Ask HN: Those making $1,000+/month on side projects – what did you make?
It can be a SaaS app, a mobile app, or any side project that is netting you recurring revenue.
An open Ask HN community consultation from 2015 where @tagabek 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 ★ 52 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 31 comments
I would guess that not many are making a $1,000 a month on side projects. Most of my friends have side projects where they make $100-$300, but when they get to over $500 they consider making that the primary project.
Some games make that but you have to continue to update them or they loose their ability to continue to sell, so it's misleading when people say "I make $1500 a month from my games" they should also say "I spend a couple hours a week making sure they are updated to the new versions".
But you may already know that.
I will follow you're question to see if you get much response. I would love to be surprised!
I built Premium Ghost Theme marketplace http://www.gtheme.io/ to sell premium ghost themes. I designed most of the themes because I have chicken and egg problem. Now I get about $100-$300/m revenue.
Most people still dont know what is Ghost https://ghost.org/ yet. It is CMS that like Wordpress, but built on NodeJS.
EDIT: Added what is Ghost
$2-300 per quarter from affiliate sales from a vinyl record shop that is linked to from http://soundshelter.net
It's completely automated so any time spent on it is time I want to spend (other than a few user queries).
Should really put up some Adsense but don't want to piss of the loyal users.
I (still) make >1000 on my watermarking windows program at www.watermark-image.com - yes an old skool installer that you dowbload :)
I am using the money to stairstep (as Rob Walling talks about) into the SaaS world with my sleep and happiness improving way to work called TimeBlock (http://timeblock.com)
I wrote a book about the Meteor JavaScript framework, which is available for free, but I also sell a video training series that's based on the book: http://meteortips.com