Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2017 – Show and tell

I make over 700$ per month through patreon for my open source work, primarily https://github.com/ory/hydra . Hydra started as a side project for a work-for-hire project. After getting bashed by people for it being trash (it was, mostly due to bad dependencies but also due to bad architecture), I rewrote it (and the libraries enabling it) and now it's one of the go-to services for getting an OAuth2 server up and running. I am very stubborn and spent a ton of time on auth* questions while building other projects, and it seems like people like my approaches to it! :)

It's come so far now that I'm starting to consider this my full-time thing (I'm in the final stages of completing my MSc computer science) and I'm currently running evaluation on an API security platform based on that technology. Basically, I spend most of my time on it and I even got a small team helping me - but it's not what earns my living at the moment.

Before that I gathered a lot of experience from running and building https://en.serlo.org/ which is basically a Wikipedia for learning (I built the whole CMS from scratch) that serves over 1m MAUs in Germany (the english page is very sparse, most of it is on https://de.serlo.org ) and is thus on the most popular learning platforms in Germany. The company behind it is an NGO (= no profits) I cofounded and the platform is ad-free and doesn't cost anything. We get money through donations and other funds.

It's an exciting journey, I'm now at a point where I need to figure out how to actually make money on the web that doesn't come through donations and goodwill, but I think I can do it - why not, right?

By the way, you may also like the WYSIWYG editor I wrote - I also plan a static site generator based on it with a themeforest-y market place. Feel free to check those out:

* https://www.ory.am/sites/ * https://github.com/ory/editor

ps: It took me almost 2 years to get to 700$ at patreon and most of it comes from one sponsorship I'm very glad of. Their CTO texted me one day because he saw hydra on HN frontpage and he works in the identity space.

https://wanqu.co - A San Francisco engineer (me) curates 5 English articles on tech & startup for Chinese makers everyday.

Started on August 6, 2014. It's a side project of mine. I built a website (Django), a native iOS app (Swift), a native Android app (React Native), and some automation tools. It brings around $1200/month via iOS in-app-purchase, sponsorship, affiliate links etc. I keep a full time job while doing this content curation thing at night (2~3 hours per day). So far, I've curated 5000+ articles and I've written over 1 million Chinese characters for comments -- The Chinese translation of all Harry Potter books consist of 2 million Chinese characters :)

Over 3 years, it accumulates over 140,000 followers across 10 content distribution channels as of today (Sep 1, 2017), including iOS push notifications, android push notifications, Weibo, Twitter, chrome push notifications ...

It's in Chinese, so it's pretty much unknown to the English-speaking world. Hacker News and Product Hunt are English only. Non-English projects are not allowed :( I hope my side project can fill the gap between Chinese-speaking makers and the English-dominant tech world. I believe doing good is the best business model.

Checkout my Indie Hackers interview (in English, of course): https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/wanqu

https://hostedapachesolr.com - since 2013, started with intention of just hosting my own search indexes (since cheap shared hosting didn't allow java apps to be installed), then ballooned from there. Minimal maintenance, almost every process is automated with Ansible + Jenkins + tiny bits of PHP glue code.

https://servercheck.in - since 2012, same as Solr, I started it to do SMS messages for my own site outages... then realized I could scale it easily using cheap ~$10/year VPSes and Node.js, currently have a few hundred clients monitoring ~1000 servers and websites.

https://www.ansiblefordevops.com - book I started writing during the process of automating both of the above SaaS products—and now the book generates more monthly revenue than both of the above :)

I've written extensively about all three projects, but continue to devote more time to the Ansible for DevOps book / project. Here are some posts with history/reflection on self-publishing: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/search/self-publishing

I launched an app for Shopify about a year ago called Custom Fields: https://customfields.bonify.io

Currently it's making about $5,000 / month.

It's been a very interesting process dealing with building the app, marketing it, and dealing with support. The app is $19/mo for regular Shopify stores, and we have about 700+ total customers (only some are paying). We get A LOT of support requests for misc things and have been trying to build up a knowledge base of articles and help guides in our ZenDesk.

We have recently been running into an issue with file hosting storage fees (we allow people to upload files, no additional charge). We have a couple of Shopify stores that are costing us about $70/mo each in file hosting fees (we don't charge them extra).

I absolutely LOVE building apps for 3rd party providers. We don't really market the app, it's found organically in Shopify's app store. The first 8 months were filled with lots of little bugs needing fixing, but that has since slowed down as I've fixed things. At this point, it's a pretty stable application that doesn't require much maintenance, mostly just user support.

http://www.visaok.in/ - Since late 2016. Soft-launched in April 2017.

Made 700$ in June, been fluctuating since then, but I'm not doing it for the money though.

When I first came to America on a H1-B visa, I remember job searches were super-annoying because I'd find a position that I was a good fit for, only to find "Sorry we can't sponsor your Work Visa" in Bold H2 font. I am now an American Citizen, but even now, I find these exclusions on several popular websites like dice.com, indeed.com and even here on @whoishiring

So I decided to create this curated job board listing jobs with employers who are willing to sponsor or transfer your work visa in over 30 countries around the world. Lot of countries in Europe (ex: Germany, UK, Netherlands etc) have recently launched "Startup Visa" programs that lets entrepreneurs come to their country and live and work on exciting new technologies and eventually get permanent residency.

A new modern UI, email alerts for jobs matching your search, and a Visa application / help community site is in the works.

Meanwhile if you have feedback please shoot me an email. theblogdoctor [@] gmail