing.
The front-end is open-source: https://github.com/CommunityAlly/CommunityAllyWebApp
Reddit marketing to relevant subreddits might help!
That's a good idea, thanks. I always wanted to help folks unite to defeat corrupt boards so maybe r/fuc*HOAs would be a good subreddit to advertise for that.
What have you tried for marketing?
Hey, thanks for asking! I used those Facebook and Google ad credits you always get when you sign-up for something, ran two postcard campaigns sent directly to HOA presidents, paid to rank higher on Capterra, hired an SEO firm for 2 years, was in a Valpak insert, and ran an ad in The Chicago Cooperator for 6 months. The Capterra campaign was by far the best ROI, but still too expensive to make sense in the long term.
That seems like a lot!
My assumption would be the best marketing, given you are a team of 1, would be demand capture campaigns. And it seems that your Capterra results bear that out.
But, your SEO agency would probably have focused on high intent keywords for demand capture, and presumably that didn’t work so well.
Anyway, seems like an interesting marketing challenge targeting a niche market that frankly I don’t know much about.
I wonder if you could target HOA management agencies rather than the association presidents. I know that many HOAs are managed externally at least from an operational perspective. That said, I know so little about the market…
This is great, thank you! I had to look up "demand capture campaigns" and that makes a lot of sense. Yes, I totally agree that property managers can be a source of growth. I'm very lucky to have a property manager user out of Michigan helping guide me with what she would need from a property management perspective. Their needs are just different enough that it will require some serious dev work and I'm "so very tired", haha. Everyone wants the equivalent of QuickBooks built-in to the software. I need something to bring back my enthusiasm from years ago.
Nice, glad to know I'm not totally off my rocker. Good luck! (Also I know the "so very tired" feeling well.)
Got two websites but the second one is basically a clone of the first with better visuals and better tech stack that I actually want to work on
https://aieasypic.com - 3k per month (declining cause not working on it a lot, just maintenance) https://bestphoto.ai - 2k per month (increasing cause of better SEO)
Now trying my hand at an actual non-consumer product, not that b2b but something to make making ads easy because that’s where I find myself getting stuck on when doing fb ads or TikTok organic stuff : https://admakeai.com
It doesn't seem like any of the photos on bestphoto.ai load for me. This is on Firefox on Mac; does seem to work in Safari.
Building version 3 of a front-end SaaS application that services proprietary models for analyzing securities, events/catalysts, etc. I am taking what I have learned from 5 years of users asking questions and basically redoing everything.
This version will hopefully provide a bot free / pump free replacement for iHub, StockTwits, Twitter, etc. to people who manage money professionally or otherwise.
Assuming I get more free time to finish it that is.
Version 2 is live here.
www.gravityanalytica.com
The two products Chat and Horizon both make more than $500/month individually.
This is a just side project. I run a family office.
For those of you who are in your 20s keep it up. In your 40s getting free time can be a real challenge.
> www.gravityanalytica.com
no ssl?
For projects of this size, what legal/financial structure do you use? Particularly of interest for what Australians do, but any stories would be good.
When I've looked, a sole trader with liability and cyber insurance seemed reasonable (maybe $2k/yr), but a Pty ltd with the same would probably be safer ($5k/yr).
It all comes down to what the risk of being sued is though. I'm sure selling games wouldn't require this.
Microlandia - The Brutally honest city builder.
I started making this game several years ago, sporadically, abandoning it for month-long periods, but after posting it here a few times in Show NH I got the encouragement I needed to publish it to itch.io, then to Steam.
This month it crossed the $500/month mark by far, but it was a long road to get it to a state where it can actually be an interesting enough game to make money.
https://microlandia.city
I'm curious, what happens if you allow much more unlimited zoning to begin with in a city? Do you have ways to model decreasing regulatory burden for new development?
Making almost exactly $500/mo on an Anki extension that embeds AI / text to speech / image gen deeply into the app, allowing you to generate example sentences, audio, explanations, etc, for whatever you’re studying, in bulk.
https://smart-notes.xyz
Still holding off on the show HN post for now; have a few more features and QoL things I’d like to add first.
It’s been an enormously gratifying project and I hear from users all around the world who have feature requests for their specific use cases. Easily the most fun I’ve had working on a project.
It looks like a great idea. Kudos on the work so far!
May I ask which channels / approaches benefited you the most in terms of reaching your first paying customers?
Thank you!
