I'm developing Wallpunch, a censorship resistant VPN for people in China, Iran, and Russia. Userbase is pretty small as I'm still polishing things up, but I hope to expand my marketing efforts a lot in 2026!
I run a dead-simple, one-time, online fax service called JustFax Online[0].
While I don't have a recurring revenue as I operate one one-time payment, for the past months I have been consistently grossing over €500/mo.
This also brings tears to my eyes, as I remember[1] browsing these threads and being amazed (still am) by all the people who make side projects and make money from them, and at the same time thinking that I will never reach this milestone, and yet, here I am.
It used to be possible to do this with a faxmodem; these days telephony is over IP, so there might be telco APIs for it. But, because it's a telco, that will be annoying and hidden.
(I slightly balked at the $5 initial price, but then realized: this is a desperation fee and I think for a lot of the users a clear fee for a clear one off service is the best deal. Anyone who wants to send 1,000 faxes will (a) be in the top 1% of fax users in their country if it's not Japan and (b) make their own arrangements. Also patio11's "charge more")
Software wise, if you have a PBX line (which the telco will change for) you can run Asterix and then https://www.asterisk.org/products/add-ons/fax-for-asterisk/ to send as many faxes as you like to the other person in your country with a fax machine.
I was hesitant to add my own but I think you might find it interesting as we make money not from clients but from grants.
We have IronCalc[1]. We don't make money from customers as we don't have a finalized product yet. But we have an ongoing grant from the NLnet[2].
You can have a look at the kind of projects they are granting money. It's always a source of inspiration.
That being said IronCalc takes a lot of time from me. Way more than a side project should.
The friction to try it out is already really low, I like that! But it could be even lower if instead of an image the interactive version is served right on the landing page. Great project!
- 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 remove the photos only if requested by the user. The photos are removed immediately, as well as the account if that is requested too. I definitely do not use the pics for retraining or any other purpose, but just to serve them on the individual overview page of the user.
thanks a lot for the heads up! That menu shouldn't be available for users that are not logged in. I just pushed a change to hide it. You can check the prices at the bottom of the landing page, before I add a dedicated page for unauthenticated users.
LE: I just added the pricing page for unauthenticated users too.
Headsnap is such a scammy and/or crappy website. I paid to purchase credits for $5, tried to train a model to generate a headshot. Nothing. It just refreshes and comes back with nothing. Will not recommend.
When did you do it? The minimum package is $8. If you did this in the past, why didn't you reach out for support? I get more than 100 customers per day and rarely have issues.
ah now I see you generated your pics 8 minutes ago. You can now see them on your account page. I have a clear disclaimer that says it can take up to 30 mins to generate the photos and that you will get an email once the photos are ready.
Thanks! I wanted to implement something like that, but it's difficult to predict the progress since it's depending on how many requests are being handled in that exact moment, but it never got past 25 minutes, not even during peak hours. I am thinking of adding a modal saying that you can close the page and you will get notified over email when the photo generation is ready (the email part is already there).
Do you think it will become more difficult to make money on such services due to AI getting better and better at coding? Like, wouldn’t that make it easier for people to create competing services?
Or do you think this effect is counteracted with AI also opening up for new opportunities for creating services that would not otherwise be feasible pre AI?
I agree that development has become easier and the barrier for entry is generally lower due to AI. However, without distribution it's still pretty much impossible to get clients. You also need to have some engineering background since AI cannot solve everything for you.
Important to mention, IMHO not many people are willing to sacrifice their time and energy to start something that doesn't have a clear path to profitability.
It's the most difficult part. In my experience paid ads do not work very well so I am not relying too much on those. I usually use social media with UGC videos created either by me or by content creators. I also reach out on Instagram, even dating apps, to users and pay them to use/promote a product.
Recently I started to use n8n automation to post on Twitter/LinkedIn, however I tend to keep those posts short since they are created with LLM's and do not seem authentic.
As for the SEO part, I usually upload search console extracts into Perplexity deep research and ask for actions on how to improve ranking for different keywords.
thanks! Most of these projects are hosted on Vercel, and I am extensively using their observability solution to get alerts when something unexpected happens. After some time you get to fix everything and you'll spend less time firefighting.
For customer queries, I usually respond myself. However when I am not available, I have a small team of freelancers that help me just with that. I played with LLMs for responding to questions, but it just didn't work out for me.
A friend and I host a monthly dinner club for people interested in ethnic cuisine. We work with a single restaurant each month to create an 8-12 course all inclusive price fixe menu. The food is served family style and is authentic to the region we are hosting. We typically host the dinners on a Tues or Wed when the restaurants in our region aren’t too busy and could use the extra business.
Since 2023 we’ve been to 44 restaurants. In 2025 we served 1,099 guests and generated $126k in revenue.
This is so cool! As someone who loves trying out new restaurants I need to ask: why would I go with you guys instead of going to the restaurants myself with a friend or partner? Looking around your website it seems to me that there's very large attendance, which in my mind means generally less focus on the food itself. Do you think one of the main factors is meeting new people/the sense of community? Anyway good job! I'm not sure what your margins are but it's probably more than 500/month! Congrats!
Out of curiosity, if you don't mind sharing, what is the sort of profit you see on that 126,000 as i'm assuming alot of that goes to paying the restaurants?
Love the communal aspect. Curious about the economics of this, how do you typically split revenue with the restaurant, and what’s the average ticket price per guest?
https://www.youhere.org: "Want to know who showed up?" is the tag line. It's an app-based attendance service for teachers/coaches/band directors/conference organizers, etc. I'm a teacher and it scratches an itch I had (students not showing up to class). Been hitting the $500/month more and more often now (even after server fees).
