ROUNDTABLES ★ 29 upvotes 2016

Ask HN: How much do you spend on your side project

The Founder's Submission

Direct narrative and submission text authored by @shanwang on Hacker News:

I mean for side projects that's not making any profit. I'm setting a budget of $800/year, including hosting cost like heroku, domain name purchase, etc.

If you have multiple projects, can you please say the average and max cost.

Retrospective Overview & Key Insights

Distilled analysis of the business dynamics, operational challenges, and strategic takeaways:

An open Ask HN community consultation from 2016 where @shanwang convened hundreds of developers and bootstrappers to share real experiences, hard numbers, and tactics.

Core Principles for Independent Builders:
1
Participants share raw revenue figures, churn rates, and stack decisions that corporate PR never publishes.
2
Recurring answers reveal that distribution, not coding skill, is almost universally the rate-limiting step in developer businesses.
3
Practical recommendations on bookkeeping, payment gateways (Stripe vs Paddle), and freelance-to-product transitions.
Community Debate Themes:

Hundreds of active indie hackers contributed case studies, pricing heuristics, and pitfalls to avoid when moonlighting on side projects.

Community Discussions & Critical Reviews

High-signal perspectives, counter-arguments, and peer founder insights debated on Hacker News (30 total discussions):

MI @mindcrime Peer Contributor

Hmm... hosting costs are around $150.00 / month. Github account is $50.00 / month. Hoovers subscription is $100 / month or so. Co-working at American Underground @ Main is $200 / month. Domain names are probably $100.00 / year counting the occasional purchase of some speculative new domain.

So, whatever all that adds up to. We don't have any customer revenue yet, so I sustain things out of my "day job" salary.

NE @NetStrikeForce Peer Contributor

I'm currently spending about £50 on server costs and an average of £200 on advertising, which will end soon as I'm switching to other methods.

I also spend money on designers and developers. Even for a side project, there are places I don't have time / skills to go to :) and I rely on external -paid- help.

SO @soared Peer Contributor

All of mine are profitable or have been stopped.

Couple websites net ~$1000 adsense a year, after $8/mo hosting costs.

Smart mirror raised $4k (lol) seed from university accelerator.

Personal website somehow got a random donation that payed for hosting.

CO @contingencies Peer Contributor

I don't look at projects in terms of profit, I look at them in terms of interest and thus motivation, learning potential, and possibly maybe way down the line something like profit. The most valuable input is always time, money is pretty much irrelevant.

TH @theknarf Peer Contributor

Domain costs, now a day I use github pages for hosting so I usually don't have to pay for hosting the domain. A subscription for Photoshop. Sometimes I pay for other software. Might have to start paying for IntelliJ soon.

HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 29 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 30 comments
TOPICS & TECH STACK: