Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2018 – Show and tell
It seems this question hasn't been asked for some time, so I'd be interested hear what new (and old) ideas have come up.
An open Ask HN community consultation from 2018 where @folli 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 ★ 227 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 151 comments
This is a hardware project I started when I was a senior in college. U2F Zero, a open source U2F token / two factor authentication device.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01L9DUPK6 https://conorpp.com/designing-and-producing-2fa-tokens-to-sell-on-amazon
Brings in around $500-$1000 per month of revenue (when in stock haha). I started just to learn how to lay out a circuit board and make my own embedded device, just kind of took off.
Using the U2F protocol is nice, since it's a standard and the PC side infrastructure is all there for the users to use it. I just have to do the hardware development :)
Also, I'm working on a new U2F token. It supports FIDO2 (password replacement protocol, upgrade to U2F), NFC, USB-C, and will have a nice case. If you're interested, sign up here, we'll be releasing more news soon :)
https://solokeys.com/
http://omgenomics.com/circa Circa is an easy-to-use tool for building circos plots with genomics data. I built the visualization piece (and most of the UI) with D3.js and made it into a desktop app with Electron. Initially sold it for $25 per user (one-time cost), which made about $750 a month. Then some professors told me it was way too cheap, so I increased the price to $100. Since then, it has made about $1,500 every month for the last year. This week I started to add some new features and will soon make some more demo videos to see if I can increase that number. :) I think it has worked this well so far because building circos plots is a well-known painful problem in the genomics field. And it was one that I had experienced myself during my PhD work. I was surprised at how many academics actually are willing to pay for software, but still unsure how big that market actually is and how much of it I am already covering. The nice thing about a tiny niche like this is that when you Google "circos", Circa's tutorial and demo videos show up on the first page.
I’m a full time developer but own a gym. By accident! I went to take over a building as office space that was a liquidated gym. Signed the lease and the day before we moved in the owner called and said we can’t remove the equipment as it was all put in before the stairs. I asked a lot of questions about why the gym didn’t work, had already seen the equipment in there and did some negotiating on purchasing the kit, knowing I could still convert an area to offices. The gyms main failure was due to the cost of staff. So I fully automated everything, door access, lights, aircon, TVs etc etc. Built a membership system. Making it a fully automated unmanned gym! We then recruited a freelance personal trainer who does all the inductions in return for advertising and doing PT in our facility with no charge. 2 years in and it’s making £4,000 profit a month with minimal costs. Now looking to buy the building. Gym: https://180fitness.co.uk Me: https://roybarber.com
Probably not what you're asking, but my side project is working on software projects for a couple local businesses. I work about 12 hours per week on the side at $150 per hour so I make about $7,200 per month.
Having W2 and 1099 income like this is advantageous as well. First, I max out my social security tax at my main employer which means my side income is social security tax free. Second, I max out my 401k employee contribution of $18,500 at my main employer. I then have an Individual 401k with Vanguard where I take about 20% of my profits and deposit that as the employer portion which lowers my federal taxes substantially. I take a good portion of what's left and deposit that in a 529 account for my kids which my state gives a tax deduction for that on state taxes.
My smaller client was just a friend that I met through my kids' school. My larger client I met while studying for a programming certification at a baseball clinic my oldest son attended. A guy who owned a local business saw me with a thick book and approached me with, "Are you in IT?"
I believe that in Poland you cannot get a normal programmer's job after studies at universities. New programmers have such big lacks of knowledge that it cost really great amount of money and time to employers to teach them how to code properly. I started teaching people C++ in January 2018. I choose only those, who have basics of programming. I do not teach from scratch, because there are many such companies. I teach programmers tools (git, make, cmake, vim), scrum, exceptions, objective C++, STL, memory management, testing and TDD, Modern C++ (C++11/14/17), good programming practices, templates, recruitment tips. After the second edition of my course, I started earning over 8k PLN/month, which is over 2k USD/month. I spend only about 10h a week on teaching and running my business as a side project. I teach in Wroclaw, Poland. From the next year, I plan to make it a full-time job (it means 20h a week for me ;)) and prepare some good online courses. http://coders.school