Last year, I came across NotebookLM and immediately noticed a pain point: importing the web pages I was browsing into NotebookLM required several steps. So in less than a day, I developed this Chrome extension: NotebookLM Web Importer[1], which allows for one-click importing.
As NotebookLM has gained popularity this year, my extension has also seen great growth. So, in July, I added paid premium features to unlock additional features. It exceeded my expectations and quickly went over $500 a month. It now has over 100,000 users and is still growing.
I really liked your extension having used it in the past. Great job and really useful! If you don't mind me asking, how do you manage the paid features from a technical point of view? Do you give paid users a token to enter in the extension which then activates certain features or is it something else?
I’m still selling Computer Engineering for Babies. And I just launched a new book called Simple Machines Made Simple on Kickstarter a month or two ago.
Both books are basically just simple interactive demos for kids and adults.
My kid got a copy of your first book as a gift a couple years ago. It's really fun to have on the shelf. The buttons are so satisfyingly clicky. Thanks!
Yeah, I’ve improved it a lot, but a lot of the books from the run I did 18 months ago get confused on the cover page thinking it’s open to the NOT page.
Occasionally $500/month, but more reliably $300/month in sales of my Video Hub App - lets users browse, search, tag, and organize videos on local / network drives. Aiming to have an 8th anniversary release February 2026.
To me, it would have been clearer to avoid the “Demo” button label altogether and be explicit about the different versions and OS targets. Also, I think the visual hierarchy of the two respective buttons is too subtle.
I’m building DB Pro, a modern desktop database client for developers who want a fast, local-first workflow.
I started in October 2025, launched v1 at the end of November, and just crossed $1k MRR.
I also post devlogs of life building and marketing DB Pro and am about to post devlog #4. The latest one is here if anyone’s curious:
https://youtu.be/-T4GcJuV1rM
Still very early, but it’s been fun seeing something fairly “boring” resonate once the UX is treated seriously.
Loved the design, looks better then the most tools I've tried. I'm using Prisma + Supabase in one of my side projects and having constant db issues. Can I integrate DB Pro? Will it replace Prisma or what?
So DB Pro is a local desktop database client for managing your databases and data. Prisma ORM it won't replace, but Prisma's browser-based data browser, yes it will absolutely replace that. It's not a replacement for Supabase, it works alongside it, if that answers your question?
I'm planning to extend DB Pro into much more than a database manager though, letting you build dashboards, workflows and workbooks.
It has some behaviour differences (connection handling, pooling, serverless constraints) that I want to support properly rather than “mostly works”. Right now I'm focused on making the core experience rock solid across the most common setups first. My focus has been UX and DevEx and it's working.
Neon support is on the roadmap though, and once I add it, it’ll be first-class rather than a checkbox integration.
Yep, it’s built with Electron. Performance has been a big focus from day one, and it’s been really performant in all of my testing so far. The goal was a proper desktop-first experience with local performance and direct database access, rather than trying to force it into a web app. Although I do have plans to offer a self-hosted version as well.
I launched Filestash [1] as my response to the infamous “Dropbox should just be FTP” comment. Once I had a decent FTP experience, I kept going: adding support for pretty much every storage protocol, plugins to expose Dropbox (or anything else) over FTP, SFTP, MCP, or S3, and all the features I wished Dropbox had, with plugins to customize everything.
The base product is open-source and I make money from custom builds, additional plugins, paid support, and the occasional extra feature for companies with specific needs. It's a bit more than noodle profitable but quite under a normal salary.
Launched "Cadence: Guitar Theory" (https://cadenceguitar.com/) a guitar learning app with a focus on music theory in September.
Currently right above that $500/month when including lifetime purchases.
Had a sizeable bump in October thanks to blowing up on here which also gave me an app store boost so thanks guys :)
I'm working on new lessons at the moment, after that I'll probably try to improve on the animations and sound effects to give the app more "juice", should be a fun thing to work on.
Also still trying to figure out marketing and how to get visibility overall...
My wife's Etsy shop (https://www.etsy.com/shop/LittleLanternShop) is starting to pick up. She is leaning into creating digital sewing patterns for decorative felt crafts. We have had Etsy success before with 3d printed products, but managing printers and fulfilling orders can be stressful and time consuming, and she was hoping to build up a more passive income stream. She made over $1000 in the past month, which beat both our expectations
(We'll get back into 3d printing once life slows down a _little_ bit again)
Any tips on that? My wife is starting her Etsy shop (https://www.etsy.com/shop/BravinaPrints) but she is not really getting any visits and still trying to figure out what kind of stuff she wants to draw.
Wanted to teach my little brother about logic gates. Saw that for him to truly grasp the idea of it, he needed some "hands on" experience to develop the intuition about it. I decided to develop a PCB board that basically turns-on-off the lights based on the inputs. He was like "cool" and kind of threw it in the corner. Rather than just leave it, I decided to further develop it and make it as a learning tool for myself as well(web design, marketing, BOM optimization etc).
Then I started to get feedback on the initial project which was quite helpful(universities, EEVBlog and colleagues) and based on that made a "Logic Trainer" which is like very advanced version of the initial idea. It has so many features and it kind of has taken off in a sense that 2 universities want to buy it for themselves. Also I didn't expect it but most people who buy it do it for their kids. IMHO its way too complicated for kids, but practice and feedback that I have gotten shows that it really isn't.
I haven't made any profits from the project yet (due to high development cost) but hopefully in the future it help to pay my rent :).
