Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell
Previously asked on:
2023 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34482433
2022 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29995152
2021 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29667095
2020 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24947167
An open Ask HN community consultation from 2024 where @codebyamir 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 Post-ZIRP & AI (2023–2026)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 109 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 89 comments
I've been running OnlineOrNot (https://onlineornot.com) since early 2021 now (almost three years).
I recently wrote about how last year it grew twice as fast as I expected: https://maxrozen.com/2023-focus-single-product-pays-off
It all started because I needed a weekly report for my contracting clients to prove their web host sucked to the point where it was costing them significant money. They were paying for cheapest tier WordPress hosting at the time, and didn't believe me when I said random 5 min blocks of downtime throughout the day were adding up.
I built a dirt-simple form that takes a URL and sends a notification when the site goes down/up, with a weekly summary email. Then, I kept adding features every day, responding to customer requests and fixing bugs 2 hours at a time, even after I stopped being a contractor.
Since then I also added status pages (example: https://hackernews.onlineornot.com/) and cron job monitoring, to ensure database backups and whatnot run when I expect.
I am building https://dreamgen.com : platform for story-writing and role-play based on my own open-weight models [1][2]. Sort of alternative to NovelAI and CharacterAI. Launched November last year.
Why? I think building on top of (and using products built on top of) closed models in this space is not sustainable.
Currently the largest limiting factor, and why I am not spending on marketing just yet, is the model quality at longer contexts. This is my main focus right now, and I am in the middle of data collection for opus-v1 (which will also be released in various sizes). I also hope GPU prices will go down soon :D
It's a lot of fun, being able to work on data, models, backend and frontend all within the scope of 1 project.
[1] https://huggingface.co/dreamgen/opus-v0-7b
[2] https://huggingface.co/dreamgen/opus-v0-70b
I started SupeChoiceForm as a passive income project many years ago: https://superchoiceform.com.au/
It started as just a content site, with google Adsense. Making about $1200 per month from ~30k visits.
It kept growing in popularity over about 2 years and I finally decided it might be worth some more effort.
So I turned it into a web app that took an employee through the process of gathering/generating all the paperwork they require to provide their employer with their superfund details. Effectively just digitising the paper form process with some smart automations.
(Superannuation is the 401k of Australia, but probably more widespread as it’s mandatory)
That was 2x MVP’s ago. Last year I got two trust partners / co-founders involved and we’ve turned it into an embedded service that can drop into any payroll/hr provider.
Raised $1M and now we’re making a lot more than $1200
All because I was nervous about getting Adsense banned for no reason. So thanks google!!
I built and recently released a UI kit for Rails - https://zestui.com
Built with Phlex, styled with Tailwind with custom built Stimulus controllers.
It's got
- 25 themes
- Dark Mode
- Form Builder
- Icons
- Built in Flash Toast
- The components are responsive or have specific mobile views
- All the JS needed (Stimulus controllers) is wired up automatically
Phlex is a game changer. It is simple, powerful, intuitive and performant. I will never ever write a component as a partial/ViewComponent again.
A short video (50 seconds) showing it off: https://youtu.be/OQmDZddLtR8
It has crossed $500/month but since it's a one time purchase it is too early to tell whether it will sustain since I launched it only in December 2023.
I work as head of ML & Innovation at my day job.
On the side, as a technical consultant, I help teams to ship products with ML under the hood.
I live in Vienna, so that makes it convenient for evening calls with USA/Canada, where my three clients operate.
Usually this involves weekly 30min calls with the teams to show them shortcuts, working recipes and save time by avoiding pitfalls. Mostly around ChatGPT/Local LLMs and RAG/Business automation type of things.
I run a newsletter [1] to try extending my client base. Not very efficient yet, since all clients came through the LinkedIn [2] and personal contacts.
[1] https://abdullin.substack.com/ [2] https://www.linkedin.com/in/abdullin