Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell

1

40 Hadiths

Https://sickmartian.com/trackendar/ <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sickmartian.calendartracker">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sickmartia...</a> Trackendar, an habit tracking calendar app. Not currently monetized, got some initial traction, put ads which I promptly removed as they made the app look like shit and had some 'add ons' with which I made between 400-500 USD, I didn't get to see that money as getting an USD payment in Argentina was a PITA so the US has them now :/ All local data, so no cost except a lot of time learning 'old' android and constantly maintaining whatever google wants to change or deprecate + updating the date/time library with the latest TZ changes. Has more features that it needs or users want to learn to use like categories, themes, reports...

#Mobile Apps #Religion #Web Search 1162 social mentions

2

dddice

#Game Engine #Gaming #Online Games 29 social mentions

3

API Bakery

Bootstrapping a project generator tool for Django and Node: https://apibakery.com I expect (well, hope for) it to be making some money at some point in the future but don't worry since it's a side project and something I'm passionate about building even if it's just for fun.

#Backend Development #REST API #SaaS 24 social mentions

4

Mingle View

#Group Chat & Notifications #Video Conferencing #Phone System

5

Savory

Https://getsavory.co/ I am making a minimal Pocket/Instapaper/Pinboard replacement. It supports tags as a first-class feature and no-feed as an anti-feature.

#Bookmark Manager #Bookmarks #Productivity 4 social mentions

6

Birdfeeder

I've been working on my Twitter bookmark tool (https://getbirdfeeder.com) for the past year. I have some paying subscribers, but I mostly give that money to DigitalOcean for database and storage hosting.

#Bookmarks #Productivity #Twitter 4 social mentions

7

OKZest

Https://okzest.com My brother and I have built a tool aimed at email marketers, allowing them to create images with merge tag information on top. We are at $0 and now know why you should start marketing on day 1, this marketing stuff is hard! We have a solid MVP and there are so many possibilities to improve / expand the target market. Future versions could show a retailers best selling product and have the image dynamically change to 'low in stock', 'sold out' etc. If a retailer has multiple stores, we could show information specific to the closest store to you. We want to get some customers and let them help guide the roadmap.

#Email Marketing #CRM #Content Marketing 8 social mentions

8

Radiant

Radiant: https://getradiant.app/ Premise: Takes your Spotify and turns it into a personalised FM-style radio station, complete with a snarky, AI-powered radio presenter called Rad. Rad'll quip, read you the news and weather on the hour, announce what you've just heard and what's coming next, gives you biographical info for bands you might not be too familiar with but most importantly; Rad helps you discover new music while playing all the songs you know and love, in a smart, contextual way. Availability: iOS, Android. Price: $0 Cost to me: like 40-50 bucks a month. Why do it? I use it daily and so do many others. Great for house parties, offices, long car journeys or just your daily pilgrimage to the supermarket.

#Arcade #Music #Action 31 social mentions

9

Pioneer.app

I'm making a PaaS thingy / Docker Swarm GUI called Lunni. It helps startups, small businesses, and self-hosting enthusiasts deploy and manage apps on their own server: https://lunni.dev/ I've done a Show HN last month [1], but it didn't get any traction (well, apart from 4 upvotes!). Perhaps because I didn't really capture what the project is about. I've reached out to dang and he gave some really valuable feedback (thank you!) and encouraged me to try again, but I'm still overthinking stuff :') I've also got an email from Rishi with Pioneer [2], saying I've got a fast track to their accelerator program. I'm still looking into that but I've tried their Tournament thing and got some nice and encouraging feedback from other founders. Overall, I'm not sure where this project gets me but even if we don't get any revenue at all, the experience of working on a passion project full-time is really nice. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34068557 [2]: https://pioneer.app/.

#Startup Accelerator #Seed Accelerator #Productivity 9 social mentions

10

Laser Tweets

Very cool! You could probably sell some kind of low-effort physical product, similar to: https://shop.lasertweets.co/. I bet there's some folks who would appreciate the coasters of their favorite repos. Or, even lower effort, sell nicely-formatted digital prints of the repositories, so folks could hang them in their office.

#Social Networks #Email Marketing #CRM 2 social mentions

11

Molasses

Https://molasses.app Feature flags as a service. People use it but not necessarily making money right now.

#Productivity #A/B Testing #Software Engineering 1 social mentions

12

Simplest File Renamer

Batch rename files with your favorite text editor (and see the diff of the changes) https://yboris.dev/renamer/ -- FREE MIT Open Source: <a href="https://github.com/whyboris/Simplest-File-Renamer">https://github.com/whyboris/Simplest-File-Renamer</a>.