It started as just an uptime checker for websites, eventually I added support for APIs and cron jobs, and automated status pages (you may have seen this one yesterday: https://hackernews.onlineornot.com/)
I started it in 2021, I give it two hours a day before work every workday, and I cut scope on most features to ensure they're shippable in two hours. Then I iterate. It works because it's default-alive. I keep a full time job to be able to build it exactly how I want.
Like my React blog, I started it knowing thousands of others were doing the same thing. I made a bet that my unique perspective would be useful to others, and it paid off.
Has been above $500/mo since 2022, growing steadily since (still a few years away from being able to replace my salary).
Humadroid (https://humadroid.io) - AI-Assisted SOC 2 & ISO 27001 compliance for small teams. $125/month flat (for now, during beta).
Recently crossed the $500/month mark after a painful pivot from HR tech earlier this year. The whole thing started because I did ISO 27001 back in 2019 and was completely lost - overpaid for consultants, got lost with policies and controls, figured it out the hard way.
Passed SOC 2 Type I earlier this year using only Humadroid (yes, dogfooding a compliance tool through an actual audit was... an experience).
Currently finishing automated evidence collection (AWS and GitHub integrations first). Pretty proud of that one - compliance shouldn't mean "panic-screenshot everything before audit."
Really cool stuff, I thought about launching something similar earlier this year, there's definitely a market there. I see a lot of AI-ative startups coming up against compliance requirements way earlier than before, with much smaller teams, and most existing solutions just need too much from you as you engage.
How do you see yourself against someone like delve.co?
Honestly, Delve is great. Them and Compai are leading the front of modern AI-assisted compliance right now. I'm chasing them.
What I'm trying to do differently is depth of context. Humadroid learns about your company first - how you operate, your stack, your processes. From there it generates control descriptions that are actually actionable for your setup, and policies that need minimal review rather than a full rewrite.
Whether that's enough differentiation? Ask me in a year.
Not yet - but literally finishing this week. Promised a customer I'd ship it before Christmas, so that's been my deadline.
AWS and GitHub integrations first. It auto-fetches and verifies the data (where applicable), creating read-only evidence snapshots. No manual screenshots or "I swear this config was set correctly" moments during audits.
Part of the standard price - no integration tier upsell.
The big difference is context-awareness. Vanta/Drata give you templates and checklists. Humadroid starts by understanding your company - what you actually do, how you operate, your tech stack.
From there, the AI generates policies that are yours, not generic docs with [COMPANY NAME] placeholders. Same with control descriptions - they're specific and actionable for your setup, not "implement access control" with no context. It also identifies risks based on what you actually do and helps build business continuity plans around your real critical processes.
You still review everything (it's compliance, not magic), but you're editing 80% done work instead of staring at a blank template wondering where to start.
The price difference is real too, but honestly that's a side effect of being early and solo - not the core value prop.
Gotcha. And then how does that translate into the audit process? Because Vanta/Drata have auditors they work with regularly, there's a bit of an incentive on both sides to use these templates because then it speeds up that part tremendously. I can't imagine the auditors being happy about really diving into hyper bespoke documents for every audit.
Your product seems great for actually doing the spirit of these frameworks (reducing risk, improving controls and processes etc.). However from what I've seen the reality of these audits is it's a box ticking exercise for everyone involved, and so improving the efficiency there tends to be the goal. How do you position yourself in that?
Also hope this doesn't come off too critical, it's just something I've been through recently and love seeing new things! I'd definitely add a vanta/drata comparison to your website though as that is inevitable.
Honestly, great questions - this is either good exercise for me or actionable feedback. Both valuable.
Right now I recommend auditors but don't have formal partnerships. Vanta/Drata's auditor relationships are... let's say on the edge of conflicted? I don't want to go that route. And at $250/month I can't play the referral game anyway (Vanta pays hundreds per referral - that math doesn't work for me).
What I can do is democratize access. I've watched too many small teams get excited about SOC 2, then ghost once they see the total cost - $15k+ for the platform, $20k+ for consultants, $15k+ for auditors. I want the barrier low enough that smaller businesses can actually get certified and compete with bigger players.
On the checkbox vs. real security thing - you're right, it's tricky. I don't want to be another "generate docs, tick boxes, forget until next audit" platform. But targeting smaller businesses actually helps here - when you're a 10-person company, management is in the compliance process, not just signing off on someone else's work. It tends to stick better.
That said, sometimes I wonder if I help too much. My System Description assistant is almost unfair - what used to take weeks now takes minutes. Is that checkbox-enabling or democratizing? Genuinely not sure.
And yes - "vs Vanta/Drata" pages are going on the list. You're not the first to ask.
https://dreamandcolor.com/ has been a fun solo bootstrapped side project for me for the past 2.5ish years - (specialize in converting photos to coloring pages for parents, educators, etc)
I started it primarily wanting to take a shot at productizing an image diffusion model (Stable Diffusion 1.5 when I started) in a novel (at the time) way and it ended up growing legs of it's own.
She's steadily chugging along, growing about 10-20% per month with minimal marketing, exceeding all expectations I had for the project when I set out
You can get great results with nano banana nowadays (ex: "convert this image to a coloring page") - I'd say we focus on 1. consistency with our base style from image to image, 2. likeness (still really tough to get 100% right but we've come a long way since our MVP) and 3. offering fun alternatives (South Park inspired coloring pages, Minecraft style, etc)
We also handle all the post-processing (upscaling, image cleaning, etc) that you need in order to get great printed results - with Gemini (Nano Banana) or ChatGPT you've got to pull each image out, possibly remove the watermark, set the curves/levels in photoshop/gimp, upscale it, etc then print the page - you can just hit Export and download a pdf ready to print from our site
Here’s my own side project that’s been earning a bit on the side:
I built DedupX, a macOS app for finding duplicate and visually similar files fast - especially useful for photographers and anyone with big local storage collections.
