Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell

I'm selling browser extensions on the App Store, but the main money-maker is currently https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-twitter

When Twitter killed off third-party apps, the browser extension I'd been developing ever since "New Twitter" launched in 2019 suddenly became one of the few ways to make Twitter more tolerable to use, and the number of users of the Chrome version tripled from 30k to 90k in a fortnight (mostly in Japan).

When they confirmed third-party apps had been killed on purpose and jacked up the price of the API to discourage new ones, I started selling it on the App Store the next week and it's made more than $500 per month ever since.

Before the end of the year I'm hoping to roll out a single paid subscription which works across all my extensions when you sign up for it, which enables syncing settings across all your browsers and devices, unlocks additional subscriber-only features, and will enable creation of extension-specific APIs if there are future features which require one. Between Control Panel for Twitter and https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-youtube I have ~390,000 users, so, y'know, please like and subscribe.

That will _eventually_ include my free Hacker News extension ( https://soitis.dev/comments-owl-for-hacker-news ) so things like new comment counts, user notes and muted users can sync across every browser and device you use Hacker News on.

If that takes off, I hope to make the App Store versions free and figure out how to give anyone who bought it 3 months of the subscription per extension they bought as a thank-you. If anyone's done something like that before, I'd be happy to hear about it via any communication method in my HN profile!

I started running AI workshops this year [1], stemming from work that I do teaching at a non-profit in New York. [2]

I've spent a lot of my life teaching people, but for the last 2-3 years I've been fascinated with AI. I'm not in the "Sam Altman is building a digital god" camp, but I've seen how amazing AI is by watching people who have no technical background build products, launch their own businesses, and change their lives in under 9 months. It's pretty remarkable what's already possible, but not everybody knows or believes that.

I set out to find a niche when it comes to teaching: I make AI more accessible to regular people. A lot of what's written about AI is unbelievable — either because people say AI can do things that it cannot or because people say that AI cannot do things that are already possible today.

I've been bridging that divide one workshop at a time. They've spread very well by word of mouth because there are no tricks here. People bring an idea that they want to build, and we do that in three hours by learning the mental models and communication skills necessary to work with AI in a short period of time.

I've had a few workshops every month since I started in April, which is remarkable as an indie who's been trying to earn a living by helping people. I'm grateful to my friend who sat down with me for what became my first workshop, and helped me start this new line of business.

It's very gratifying to hear a PM with great ideas tell me "I have a new hobby that I can't put down". That's what I mean when I say I'm making AI accessible — people are this close to manifesting the ideas in their head the way programmers have been able to for decades — they just may need a little bit of guided learning.

[1]: https://build.ms/ai [2]: https://pursuit.org

Manabi Reader - learn Japanese by reading

More than $500/month. It currently sustains my full-time focus

https://reader.manabi.io

I quit my job a couple years back to work on this app full-time, as well as its companion flashcard app, Manabi Flashcards. The goal is to help you learn through immersion and eventually replace some of your flashcard reviews time with reading (once I finish auto-reviews for flashcards)

What's special about it? Manabi Reader became popular as an Japanese-focused alternative to services like LingQ in that it locally tracks and analyzes all the words and kanji you read and study. It shows you which words are new and which you're currently learning via flashcards, so you can easily find content that suits your level and see what flashcards to prioritize adding.

It also passively accumulates an on-device (and in your personal iCloud) corpus of example sentences from your reading. It’s also one of few ways to mine sentences including pitch accent directly into Anki on iPhone.

I had built this part-time while working over many years (starting with flashcards and then the reader app) but going full-time gave me the time to do a full rewrite: SwiftUI, native iOS + macOS, and an offline-first architecture that syncs with iCloud and my server in the background.

Although it has a companion SRS algorithm (FSRS) flashcard app, it's also excellent for mining Anki cards. This works with AnkiMobile on iOS and AnkiConnect on desktop.

You can use it like a web browser for the web, or subscribe to RSS feeds. It comes with a bunch of curated content by level. Recently I added EPUB support, pitch accents, and note-taking with todos.

I'm now almost done adding a manga mode via Mokuro, and Netflix/streaming video support via realtime captioning of audio streams.

To scale this with UGC/influencer market I need to make it more beginner friendly. Currently it assumes you can read kana at least.

I built and run several SaaS platforms:

- https://dave-bot.com -> a full-stack AI platform where you can generate videos, images, music, code, 3d objects with frontier Gen AI models.

- https://headsnap.io -> a platform that you can generate images of yourself based on 4 selfies.

- https://quantiq.live -> a service providing financial and historical data for stocks, as well as government trades.

- https://aivestor.tech -> an AI agent that picks small/midcap stocks and trades them using Alpaca API. It uses Reddit, news, polymarket, Google Trends and many other data sources to take investment decisions.

- @Polyglot_lingua_bot -> a voice-enabled Telegram-based bot that can help you learn new languages.

- https://select.supply -> a directory of carefully-curated and well-crafted products.

All of those allowed me to quit my day job and live a comfortable and flexible life. I still invest time in maintenance and adding new features, but I love coding, marketing and everything that comes with promoting and selling a SaaS (and I also have a serious addiction for Stripe notifications).

On top of that, I developed my own software agency where I help clients build and scale software (https://bitheap.ch).

I'm building a book recommendation app that tries to make it fun to explore books through what other people loved to read -> https://shepherd.com/

Some examples of pages we've built over the years using all the interviews we do with authors: https://shepherd.com/bboy/2025 https://shepherd.com/bookshelf/authoritarianism https://shepherd.com/best-books/if-you-want-to-be-a-mathematician

And in the process of bringing on a co-founder and building a full desktop/mobile app so you can track what you are reading, what you loved, and we can use that data to deeply personalize your recommendations (as I am frustrated with Goodreads as I don't think they even try to do this well).

https://building.shepherd.com/roadmap/ *early beta coming in late January

Fun to work on :)