Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2022 – 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 2022 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 Pandemic Bubble (2020–2022)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 6 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 1 comments
I built KTool (https://ktool.io) — it allows you to forward web articles, newsletters and RSS feeds to your Kindle.
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I did a Show HN 4 months ago[1].
The reason I started KTool was to spend less time on computer screens, and more on e-ink Kindle. I was afraid of going blind.
After 4 months improving KTool, it now becomes a tool to help you combat doom-scrolling. Instead of mindlessly scrolling the web, I deliberately send interesting articles to my Kindle.
Recently, I added newsletter & RSS support, it's 100% automated now.
My favorite source of content is Hacker News RSS[2], Stratechery[3], Indie Hacker Newsletters[4] and a few other Substack newsletters.
I can enjoy reading HN latest stories or my fav authors' latest pieces on my Kindle without spending hours browsing on my computer.
I just reached $580 MRR today (Dec 31st)
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32637996
[2]: https://hnrss.github.io
[3]: https://stratechery.com
[4]: https://www.indiehackers.com/newsletter
I built OnlineOrNot (https://onlineornot.com) - it's a hosted Status Page, with built-in Uptime Monitoring. It supports:
* Custom domains
* Private Status Pages (password protection)
* Automatically posting incidents to your status page based on uptime monitoring (either using our monitoring, or Uptime Robot integration - more integrations coming soon!)
* Subscribing to incident updates via Email
Our uptime monitoring supports websites, web apps, and APIs, and can send you alerts via:
* Email
* SMS (BYO Twilio account)
* Webhooks
* Slack/Discord
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As the 200th uptime monitoring service, folks often ask me what makes OnlineOrNot different - and they often find the answer disappointing: me.
I've worked on the web for Atlassian and Cloudflare, I've seen what works and doesn't work for self-serve web apps. So OnlineOrNot has:
- docs written in clear English that aren't out of date, and load fast
- a modern, responsive web UI with errors that don't make you feel dumb
- uptime monitoring for websites, web apps, and APIs that Just Works
Not your typical side project but my book, Junior to Senior, has been averaging over $500/month in sales since it was published back in October of this year.
I've also been growing my newsletter, Beginner.dev, to help reach my target audience for the book and teach them the importance of soft-skills for software engineers.
I also have a job board for junior software engineering roles in the works to add even more value for the book's target audience.
book: https://www.holloway.com/b/junior-to-senior
newsletter: https://newsletter.beginner.dev/
MesoSim: Advanced Options Backtester - https://portal.deltaray.io
Put it together while I was learning about Options Trading and manual backtesting was very tedious. It made me better understand options, develop and validate strategies and now also enables users to iterate quickly on trading system development on SPX, BTCUSD and ETHUSD options.
For example trades see these posts: - https://blog.deltaray.io/boxcar-trade - https://blog.deltaray.io/boxcar-ng-an-optimized-boxcar
We have been reading these $500/month posts year after year and recently we have been holding back on launching our own as well. Recently we finally decide to just went in after months of working on it. It is called MessageDuck (https://www.messageduck.com) which was built while we were looking for a good solution for SMS data marketing.
We built this after we noticed that there was not much good solution except one which is quite pricey called MailCharts SMS. We are still working on it and we also have a code YC that you can use for 10% off our Pro Plan.
Hopefully, we can reach $500 by 2023 and we can Show and Tell as well.