#File Management #Office & Productivity #Tool 4 social mentions

13

8bitnews.io

Metrik.one : https://metrik.one/ Advanced analytics for Mailchimp. It provides deep insights into subscriptions, opens, clicks and campaigns. In addition it comes with advanced segmentation based on subscriber behaviour instead demographic data. And it includes a cohort analysis, that helps to reduce inbound ad cost dramatically by not just focusing on CAC but prospect groups that actually open and click. We built it out of our own need (running https://8bitnews.io/) and target newsletter senders, who prefer data driven decision making. Instead of building the next SaaS we decided to build a desktop app. Privacy and data protection were the main drivers behind that decision. Currently in beta, but close to a release and seeking market validation.

#Tech #Game Engine #Money Transfer 6 social mentions

14

Steam Database

SteamDB: https://steamdb.info/ I've been running it for over 10 years now, it's a database of Steam games, their updates, price history, charts, and a lot more. In the early days we took monetary donations but stopped a few years in. It costs less than 100$ a month to run.

#Games #Group Chat & Notifications #Comparison 680 social mentions

15

Productivity Power Tools

TurboSearch: A MSVC extension frontend for the excellent command line utility, The Silver Searcher (Ag). https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=CaseyBanner.turbosearch Price: $12 I use this tool myself daily as my main search tool inside MSVC. I built it because I was frustrated with how slow other tools were, and before I built this I would use ag in my console instead. I've sold one copy, but I solved my own problem so I'm happy!

#Regular Expressions #Programming Tools #Development 356 social mentions

16

FeedMail

I've been using RSS-to-Email services for almost a decade but wasn't really happy with any of them. So I launched https://feedmail.org/. I never really expected to make money (and the service is priced to be very low-cost without a huge margin) but currently we are approximately breaking even (about $20 negative after 13 months). So it looks like in the long-term it will probably pay for itself. But the main thing for me is that it behaves exactly like I want (although I have already added a few features that I didn't want for other users).

#RSS #Email #SaaS 24 social mentions

17

Blogstreak

Https://blogstreak.com It's an another Notion to Blog integration service. Who can benefit from it?

#Analytics #Startups #SaaS 2 social mentions

18

Wishy.gift

Https://wishy.gift - A privacy friendly wishlist service, made for my SO after she got 4 thermoses for Christmas a year and only needed 1. Costs ~$30/mo, but is used by my entire extended family, which makes it all worth it :).

#Holidays #Wishlists #Personalized Gifting 4 social mentions

Https://litchan.com/ Link aggregator / RSS reader with real-time commenting. No plans to monetize it. I mostly built it to learn Phoenix Liveview and TailwindCSS.

#Tech #RSS Reader #RSS 2 social mentions

20

Zoom

ShareClinic: https://www.share.clinic A pandemic project that was supposed to help people post better links on social media. Meaning if you post links to content that you are providing on e.g. Zoom, it doesn't populate your listing with the open graph images and text from https://zoom.us, but you can decide how you want to decorate your post with some relevant imagery and description.

#Video Conferencing #Phone System #Group Chat & Notifications 195 social mentions

21

Boardgame Lab

For playtesting, this might be helpful: https://boardgamelab.app/.

#Game Reviews #Games #Graphic Design Software 4 social mentions

22

Posthaven

Thanks for sharing, I've found out they started https://posthaven.com/, what basically is more polished version of nofuss. What I find interesting, they sell blogging platform but don't have a blog themselves. I wonder how many blogs they're hosting and how do they acquire new customers.

#Blogging #Blogging Platform #CMS 11 social mentions

23

Lwan

Lwan: https://lwan.ws Been working on this for exactly 11 years today! It's just a webserver on the outside but it has become an umbrella for experimentation.

#Web Servers #Web And Application Servers #Application Server 1 social mentions

24

Everyone Draw

Everyone Draw: https://everyonedraw.com I created a little experiment a few years ago to see what would happen if anyone in the world could draw pixel by pixel on an infinite, shared canvas. It's attracted a small community of fans who use it to relax and practice their drawing skills. The community has spawned some breathtaking pieces of collaborative art, including a world map[1], a galaxy[2], and a magic forest[3]. There have been a few donations, but not nearly enough to cover all my costs. I'm fine running it at a loss while I have a job. This summer I plan to take some time off from full-time employment to travel the world, at which point I'll try to monetize this project to cover my travel expenses. [1] https://everyonedraw.com/1/-2564/-759.

#Digital Whiteboard #Diagrams #Idea Management 5 social mentions

25

SpaceHey

Https://spacehey.com - a MySpace-like retro social network without any tracking or algorithmic feeds. Including customizable profiles (with HTML & CSS), bulletins, and more. I started it 2 years ago and it's pretty successful with about 600k registered users so far. I really enjoy building it and looking through all the creatively customized profile pages! It's so much fun! It's currently funded with donations and merch, but it sadly doesn't cover the costs atm.