What it does
- Exact duplicate detection using incremental hashing so it doesn’t have to fully load huge files.
- Perceptual image matching finds similar images even if they’re resized or lightly edited (not just byte-for-byte duplicates).
- Native macOS integration with a Finder right-click scan.
Why I built it: My brother kept running out of space because of tons of photos, and every existing tool I tried either missed similar images or was slow and clunky - so I spent a couple of weekends building something that felt fast, accurate, and native.
Business side
- Free trial (no CC required).
- Paid tiers: ~$5.99/yr or ~$16.99 lifetime.
Got positive feedback and 100+ paying users shortly after launch. Been growing steadily ever since.
I started making a daily logic puzzle called Clues by Sam in May and it's been stadily growing since. The number one thing people were asking for was more puzzles, so I started selling puzzle packs instead of monetizing with ads. The reception has been great, and the revenue has been enough for me to decline some consulting gigs and instead focus on improving the game.
Love it, I discovered it last week and bought a supporter pack after two days!
Everytime I get stuck I'm 100% sure you made a mistake... Until I find my own mistake
Thank you so much! Indeed, it's quite tempting to blame the game, but the algorithm that ensures all valid deductions are enabled hasn't been wrong a single time since it was finished in June. Often I don't believe it myself, but it always turns out to be smarter than me!
Making almost exactly $500/mo on an Anki extension that embeds AI / text to speech / image gen deeply into the app, allowing you to generate example sentences, audio, explanations, etc, for whatever you’re studying, in bulk.
Still holding off on the show HN post for now; have a few more features and QoL things I’d like to add first.
It’s been an enormously gratifying project and I hear from users all around the world who have feature requests for their specific use cases. Easily the most fun I’ve had working on a project.
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).
Neat! We made a similar thing years ago in the pre-AI era, with strong focus on detection of how the planned workouts were executed rather than making plan adjustments just on a single scalar metric (e.g. TSS). Didn't really go anywhere unfortunately.
Congrats. This sounds like a great way to build a "wrapper" product. Gather clean data on a particular niche and keep it in one place. Have something that's good at processing that data. No matter what "startup killers" the big boys release, it's still resilient and valuable.
TR's "AI" claims are a bit of a stretch. It basically just monitors fatigue and will ramp down a prescribed workout to ensure you don't overtrain.
The workouts themselves are templates chosen from a list and do not adapt to the rider as an individual. It plugs in a standard periodization schedule with flexible dates.
Repth uses AI for everything with a few guardrails. You pick a peak date, describe your peak event, weekly availability, and ftp.
Repth then generates a macro plan, and the next week of workouts. As you perform, it will monitor for compliance and adjust the prescription depending on your compliance and feedback. All of it is unique per user, optimized for the demands of the specific event.
Overall, TR's approach is fine. Any plan can work as long as you stick to it. I built Repth simply to replace my (human) coach in 2022 and in that regard it has been a huge success
I subscribed last december after knowing about it in last year's version of this thread.
It is great and gives a very good summary of the HN week, I love it!
It‘s making about $700 on iOS and $300 on Android, solely from $2.99 IAPs for the later missions in the game (the first 2 missions are free).
I think a main reason for this is that escape rooms (and games) don’t „saturate“: you play them only once, because then you know the solutions. So another escape room (place, game, app) doesn’t cannibalize the market - it may rather strengthen the others by fostering it as a group activity.
I also put 0$ into ads- it solely spreads itself by being a group activity (3-5 people are best) and through its mission editor (people can make their own missions, used in school and for birthdays etc).
Wow this is pretty cool. I am working on my first mobile app. what tips can you give. I am planning to build in public on twitter, substack and share my coding process here on HN.
I started with some Apple Search ads which worked pretty well and then did some IG ads which worked well too. I haven’t done any in a while though. Bing and Google ads had really bad results
Launched Standly, a standing desk companion app on iOS and Max in Feb 2025. Steadily grew it by talking to people on reddit and in person. Mostly word of mouth sales and ASO. Initially it was only for mac but launching iOS has been good. Most downloads coming from organic search. Most people like it to build stamina for standing and stretching while working, especially those with lower back pain. Most customers are from EU.
I recently open-sourced my first ever tool! and I'm super excited about it guys
It's an HTTP request replay and comparison tool in Go. You can replay real traffic, compare multiple environments, detect broken endpoints, generate HTML/JSON reports, and analyze latency
It’s currently at v0.4, so I’d love any feedback, suggestions, or ideas for improvements. (Be gentle, I haven’t used Go professionally, however it’s my main language for personal projects )
Not consistently, but there have been a few months this year where I have hit $500 selling individual commercial use licenses for my tiling window manager[1]
The experiment is end-user mediated wealth redistribution from large corporations by leveraging reimbursement mechanisms, and so far I'm content with the results
https://mergecal.org - First project I built when learning Django a couple years back. Takes multiple iCal feed URLs, merges them into one feed. Turns out
people actually need this!
I started my project in 2023 and posted here, made 20k that year. The traffic has been slowly decreasing during 2024, and last October, I was officially entering losing territory, where the cost of running it exceeded the total earnings (mostly due to free trials).
It's been a good journey. Thank you so much to whoever keeps running this thread!
how do you deal with continuous Google-degrading-risk?
I stopped a site lately i ran for 10 years, because Google changed the ranking so often over the years, finally traffic drowned nearly completely like 1k visitors per month, it was so frustrating so I just stopped the webserver after so many years.
