Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

1

Lunar.fyi

Building and selling macOS apps is a pretty good niche to be in right now. I escaped my stressful corporate job 1 year ago and I’ve been living comfortably since then from app revenue only. I’m making between $3.5k and $9k per month with https://lunar.fyi/ and the smaller apps I create at https://lowtechguys.com/ It’s not much for some parts of the world. But I’m well enough from this that I even took the time to build a small calendar app (https://lowtechguys.com/grila) from which all the funds will go to my brother’s college costs so he can stop working 12h/day jobs. Before this I tried creating paid web services but none took off. I realized I actually don’t use any indie web product after 8 years of professional coding. I’m only using web products from big companies like Google, fly.io, Amazon etc. Desktop apps on the other hand, most that I use and love are made by single developers. With the ascent of Apple Silicon, and the ease of SwiftUI, this has the potential of bringing a modest revenue while also being more fulfilling than a corporate job. In case you’re curious how the code looks for something like that, here’s a small open-source app that I built in a single (long) day, which has proven to be useful enough that people want to pay for it: https://github.com/alin23/Clop.

#Mac #Utilities #Productivity 79 social mentions

2

rcmd

I also made tens of dollars a month with https://lowtechguys.com/rcmd for the first few months ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The good thing is that usually you just keep growing from this. Now it’s making $1k per month, mostly because of sharing it with the world and implementing recurrent annoyances shared by users. It’s important to have a way for users to contact you. I love Formspark.io for that, just slap a contact form on the app website and emails will start coming.

#Mac #Productivity #Developer Tools 48 social mentions

3

Carrd

For simple one-page presentation websites, try https://carrd.co In my experience, knowing CSS is 90% of making a pretty and informative page. HTML is mostly just h1 for title, h2 for subtitle, div for groups and p for copy text. I don’t like writing neither HTML nor CSS so my websites are written in Plim with Tailwind classes for styling. Here’s a snippet that defines the icon on the https://lowtechguys.com/clop page <pre><code> section#hero.min-w-[100vw].flex-center.flex-col.relative.pb-20.

#Personal Website #Single Page Websites #Website Builder 222 social mentions

4

Noiseblend

My most ambitious web project was https://noiseblend.com which is a web app for discovering music on Spotify. It’s a next.js + React slow and memory hungry mess [1] which could have been static HTML with some JS for the dynamic bits. Experience taught me to keep it simple nowadays, but I had to go through the Noiseblend mistakes first. The stack is Python with Sanic for the backend, Postgres for db and Redis for cache. That’s what remained after removing all the unnecessary services I implemented because I thought they were paramount: high availability, data locality, time series databases, performance monitoring, alerts etc. Forget about those until you start making money on the product. The biggest disadvantage a web service has over a desktop app is that you have to keep it up. No matter what, you have a server to manage and make sure it keeps responding. That worry doesn’t exist on offline desktop apps. The other is finding the market for it. Noiseblend didn’t have a market, and it being dependent on Spotify didn’t allow me to ask for money unless I did something more. That’s another problem, avoid creating functionality that depends heavily on big companies. I thought about “pivoting” and turning it into a playlist building tool for DJs. I added filtering songs by key and mode (e.g. A minor) and asked a few people if they would use such a thing. Turns out that they use a semi-offline desktop app [2] that already does that and is much faster and powerful. <i>Oh well, at least now I have a way to find songs to improvise on with my Kaval and guitar.</i> From my observations, people are reluctant on paying for websites. I guess they don’t feel as “owned” as a desktop app. [1] https://github.com/Noiseblend/ui/blob/master/pages/artists.coffee [2] https://mixedinkey.com/camelot-wheel/.

#Music #Music Streaming #Audio & Music 4 social mentions

5

Video Hub App

I have mild success at $500/month by selling my $5 <i>Video Hub App</i> (though I donate $3.50 of every purchase to a <i>cost-effective</i> charity). This is averaging 100 sales per month for several years now. https://videohubapp.com/ - though I also have it open source: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App.

#Video #File Manager #Video & Movies 25 social mentions

6

Productivity Power Tools

This is a great post! I have very similar thoughts! I haven't escaped the corporate job yet, but the pandemic and subsequent layoff scares have convinced me that bootstrapping a business is a good way to take back some economic control. I'm working on DiffLens to improve how developers see diffs of their code changes. DiffLens uses abstract syntax trees to make diffs more focused and understandable. It's free at the moment while we iterate on it and get the word out. I think it's the better way to view source code changes. If someone is interested in checking it out, see https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=DiffLens.difflens . It works within VS Code and supports JS, TS, CSS and text diffs. JSON support is coming soon!

#Regular Expressions #Programming Tools #Development 519 social mentions

7

Dash for macOS

Thanks! I only learn by building small ideas and looking into the Apple documentation through Dash (https://kapeli.com/dash) and searching "how to do X" on Google. So I can't recommend material from first-hand experience. But I've heard good things about this university video course: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9VJ9OpT-IPSM6dFSwQCIl409gNBsqKTe On a first glance it seems to cover a lot of stuff I use regularly in SwiftUI, but also some videos are quite long. It depends if you like learning by watching, or by doing.

#Software Development #Productivity #API Tools 91 social mentions