#Social Networks #Social & Communications #Social Media 76 social mentions

26

OSS Database

Looks like they typo'd, it's https://ossdatabase.com.

#Open Source #Open Source Service Discovery #Software Marketplace 5 social mentions

27

tooltipr

* Tool to create glossaries within your corporations and have them everywhere in the browser with a tooltip: https://tooltipr.com.

#Holidays #Digital Whiteboard #Games 1 social mentions

28

Imitate Email

Imitate Email: https://imitate.email A little tool for testing out email flows as you build/test apps - comes with an embedded widget so you don't have to context switch (see https://imitate.email/demo) for example. Earns nothing - spent far too much time researching chameleons, finding and, thanks to AI, creating Chameleon pictures :-).

#Testing #Email #Email Testing 5 social mentions

29

Urban DJ

#Music #Games #Online Games 3 social mentions

30

Shorter Shower

#File Manager #Web App #Home

31

Privacy-First Jobs

Privacy-First Jobs - a job board solely for privacy-focused companies and orgs: https://privacyfirstjobs.com/ Direct feedback from users is consistently positive but I’m starting to think a job board based around values is not the great idea I thought it was. Nevertheless it’s still something I think should exist (and I might need it myself one day), so as long as the cost to keep it running is low, I’ll keep it running.

#Job Boards #Web App #Hiring And Recruitment 1 social mentions

32

Legible News

Https://legiblenews.com/ I have paying subscribers, but it’s not a ton and it mostly covers sever and maintenance costs. I wrote about why I made this at https://legiblenews.com/about.

#Social Media Tools #Social Media Marketing #Marketing 8 social mentions

33

Plain Text Sports

I run Plain Text Sports (https://plaintextsports.com/). I got sick of waiting for ESPN to load so I made a site with the goal of providing immediate access to what people actually care about: sports scores. It's pretty fully featured at this point, supporting the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, MLS, Premier League and Champions League, college basketball and college football, WNBA, NWSL, and the World Cup. And for a lot of leagues it has full schedules and standings as well. It actually was really popular in South Africa during the World Cup when a "super-app" that points users to sites that don't use a lot of data linked to it. The site is served off of S3 (which is cheap), but there's a job running on an AWS server that's fetching the data for all the games and republishing pages to S3. It's using Ruby and is making a lot of network requests, so it's definitely not super efficient. I need a least a couple virtual CPUs, so it ends up costing ~$60 a month. I could definitely reduce that number, but the trouble just isn't worth it to me right now. I <i>don't</i> want to make money on it. It's been difficult enough to get people to use it; getting people to pay for it would be even hard. At this point I feel like I've gotten everything I've wanted from the project. (An eye-opening experience into the marketing world; a website that I use every day.) I try to limit how much I work on it now to mostly just maintenance work. I'd rather work on other stuff. If I started making money that'd just be a number to obsess over, and, honestly, it's never going to make enough money to replace my salary as a software engineer.

#Sports #Basketball #Football 16 social mentions

This is cool, really dig the text look. Reminds me of https://wttr.in/. I would love to see more of these text-based sites.

#Weather Apps #Web App #Weather 60 social mentions

35

Writing Streak

I have a bunch of those. https://writingstreak.io - a tool for developing a daily writing habit. https://screenplays.io - a library of free screenplays. https://startupideas.io - a newsletter where I research and analyze startup ideas, opportunities, and trends. https://rpgadventures.io - a discord community where we a group of Game Masters brainstorm, create, and publish adventures for roleplaying games together. https://improvgames.io - a discord community where I run free weekly improv workshops.

#Health And Fitness #Project Management #Markdown Editor 6 social mentions

36

Profile Peacock

I made https://profilepeacock.com/ on a whim after messing around with the Twitter API to make a tweet that quote-tweeted itself (quinetweet). It gives you a lil progress bar on your twitter profile pic. I don't plan on monetising it and it costs next to nothing as it's just on a cronjob on my laptop. It's a fun lil thing to keep around and spreads good vibes and support.

#Productivity #Twitter #Marketing 1 social mentions

37

GitHub & BitBucket HTML Preview

PeaceFounder: https://peacefounder.org For the past few years, I have been exploring the idea of building an e-voting system around the anonymisation of voters rather than votes. In contrast to existing systems, the design enables the publication of all election evidence, verifying the legitimacy of the votes without sacrificing either privacy or transparency. It does all complex ElGamal re-encryption mixing before elections without the voters' active participation by simply shifting a relative generator on which voters would cast votes. In addition, election administrators do not need to take care of keeping secrets except ones used for server identification to the voters' devices. This would make the Price/Security for running elections small compared to what is already out there. Currently, the project is in a heavy development stage. I have settled on making a microservice which would be easily integrable into existing systems allowing members to enrol for voting by simply scanning a QR code. At the same time, the admins would be free to choose how they want to present data. REST API for the user and server, which onboards users, is now finalised and now I am working on UX for the client application and hopefully will start to code a prototype in GTK in the coming weeks. http://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/PeaceFounder/PeaceFounder.jl/blob/master/mockup/index.html The feeling is much like playing a game of chess with oneself. Trying to finish it while I am young and can still keep the scope of the problem in my mind. If anyone is interested, I do enjoy a friendly argument ;).

#CDN #Cloud Computing #Image Optimisation 10 social mentions

38

Playtune

Playtune: https://playtune.app I made it out of frustration on finding rhythm game with my favorite songs. So I decided to build one and use YouTube as the music provider. It made $0 as there are no monetization nor ads. Me and my daughter still occasionally play it.

#Holidays #Digital Whiteboard #Games 1 social mentions

In similar spirite, when the world cup was going on I used https://worldcup.cole.ws/ a lot to check on it. Much better than all other sites.

#Holidays #Digital Whiteboard #Games 1 social mentions

40

RoQR

RoQR: https://roqr.app/ It's a privacy-focused dynamic QR code application. Just got my first paying customer this past week, which I'm pretty stoked about! The costs of running it are very low (~$15 / month), and it's not something I'm planning on ever turning into my main gig, but the fact that someone is willing to pay for an app I built on my own feels really fun.

#Productivity #Tech #Marketing 1 social mentions

41

Steam Spy

I think Valve will shut it down once it learns about the monetization. AFAIK that is what happened to https://steamspy.com/ when they introduced paid subscription tier.

#Games #Group Chat & Notifications #Gaming 25 social mentions

42

Linear Equations Solver

Https://linear-equations.com/ Solve systems of linear equations. A tool I needed during my studies. No idea if that counts as a proper side project since it took like a day (?) or so to make.

#Holidays #Digital Whiteboard #Games 1 social mentions

43

Courses.so

I built https://courses.so. The concept: build courses with Notion. The idea came from my partner in the project, who runs an e-learning community centered around no-code tools and wanted something simple and no-code-y to host their material. I built it during a bad main-project burnout day and we've been improving and marketing it ever since. We have a bunch of people using the free plan to publish their courses for free, but not enough users pay the 9€/month plan, which allows you to charge for the courses, to pay for the infra. So we're in the negative monthly profit. Still, it's a fun side project and we enjoy improving it and listening to user feedback. If you want to offer or sell courses and you like Notion, check it out. Especially if you are a <i>maker</i> type, we offer API access and are working on full access to statistics and event webhooks so you can integrate it with your systems. We even have first party integrations with Zapier and Make.com.

#Courses #Notion #Online Courses 1 social mentions

44

collAnon

As in the last thread about projects that didn't make into top HN https://collanon.com remains a free web app for your private discussions and confrontations. ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯.

#Social & Communications #Open Discussions #Communication 8 social mentions

45

AppHunt

AppHunt https://apphunt.org It’s a newsletter that sends out posts about interesting iOS apps every week. I bought the newsletter on microns.io in December 2022. It’s a ghost blog / newsletter hosted on a VPS which isn’t expensive. However I’m using mail gun and that part is pricey. I’m thinking about switching to something else soon but mailgun integrates pretty easily with ghost. I write software at work so I figured a newsletter would take me out of my comfort zone. I have to do things I don’t think I’m great at like writing and marketing. I find the deadline of putting out an issue every Monday keeps me honest. Also I love these posts it’s fun scrolling through all the different projects!

#Apple #Apps #Newsletter 1 social mentions

46

Merge Music

I made a Spotify powered app ( https://mergemusic.app ) and we didn't add any payment methods to comply with their terms. Tried for <i>months</i> / <i>years</i> to get in touch with someone at Spotify who could discuss a commercial licence agreement, so the app could have a business model. Stonewalled. Turns out Spotify instead of working with us, made their own version - Spotify Blend, launched 2 years after our app. The thing that bugs me the most is Spotify is a member of https://appfairness.org which states > App store gatekeepers have carefully crafted their mobile device ecosystems to eliminate competition and maximize their own control and profits, to the detriment of developers and consumers. However Spotify's own App Store did exactly the behaviour they are complaining about.

#Music #Web App #Audio Player 1 social mentions

47

mgmt

#Email Marketing #Job Boards #CRM 27 social mentions

48

Themes For App

#Web App #Design Tools #Developer Tools