Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2023 – Show and tell

1

Label LIVE

#Design Tools #Office & Productivity #Image Marketplace 15 social mentions

2

OnlineOrNot

I'm coming up on three years of running OnlineOrNot (https://onlineornot.com). I still work on it two hours per workday, before my day job starts, but it now supports uptime monitoring for websites, APIs and JavaScript apps, as well as cron job/scheduled task monitoring, and has built-in status pages. It's been funny working in a "red ocean" (as MBA-types call it), competitors will enter the market with such enthusiasm, and close up shop a few months later when they haven't made nearly enough money to justify the effort. Anyway, I'm a big fan of the "outlast" strategy as described by Justin Duke (of Buttondown): https://www.applied-cartography.com/goon-squad - my aim is to ship high quality code over a very long time, and the business seems to be growing faster and faster each year, so it seems to be working.

#Uptime Monitoring #Website Monitoring #Monitoring Tools 55 social mentions

3

ChatGPT Writer

#Email Marketing #Email Productivity #Sales Tools 7 social mentions

4

Refined GitHub

<a href="https://github.com/refined-github/refined-github">https://github.com/refined-github/refined-github</a> I never intended it to be a side project, I just liked the extension and started contributing heavily to it, to the point where I became the maintainer for the next several years. I get about that amount per month in GitHub Sponsorships. Not nearly worth the amount of time I put into it, but it’s relatively effortless work. It makes my regular work on other GitHub projects more enjoyable (due to the features that Refined GitHub adds).

#Developer Tools #Git #Software Development 12 social mentions

5

webtoapp.design

I've been working on https://webtoapp.design for for 4 years now (in 10 days). It's my first business, so I've made plenty of mistakes. By now I have someone that handles the easier customer support inquiries and after all the other costs I can live off of it (not an appropriate software engineer salary for Europe, but it's enough). It can be very frustrating, since I help my customers through the entire app creation and publishing process, so that includes dealing with Google and Apple. I keep working on it because it's growing slowly but steadily and it provides me a lot of flexibility. I don't know which marketing channels to focus on to speed up growth though, at the moment it's pretty much all SEO.

#Web App #Mobile Apps #Mac 16 social mentions