Many reasons: 1) lack of marketing, 2) I stopped working on it for a while, 3) because of #2, the app lacks new features to attract users.
Another one but turned out it was never really a big deal: some chatbots from frontier AI labs started to support those niche features (people still coming to my app for the flexibility of using multiple AI models).
I think the biggest problem was #2, life kept pulling me the other way.
Just signed our 3rd customer with TrueCast (600€/month) (https://www.truecast.fr/), which is Granola for tech and non-tech recruiters. Rather than replacing recruiters in the HR process, we want to give them real time hard skills knowledge superpowers so they can better assess candidates before submitting them to their teams. We are convinced that recruiting should remain human-first.
There’s also a bot option, for self-conducted interviews, mostly used for open applications for some pre-filtering.
We are still unsure on how to enter such market, so we are doing direct networking atm, if you guys have an idea on how you’d do it or want a free trial of the product we’d love having a chat with you about it.
I think most ideas should start with the “equivalent” of a cgi bin script and domain name before going crazy with infrastructure. Scaling is so much more fun when customers are maxing out what you have now and improvements lead to direct customer impact.
My product NumeroMoney (https://www.numeromoney.com) is the first I've built that makes over $500, and it's grown surprisingly quickly. I built it because I needed something simpler that the existing solutions I could find for understanding our families spending (YNAB etc were geared too much towards budgeting). It helps users to import and categorize bank statement transactions in a way that makes it really easy to make decisions about household spending.
We're a group of developers who worked together years ago. We meet a few times a year, but scheduling is always a hassle with endless back-and-forth trying to align everyone's calendars. Frustrated by this, I built Troviamo to solve it automatically. I know similar tools exist, but this one is modern and tailored to exactly what we needed.
It's just been a month since I set up a proper website, and I've already received my first $ 500 in a side gig. The jobs started before I set up the website.
I help businesses automate their admin work if they already use Google Workspace products using App Script and Typescript.
I've got 2 that are kind of intermingled. Each averages a little over $500/mo on their own though.
Sportsbook API (https://sportsbookapi.com/) - A single API to get odds data from a number of US Sportsbooks
Odds Assist Pro (http://pro.oddsassist.com/) - An odds scanner tool that shows both current odds and things like arbitrage, plus ev, middles. This actually started as just a UI for me to quickly do sanity checks on the API data and eventually grew into a full site. The site is on a subdomain of a site my business partner had built long before we met, so it's kind of positioned as the plus version of that site.
API revenue is really stable and has been pretty consistent slow growth. Pro's revenue is all over the place since it's almost all referrals and promos with big spikes around major sporting events. Probably averages at least $500/mo if you look at the entire year.
I was an accountant for 3 years before I switched my career to be a programmer, then I kept coding for 10+ years in big tech companies and had always wanted to build a product on my own. Eventually, I found the niche to combine my finance knowledge and my iOS skills into this App and happily building for a few years.
ah sorry currently there is no share data feature although I've heard this feature request from time to time, I probably should consider implementing this later. The premium membership can be shared with family members though -- one purchase for all members.
I’ve created Pixie, a platform to employ and track your kids work. For families with a business, it helps reduce tax burden and fund a child’s Roth.
I’m a physician with some 1099 income, built the platform myself because my kids help with my side projects, and have since onboarded CPAs who now offer it to their clients. I saved 5k this year on my own taxes by employing my kids and it has funded their Roth.
Soon after launching, I crossed the $500/month mark.
Still in MVP mode - but it already made some sales.
What's different about it from similar solutions is the way you can get data from an Excel file (most other companies have the JSON and CSV figured out).
It supports Excel style addressing so it's pretty flexible on how you reach for the data inside a PowerPoint template (access every sheet, every cell, named range or table to use it in merging process).
People use it for various kinds of use-cases - creating certificates, automating pricing offers, delivering employee feedback forms, preparing market research presentations and even subtitles for a theatrical play.
I run SideProjectors - https://www.sideprojectors.com - a marketplace where people can buy/sell their side projects and businesses. I've been running it for over 14 years now.
Not quite a side project, but I launched CoPlay about 3 years ago. Slow but steady growth up to 6k MRR for 2025. I think we will just about double that in 2026.
CoPlay is a platform for managing fleets of gaming consoles, users and subscriptions for pediatric hospitals. Think of it as an mdm for Xbox devices/users that does managed subscriptions
Not sure if blogging, collecting blogs, and interviewing people about blogging is considered a side project but ever now and again, depending on how generous the people on the other side are, I hit 500/month in donations.
Everything I do is free for everyone but for the past few years I’ve been running an entirely optional membership program that starts at $1/month.
I’m (probably naively) a big believer in kindness and I keep refusing to monetize what I do in any other way.
Oh, it's you! One of my favorite channels on YouTube. Learnt Alpaca and TA-Liband backtesting from you and also built my screener with your vids. Awesome content always. I am looking to go through the IB ones soon.
This is a huge success!!! Im also in this field, never thought that you could collect so many people on this niche topic!
If you say: some affiliates - think about getting a sponsoring partner for some B2B stuff, and speak the advertorial by yourself(!), one slot per one video/show.
In my country we have a small but good&nerdy startup podcast run by two guys - they do advertising this way, mainly B2B tech stuff (accounting software etc.) - in an interview recently, they unveiled their numbers - per slot (20-25 seconds) they get 8k - 10k. And they have a couple of slots per month.
Sadly not $500/mo, but I do get a few sales on https://dailychinesestories.com each month. It's as simple as it sounds - a story in Chinese at your HSK level for your preferred themes once a day.
