Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

1

Aptakube

#Developer Tools #Kubernetes #DevOps Tools 11 social mentions

2

Mockoon

I maintain https://mockoon.com, an API mocking tool for developers. I created it in 2017 and initially worked on it during my free time. I started focusing on it full-time three years ago and introduced cloud options to make the project sustainable alongside donations.

#Developer Tools #APIs #API Tools 35 social mentions

3

PortDroid

I made PortDroid, an Android Port Scanner and networking toolkit back in 2014 because I was learning programming and was curious to what was possible. I mainly wrote it for myself and I've done no marketing so have been quite surprised how popular it has become (~800k downloads). It's been a consistent passion project for me now over the years and I love getting feedback and suggestions from people using it. It'll never have ads (I hate them) and only data collection is optional crash reports. https://portdroid.net.

#Monitoring Tools #Security #Network Scanning 1 social mentions

4

Vocabuo - The vocabulary app

I have two! https://gifmemes.io, haven't touched the code for years, makes between 100-300$ a month, depending on the season. https://vocabuo.com - a side project I hope to turn into a business, so I work on it around two days a week, made around $3.5k in revenue last month but most of it went back into ads.

#AI #Productivity #Spaced Repetition 12 social mentions

5

Gifmemes

I have two! https://gifmemes.io, haven't touched the code for years, makes between 100-300$ a month, depending on the season. https://vocabuo.com - a side project I hope to turn into a business, so I work on it around two days a week, made around $3.5k in revenue last month but most of it went back into ads.

#App #Meme #Tool 31 social mentions

Https://reqres.in/ - roughly that much in ads revenue. Would love to add a paid plan for more features, but....time.

#Development #Online Services #API Tools 21 social mentions

7

Hacker Newsletter

Still running https://hackernewsletter.com/ after 15 years and 60k+ subscribers. It has been hard to put a lot of focus on it the past couple years, but been finally getting some time to spend on some improvements there. Income here has always been simple sponsors which I'm very grateful for.

#Hacker News UI #Productivity #Hacker News 27 social mentions

8

Hyperpaper Planner

I've built a custom planner/calendar generator targeting e-ink tablets like the reMarkable, Supernote, and Kindle Scribe. Revenue is highly seasonal, but now consistently over the $500/mo threshold :) https://hyperpaper.me/.

#Productivity #Web App #Inventory Management 11 social mentions

9

YouTube

Https://foxev.io I built custom electric cars, and now I am sharing my knowledge for free in a knowledge base and in a YouTube series: https://youtube.com/@foxev-content My knowledge is EV and renewable energy knowledge from first principles and for an open source tool.

#Video #Video Platform #Social Media 1906 social mentions

10

Elite Hoops Basketball

I develop a basketball coaching app called Elite Hoops, it makes $3.5k/month and thankfully growing: --> https://elitehoopsapp.com I wrote a book series over iOS development, self-published, made over $120k: --> https://bestinclassiosapp.com I do one sponsored ad a year, which translates to over $500/month (i.e. Your criteria): --> https://www.swiftjectivec.com And launching another app soon to follow D2/D3 collegiate scores, hoping to get that up and over $500 MRR quickly: --> https://x.com/JordanMorgan10/status/1864796895396110737.

#WordPress #Website Builder #CMS 1 social mentions

11

A Best-in-Class iOS App

I develop a basketball coaching app called Elite Hoops, it makes $3.5k/month and thankfully growing: --> https://elitehoopsapp.com I wrote a book series over iOS development, self-published, made over $120k: --> https://bestinclassiosapp.com I do one sponsored ad a year, which translates to over $500/month (i.e. Your criteria): --> https://www.swiftjectivec.com And launching another app soon to follow D2/D3 collegiate scores, hoping to get that up and over $500 MRR quickly: --> https://x.com/JordanMorgan10/status/1864796895396110737.

#Design Books #Books #AI 2 social mentions

12

ScrapeNinja

#Web Scraping #Web Scraping API #Data Extraction

13

GetLoaf.io

I run https://getloaf.io/ an app which lets you customise SVG animations that are built into the app. Constantly plugging away for 4ish years now!

#Design Tools #Animation #Website Design 2 social mentions

14

Achromatic.dev

Https://achromatic.dev - Next.js SaaS starter kit that is not crap. It become the #3 selling one (after Shipfast and Makerkit) in under 3 month. I can't update the website because feature requests rn but it is worth it to prio the boilerplate. Soon it will also have multi-organization support. 2025 is gonna be interesting since I plan to add multiple boilerplates to the same package deal. Realized I'm not a business that needs to be greedy, but I can help others in a big way.

#Developer Tools #Boilerplate #Nextjs 5 social mentions

15

Produktly

Https://produktly.com/ - a suite of tools to improve onboarding, product adoption, and retention. Things like product tours, checklists, feedback widgets, changelogs etc. That help you proactively guide your users, listen to their feedback, and communicate progress and upcoming features. All manageable without any coding (after the initial copy-paste script integration), so e.g. Product managers or customer success can build and add these from the web dashboard.

