Ask HN: How much have you made from your side project in 2016 and what is it?
An open Ask HN community consultation from 2016 where @chirau convened hundreds of developers and bootstrappers to share real experiences, hard numbers, and tactics.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Participants share raw revenue figures, churn rates, and stack decisions that corporate PR never publishes.
Recurring answers reveal that distribution, not coding skill, is almost universally the rate-limiting step in developer businesses.
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.
CATEGORY Ask HN Roundtables →
HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 26 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 7 comments
I've made just over $6,000 this year from https://swingtradebot.com - my site which allows people to find and track stocks based on technical analysis signals.
That revenue is about 50/50 from Adsense and subscriptions. I made the site freemium in May and subscriptions have become the majority of the revenue the last couple of months. It's currently doing about $1,400/month -- ~$900 from subscriptions and the rest from ads.
Made roughly $300 so far this year from carbon ads on my project sites:
http://projects.lukehaas.me/css-loaders/ http://projects.lukehaas.me/scrollify/
Instagram follow bot that uses machine learning. http://www.sequbot.com
$450 Released this month though.
Net loss in hosting fees.
But hey, it's not even close to being done.