I designed a pocket music instrument. I partnered with a company in China called Seeedstudio, they do the manufacturing, shipping, customer handling, etc. and I receive royalties on each sale. I varies from month to month, but above the 500$/month on 2025 :)
I love to be able to focus on the design and not the practicalities of selling a hardware product!
Building version 3 of a front-end SaaS application that services proprietary models for analyzing securities, events/catalysts, etc. I am taking what I have learned from 5 years of users asking questions and basically redoing everything.
This version will hopefully provide a bot free / pump free replacement for iHub, StockTwits, Twitter, etc. to people who manage money professionally or otherwise.
Assuming I get more free time to finish it that is.
Version 2 is live here.
www.gravityanalytica.com
The two products Chat and Horizon both make more than $500/month individually.
This is a just side project. I run a family office.
For those of you who are in your 20s keep it up. In your 40s getting free time can be a real challenge.
https://unrav.io . Lets users reshape any article, paper, or video into the form that actually helps them think, mind-maps, summaries, podcasts, or interactive Q&A. Launched as part of the Bolt.new hackathon in August and growing steadily. Going from a 100% vibe coded web app to a full production system has been quite a ride!
Got two websites but the second one is basically a clone of the first with better visuals and better tech stack that I actually want to work on
https://aieasypic.com - 3k per month (declining cause not working on it a lot, just maintenance)
https://bestphoto.ai - 2k per month (increasing cause of better SEO)
Now trying my hand at an actual non-consumer product, not that b2b but something to make making ads easy because that’s where I find myself getting stuck on when doing fb ads or TikTok organic stuff : https://admakeai.com
Formester started as a side hustle but today we make $7000/month.
All I wanted was to build a good product which our users feel like using. Help them with exceptional customer service and build a team and a company worth waking up to.
This is huge, actually I have used this before the free version, is this a 'side-project' or do you have some staff because it seems a big operation. Nice job.
Everything comes and goes. HN is no exception.
With that in mind does it matter for you? Are you here because HN is at its peak? If commenting here makes you life better a bit keep doing that. If not then just don't and go somewhere else. Or stop using the internet altogether and just became goat farmer. Do what makes you happy and not what crowd thinks will make you happy!
Started Find Boxes in 2024, it's a project and inventory management tool for audio visual companies. Took longer than expected to get the first customers, but I'm a bit above $300 a month now. I hope to cross the $500 a month mark sometime next year.
My parter and I made a fun erotic story generator called Smitten (https://smittenstories.com ) during the valentine's day weekend as a way for couples to spice things up.
Initially it was running on donations, but with model costs rising we had to add a paywall. I have a full time job but it's still fun to run this on the side by spending few hours on it over the weekends!
I have a variety of education (books, courses) and run fintech SaaS, which combined are finally providing around $2K/month in profits since around July this year (for a long time, was hovering around that $500 mark)
My first successful SaaS, The Wheel Screener, a screener optimized for selling options: https://wheelscreener.com
And, just launched in November, but already profitable, VannaCharm, a dashboard to view and watch in real time dealer hedging metrics: https://vannacharm.com
Looking to launch 1-2 more SaaS in 2026, trying to get to the point where I can do this full-time, let's get it folks!
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'm developing Wallpunch, a censorship resistant VPN for people in China, Iran, and Russia. Userbase is pretty small as I'm still polishing things up, but I hope to expand my marketing efforts a lot in 2026!
https://wallpunch.net/
My portfolio of iOS apps ends up at an average of $500/mo.
Most are older, still functional but rarely updated. A few of the newer ones include:
https://daylightgoals.com - Time in daylight tracker, using Apple Watch/HealthKit as the data source.
https://airlauncher.app - App launcher for visionOS - was much bigger last year before Apple added the ability to organize your apps.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ibuzz/id304684758?ls=1&mt=8 - iBuzz - I built this app in a day 15 years ago, it still makes about $100/mo from ads and removing ads. Just a simple buzzer soundboard app.
I run a dead-simple, one-time, online fax service called JustFax Online[0]. While I don't have a recurring revenue as I operate one one-time payment, for the past months I have been consistently grossing over €500/mo.
This also brings tears to my eyes, as I remember[1] browsing these threads and being amazed (still am) by all the people who make side projects and make money from them, and at the same time thinking that I will never reach this milestone, and yet, here I am.
[0]: https://justfaxonline.com [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39110194#39141819
Thanks for making a service where people can pay for a thing to happen, rather than an account and subscription and …
I often get frustrated at how hard it can be to give someone money to perform a service I want them to do and they want to be paid to do.
This is the coolest thing I've seen on this thread. Single purpose and a very nice, crystal clear homepage.
That's super cool, how do you run it? Are you using some other service under the hood, and just abstract their annoying pricing model?
It used to be possible to do this with a faxmodem; these days telephony is over IP, so there might be telco APIs for it. But, because it's a telco, that will be annoying and hidden.
UK: OFCOM are phasing out the fax support requirement https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-and-broadband/telecoms-infra...
(I slightly balked at the $5 initial price, but then realized: this is a desperation fee and I think for a lot of the users a clear fee for a clear one off service is the best deal. Anyone who wants to send 1,000 faxes will (a) be in the top 1% of fax users in their country if it's not Japan and (b) make their own arrangements. Also patio11's "charge more")
Software wise, if you have a PBX line (which the telco will change for) you can run Asterix and then https://www.asterisk.org/products/add-ons/fax-for-asterisk/ to send as many faxes as you like to the other person in your country with a fax machine.
I was hesitant to add my own but I think you might find it interesting as we make money not from clients but from grants.
We have IronCalc[1]. We don't make money from customers as we don't have a finalized product yet. But we have an ongoing grant from the NLnet[2]. You can have a look at the kind of projects they are granting money. It's always a source of inspiration.