#Customer Onboarding #Digital Adoption Platform #Product Tour 1 social mentions

16

SMS to Slack

I've built a SMS to Slack which enables two-way SMS messaging from your Slack channels. I had an annoying use case where when trying to login to a shared work account, the 2FA code was being sent to a colleague's phone number. Now being able to receive that code in Slack solved the problem. Customers now use it for their own customer support. End users really like SMS as a messaging platform, nobody wants to send an email or talk to a chatbot. It uses Elixir, Fly, GCP, Stripe, and a couple carriers. https://smstoslack.com.

#SMS #Customer Support Tools #B2B 1 social mentions

I was laid off at the start of 2024 and built https://interviewsolver.com which is an AI copilot for helping you with your leetcode interviews. Doing about 6k/month, though the space is becoming fairly crowded.

#Careers #Interview Preparation #Programming 3 social mentions

18

Tunnelmole

Tunnelmole - https://tunnelmole.com/. This is an open source tunneling tool in the same category as ngrok. I have turned this into an actual company, it's just a one person one for now. While it is open source, I am trying to build a sustainable business around it. It is bootstrapped and there is no VC funding as of yet. Currently there are several thousand monthly users and just enough paid subscriptions to be making ~$500 (AUD) per month. Promoting it so far has not been too difficult with different strategies, but the conversion rate is quite low, so I'm planning to start doing some data science type analytics to find ways to optimise that.

#Cloud Computing #Cloud Hosting #Testing 8 social mentions

19

Compress Image (aka Batch Compress)

Among some related tools, I run Batch Compress (https://batchcompress.com/en), an online image compressor. It converts images to WebP or JPEG with a lot of compression applied in order to shrink file size by a lot. There is a lot of competitors, but usually they have limits requiring accounts & payment if the images are too large to begin with or if you want to compress a lot of images. Batch Compress is free for unlimited use. Always very open to feedback or feature requests.

#Image Optimisation #Image Editing #Freelance 3 social mentions

20

ZenMic

Launched ZenMic: AI Podcast Generator few months ago. Crossed 400 free users so far. Zero MRR but it makes money indirectly. We still have to add pricing and paid plans but it attracted enough freelancing client who need related custom solution. https://zenmic.com.

#Podcasts #Podcast Tools #Generative AI 2 social mentions

21

Attic Manager

I built a Home Inventory software back in 2006 called Attic Manager: https://guacosoft.com/attic/ In the first few years it only sold a couple of copies per quarter, but then Intuit decided to discontinue support for their Quicken Home Inventory programs and users got stuck. I added the ability to import that data and then the sales started doing well. It has tapered off in the past three years but I still get some months over $500 during the year. I haven't really done any marketing, as it's just a Home Inventory program I made for myself, to keep track of stuff when we were moving to a new home. As far as I know, Attic Manager is still the only program which can load QHI data.

#Home #Inventory Management #Home Care 1 social mentions

22

Resumey.Pro

We launched a Markdown resume builder called ResumeyPro (https://resumey.pro/) as a side project in 2020. It has been consistently generating revenue with barely any active marketing from our side. Most of the revenue is via organic search.

#HR #Resume Builder #Markdown Resume 10 social mentions

23

Hosted gitea

The combination of https://hostedgitea.com and https://dopeloop.ai brings in over $500 per month. In 2025 I'm going to focus on shipping a bunch of new online music apps on dopeloop.

#Git #GitHub #GitLab 1 social mentions

24

PO LoopSync

The combination of https://hostedgitea.com and https://dopeloop.ai brings in over $500 per month. In 2025 I'm going to focus on shipping a bunch of new online music apps on dopeloop.

#Audio & Music #Audio #Email Marketing 2 social mentions

25

OnlineOrNot

I built a service that tells you whether your team's website/API or cron jobs are online, or not. It's called OnlineOrNot: https://onlineornot.com Coming close to 4 years of operation!

#Uptime Monitoring #Website Monitoring #Monitoring Tools 68 social mentions

26

volt.fm

Https://volt.fm Can't really call it a side project, though, as I'm working on it full-time.

#Music #Spotify #Analytics 52 social mentions

27

OpenIn

Mac/iOS apps https://loshadki.app Stable between 1000-1500 monthly, depends on the month.

#Project Management #Website Testing #Webapp Testing 10 social mentions

28

Use Digest

#Email #RSS Reader #Productivity 7 social mentions

29

VTube Studio

Thanks! Yeah, I've been asked about this a few times - however, it does look like this is basically exactly that (using ARKit and ARCore) and exists already: https://denchisoft.com Have you heard of this tool?

#Vtuber Software #Art #Animation 2 social mentions

30

Music Interval Training Tool

I've been building something in a similar space over at https://muted.io/. It's been just about paying out my rent and food in the past year. I've been pretty impressed at Lightnote and how its executed and actually tried to reach out to the creator a couple of times for potential collaborations. Not sure if my messages made it through.

#Health And Fitness #Time Tracking #iPhone 1 social mentions