Almost all of my customers so far have been directly from the central Anki plugin directory. I made sure to use lots of SEO friendly terms / buzzwords in the title so that when people ctrl+f for AI or ChatGPT, they find mine.
My next steps I think are to better incentivize leaving reviews so that it ranks higher on the add-on list, and then launch it on various language learning subreddits. There’s a whole cottage industry of Anki influencers on YouTube as well (absurd, I know), so that’s another channel eventually.
My product NumeroMoney (https://www.numeromoney.com) is the first I've built that makes over $500, and it's grown surprisingly quickly. I built it because I needed something simpler that the existing solutions I could find for understanding our families spending (YNAB etc were geared too much towards budgeting). It helps users to import and categorize bank statement transactions in a way that makes it really easy to make decisions about household spending.
Hey! Late to the party, but a friend and I have been plugging away at CineQuote https://cinequote.net a daily movie quote guessing game that uses audio quotes.
We've been running the web site for a few years now (just past 1000 daily games!) and we just launched iOS and Android apps in the last couple months! Its been quite a learning experience for sure!
This is fun! Where do you get the audio from?
Thanks!
We handcraft each game my pulling audio quotes from different media available on the internet and also from the original sources. We also have a workflow to pull clips from clip.cafe via their API (with a workflow process to extract the audio only and generate subtitles and other cool stuff) but we usually still trim and normalize those by hand too.
I run a couple projects, only one makes money at the moment:
SFX Engine: https://sfxengine.com/ - ~1.2k MRR
I launched another two and hoping to get these scaled up as well
Sparkpod.ai: https://sparkpod.ai/ - $20 MRR
Disstrack AI: https://aidisstrackgenerator.com/ - $0 MRR
https://www.jamp-audio.com I started making audio plugins for iOS 2 years ago. I'm making about $300/month.
I run a side project n0c0de.com [1] ... thats no-code with two zeroes
I develop apps for experienced operators who want to start their own business.
It averages well over $500 / month in side income. Typically about $3-5K depending on the amount of time I have.
I spent perhaps a decade pushing going independent due to inability to get a product ready. I ended up learning the skills and now to solve that pain point for others.
[1]: https://www.n0c0de.com
bewCloud [0] is a simpler alternative to Nextcloud if you don't use a lot of its customization options.
This year I got a grant from NLNet [1] for it, which averaged to over $500 / month. I also have some customers for it, but not close to that at all, which I'd rather have, as more sustainable way to keep improving it.
Still, I'm quite grateful to NLNet!
[0]: https://bewcloud.com
[1]: https://nlnet.nl/project/bewCloud/
I run a podcast app for flip phones called PodLP. Revenue hasn’t always been $500/month, but averaged over the past 5 years it’s been over $500. It’s been primarily from sponsorships (podcasts get featured on the homepage to get more listeners), although next year looks more uncertain so I’m looking at other avenues.
https://podlp.com
https://codeapprove.com
Basically it’s a code review UI on GitHub for ex-Googlers who miss Critique.
I wrote a book about modern HTML & CSS to create website with as little javascript as possible. I made almost 5k$ the first month, now I do 300-500$/month with it. Here’s the link: https://theosoti.com/you-dont-need-js/
I am the co-creator of ShoppingScraper. Convert an EAN / GTIN to pricing information, product specs, content or image. API-based and rapid with pricing and barcode data.
The website needs some love, but the webapp is going well.
https://shoppingscraper.com/features
This year I've been working on AccelPrompt--> https://accelprompt.xyz , a tool to generate instructions for different AIs, but I haven't been able to monetize it yet :(
Started Find Boxes in 2024, it's a project and inventory management tool for audio visual companies. Took longer than expected to get the first customers, but I'm a bit above $300 a month now. I hope to cross the $500 a month mark sometime next year.
https://www.findboxes.co
This app looks really cool. Did you developed also an ios app for it? It would be much easier to do all the task in an app.
I run an iOS app! Half Lemons. It finds recipes using your ingredients. (https://halflemons.com)
It's freemium. And offers lifetime purchases and monthly sub. Will experiment with adding an annual sub soon.
Just over $500 in subscriptions right now since posting on HackerNews and Reddit.
This is mostly because of the posts gaining high engagement and people signing up and subscribing. Many also migrating from other apps.
Expecting the revenue to go down next month
https://onlyrecipeapp.com
Cool app but i feel 35$/year is a cost that is not justified for me, specially that i can extract the ingredients and the steps of any recipe from a video recipe in chatgpt, and then save it in notes.
I built a SaaS for photographers specifically designed for latam’s market: https://pickyour.photos/
Been running 1.8 years, current mrr is ~$790 usd.
Current costs are around ~$190 usd monthly
- vps: $69 - cloudflare: $25 - r2: ~$50 - crisp: $45 - customer.io $1
Save For Later – an AI-powered bookmark manager that resurfaces what you save
Link: https://saveforlater.pro
does negative 500 count?
sure, its just about turnover :-D
wow i did not think of that! here is my project EasyAnalytica.com - Build dashboards from google sheets, CSV files.
What you have looks like an "up & running product" - great! How many paying customers do you have, if I may ask?
https://stockevents.app
Created around 2019 and have recently moved it from side project to main job.
https://stockevents.app
Created around 2019 and have recently moved it from side project to main job.
Right about $500 now, down from $5K at peak
AI assistant in your iMessage group chats https://olly.bot
How did you make a bot that can send iMessages? I want to make a service on my Mac that can send notifications through iMessage. (preferable multiple chats, different topics for different notification types)
seems to be a few apps that can do this, but you need a mac to do it
https://github.com/linjunpop/imessage https://github.com/danikhan632/iMessage-API
My friends and I are working on Norma. It helps you curate a dataset that captures as much signal as possible for model training.
See norma.grouplabs.ca
Can we establish a convention?
If you sold $500p/m and had costs of zero, then you made $500.
If you sold $500p/m and had costs of $450 p/m then you made $50p/m
I know the saas people have high margins, but some of the commenters clearly have a much lower margin
Angry Scam Altman noises who "made" 20 Billion by spending 100 Billion
Made PrivacyPolicyURL.com => get a live URL for all the forms asking for it in under a minute.
My parter and I made a fun erotic story generator called Smitten (https://smittenstories.com ) during the valentine's day weekend as a way for couples to spice things up.
Initially it was running on donations, but with model costs rising we had to add a paywall. I have a full time job but it's still fun to run this on the side by spending few hours on it over the weekends!
I've been helping with a small portfolio of Slack apps under the brand https://happybara.io, including Nightowl (multi-DM broadcast for Slack, like BCC for email), and Channitor (channel management & auto-archiving).
It's been a really interesting journey making mistakes & learning from them. One mistake that made me feel foolish: I assumed no one would ever pay for one of the apps. A paywall was added "just in case" -> boom, customers almost immediately started signing up. I felt incredibly silly after that, especially for the number of times I've read on HN and similar sites "your work is valuable" and "charge more".
This is cool! I looked into building a slack app myself, I'm curious: how are you liking the slack store and its policies? Was starting out difficult? I vaguely remember having to have your app installed in multiple workspaces already before being listed in the store
Courses and books about Python, Pandas, XGBoost, Visualization, and soon AI
I sell the canvas space within https://www.minigenitals.com to private parties looking to settle scores. Between the coffee's I'm bought and averaging out the monthly "ad buys", it's just over $500/month, usually 3 or 4 $50 2-day campaigns a month and then a bunch of satisfied fans, apparently ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ We recently had to reset the coffee account due to phishing, but otherwise it's been a riot. I think there are a few backed up in the IA
I sell photographic prints. A breakdown of income and costs for this year can be found here: https://leejo.github.io/2025/11/01/print_costs/
TL;DR? It's a grind, an absolute grind.
Trendyzip.com Home sale trends to help buyers make informed decisions. A basic report is $5
I'm at year 1.5 and built this software for making small art books
https://zine.baby
The goal is to make physical books. It's still early days, but fun to see what people are creating.
I see no indications of any revenue?
Disclaimer: I haven't make any money, YET.
I recently open-sourced my first ever tool! and I'm super excited about it guys
It's an HTTP request replay and comparison tool in Go. You can replay real traffic, compare multiple environments, detect broken endpoints, generate HTML/JSON reports, and analyze latency
It’s currently at v0.4, so I’d love any feedback, suggestions, or ideas for improvements. (Be gentle, I haven’t used Go professionally, however it’s my main language for personal projects )
https://github.com/kx0101/replayer
Here's the landing page too: https://www.replayer.online/
I think you should better post this separately, e.g. as “Show HN”. It’s off-topic for this thread (hence, I assume, the downvotes).
probably, yeah. That's okay :)