That being said IronCalc takes a lot of time from me. Way more than a side project should.
[1]: https://www.ironcalc.com
[2]: https://nlnet.nl/project/IronCalc/
The friction to try it out is already really low, I like that! But it could be even lower if instead of an image the interactive version is served right on the landing page. Great project!
This is lovely! I'm surprised I had never heard of it before today
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).
Do you delete the uploaded photos after you've finished processing? The privacy policy does not make this clear.
https://headsnap.io/privacy
Alternately that their presence doesn't grant any rights for other use would be a good clause which I didn't spot.
I remove the photos only if requested by the user. The photos are removed immediately, as well as the account if that is requested too. I definitely do not use the pics for retraining or any other purpose, but just to serve them on the individual overview page of the user.
I get 404 when I look for pricing of headsnap - https://headsnap.io/pricing
thanks a lot for the heads up! That menu shouldn't be available for users that are not logged in. I just pushed a change to hide it. You can check the prices at the bottom of the landing page, before I add a dedicated page for unauthenticated users.
LE: I just added the pricing page for unauthenticated users too.
Headsnap is such a scammy and/or crappy website. I paid to purchase credits for $5, tried to train a model to generate a headshot. Nothing. It just refreshes and comes back with nothing. Will not recommend.
When did you do it? The minimum package is $8. If you did this in the past, why didn't you reach out for support? I get more than 100 customers per day and rarely have issues.
ah now I see you generated your pics 8 minutes ago. You can now see them on your account page. I have a clear disclaimer that says it can take up to 30 mins to generate the photos and that you will get an email once the photos are ready.
You probably need to add some visual indicator that the generation is ongoing. A progress bar is ideal, but those can be hard to feed with real data.
Thanks! I wanted to implement something like that, but it's difficult to predict the progress since it's depending on how many requests are being handled in that exact moment, but it never got past 25 minutes, not even during peak hours. I am thinking of adding a modal saying that you can close the page and you will get notified over email when the photo generation is ready (the email part is already there).
Thirty minutes? Polaroid film could do it in five.
30 pictures? I doubt
Do you think it will become more difficult to make money on such services due to AI getting better and better at coding? Like, wouldn’t that make it easier for people to create competing services?
Or do you think this effect is counteracted with AI also opening up for new opportunities for creating services that would not otherwise be feasible pre AI?
I agree that development has become easier and the barrier for entry is generally lower due to AI. However, without distribution it's still pretty much impossible to get clients. You also need to have some engineering background since AI cannot solve everything for you.
Important to mention, IMHO not many people are willing to sacrifice their time and energy to start something that doesn't have a clear path to profitability.
What's your source and/or quality of the financial data? How much do you cover? What data fields do you provide?
I fetch those from 10-Q forms through an internal scraper I built. The response is quite big, you can check it out here: https://www.quantiq.live/docs
Wow! how do you make marketing for so many projects?
It's the most difficult part. In my experience paid ads do not work very well so I am not relying too much on those. I usually use social media with UGC videos created either by me or by content creators. I also reach out on Instagram, even dating apps, to users and pay them to use/promote a product.
Recently I started to use n8n automation to post on Twitter/LinkedIn, however I tend to keep those posts short since they are created with LLM's and do not seem authentic.
As for the SEO part, I usually upload search console extracts into Perplexity deep research and ask for actions on how to improve ranking for different keywords.
really inspiring! Any tips on how you manage incidents and customer queries?
thanks! Most of these projects are hosted on Vercel, and I am extensively using their observability solution to get alerts when something unexpected happens. After some time you get to fix everything and you'll spend less time firefighting.
For customer queries, I usually respond myself. However when I am not available, I have a small team of freelancers that help me just with that. I played with LLMs for responding to questions, but it just didn't work out for me.
A friend and I host a monthly dinner club for people interested in ethnic cuisine. We work with a single restaurant each month to create an 8-12 course all inclusive price fixe menu. The food is served family style and is authentic to the region we are hosting. We typically host the dinners on a Tues or Wed when the restaurants in our region aren’t too busy and could use the extra business.
Since 2023 we’ve been to 44 restaurants. In 2025 we served 1,099 guests and generated $126k in revenue.
https://www.deadchefssociety.com/
This is so cool! As someone who loves trying out new restaurants I need to ask: why would I go with you guys instead of going to the restaurants myself with a friend or partner? Looking around your website it seems to me that there's very large attendance, which in my mind means generally less focus on the food itself. Do you think one of the main factors is meeting new people/the sense of community? Anyway good job! I'm not sure what your margins are but it's probably more than 500/month! Congrats!
Out of curiosity, if you don't mind sharing, what is the sort of profit you see on that 126,000 as i'm assuming alot of that goes to paying the restaurants?
Love the communal aspect. Curious about the economics of this, how do you typically split revenue with the restaurant, and what’s the average ticket price per guest?
I am also curious on that
this actually is a great idea!
https://www.youhere.org: "Want to know who showed up?" is the tag line. It's an app-based attendance service for teachers/coaches/band directors/conference organizers, etc. I'm a teacher and it scratches an itch I had (students not showing up to class). Been hitting the $500/month more and more often now (even after server fees).
Last year, I came across NotebookLM and immediately noticed a pain point: importing the web pages I was browsing into NotebookLM required several steps. So in less than a day, I developed this Chrome extension: NotebookLM Web Importer[1], which allows for one-click importing. As NotebookLM has gained popularity this year, my extension has also seen great growth. So, in July, I added paid premium features to unlock additional features. It exceeded my expectations and quickly went over $500 a month. It now has over 100,000 users and is still growing.
[1] https://notebooklm-web-importer.com
I really liked your extension having used it in the past. Great job and really useful! If you don't mind me asking, how do you manage the paid features from a technical point of view? Do you give paid users a token to enter in the extension which then activates certain features or is it something else?
It is account based, and I'm using Clerk for the auth.
That sounds awesome. Can you please talk about which premium options you added?
I’m still selling Computer Engineering for Babies. And I just launched a new book called Simple Machines Made Simple on Kickstarter a month or two ago. Both books are basically just simple interactive demos for kids and adults.
https://hackylabs.com
I have this book for my kid and love it!
I am commenting on this so i will fi d it easy when i will need to buy a present for one of my friends’ babies. :)
Literally the first book I bought for my hellspawn. We had fun working out the mechanisms.
I got gifted Computer Engineering for Babies and big Babies last Christmas in preparation for having our first child :) They are great!
My kid got a copy of your first book as a gift a couple years ago. It's really fun to have on the shelf. The buttons are so satisfyingly clicky. Thanks!
Thanks for buying it!!
I bought two copies of Computer Engineering For Babies for some close friends! They were absolutely delightful.
I always see your ads. My first baby is expected to be born next year and I cannot wait to buy it for her
Bought probably 6 copies between the first and second. Love this book! First gets stuck in NOT mode sometimes but it’s chill.
Yeah, I’ve improved it a lot, but a lot of the books from the run I did 18 months ago get confused on the cover page thinking it’s open to the NOT page.
Oh man this sounds so cool!! Ive always wanted to make a childrens book.
Occasionally $500/month, but more reliably $300/month in sales of my Video Hub App - lets users browse, search, tag, and organize videos on local / network drives. Aiming to have an 8th anniversary release February 2026.
$5 per copy (Windows, Max, Linux; keep forever) https://videohubapp.com/
MIT open source (build your own copy) https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App
Intel macs only?
Not OP, but it looks like the wording of their downloads page (https://videohubapp.com/en/download/) is slightly confusing:
- Clicking “Demo” (for macOS) points to the 3.2.0 ARM version
- Clicking “Intel Mac” points to the 3.1.0 (!) Intel version
The Github release page appears to list all available versions: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App/releases
To me, it would have been clearer to avoid the “Demo” button label altogether and be explicit about the different versions and OS targets. Also, I think the visual hierarchy of the two respective buttons is too subtle.
Curious how you manage licensing?
https://dbpro.app
I’m building DB Pro, a modern desktop database client for developers who want a fast, local-first workflow.
I started in October 2025, launched v1 at the end of November, and just crossed $1k MRR.
I also post devlogs of life building and marketing DB Pro and am about to post devlog #4. The latest one is here if anyone’s curious: https://youtu.be/-T4GcJuV1rM
Still very early, but it’s been fun seeing something fairly “boring” resonate once the UX is treated seriously.
Loved the design, looks better then the most tools I've tried. I'm using Prisma + Supabase in one of my side projects and having constant db issues. Can I integrate DB Pro? Will it replace Prisma or what?
So DB Pro is a local desktop database client for managing your databases and data. Prisma ORM it won't replace, but Prisma's browser-based data browser, yes it will absolutely replace that. It's not a replacement for Supabase, it works alongside it, if that answers your question?
I'm planning to extend DB Pro into much more than a database manager though, letting you build dashboards, workflows and workbooks.
Hi! When will Windows/Linux be available? I'm growing weary of DB Browser for SQLite.
Windows and Linux are both launching next week (just in time for Xmas!)
Any reason why neon isn't supported even though it speaks the postgresql wire protocol?
It has some behaviour differences (connection handling, pooling, serverless constraints) that I want to support properly rather than “mostly works”. Right now I'm focused on making the core experience rock solid across the most common setups first. My focus has been UX and DevEx and it's working.
Neon support is on the roadmap though, and once I add it, it’ll be first-class rather than a checkbox integration.
Looks cool and congrats on the $1k MRR! Is the app built with electron?
Thanks!
Yep, it’s built with Electron. Performance has been a big focus from day one, and it’s been really performant in all of my testing so far. The goal was a proper desktop-first experience with local performance and direct database access, rather than trying to force it into a web app. Although I do have plans to offer a self-hosted version as well.
I launched Filestash [1] as my response to the infamous “Dropbox should just be FTP” comment. Once I had a decent FTP experience, I kept going: adding support for pretty much every storage protocol, plugins to expose Dropbox (or anything else) over FTP, SFTP, MCP, or S3, and all the features I wished Dropbox had, with plugins to customize everything.
The base product is open-source and I make money from custom builds, additional plugins, paid support, and the occasional extra feature for companies with specific needs. It's a bit more than noodle profitable but quite under a normal salary.
[1] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash
Launched "Cadence: Guitar Theory" (https://cadenceguitar.com/) a guitar learning app with a focus on music theory in September.
Currently right above that $500/month when including lifetime purchases. Had a sizeable bump in October thanks to blowing up on here which also gave me an app store boost so thanks guys :)
I'm working on new lessons at the moment, after that I'll probably try to improve on the animations and sound effects to give the app more "juice", should be a fun thing to work on. Also still trying to figure out marketing and how to get visibility overall...
My wife's Etsy shop (https://www.etsy.com/shop/LittleLanternShop) is starting to pick up. She is leaning into creating digital sewing patterns for decorative felt crafts. We have had Etsy success before with 3d printed products, but managing printers and fulfilling orders can be stressful and time consuming, and she was hoping to build up a more passive income stream. She made over $1000 in the past month, which beat both our expectations
(We'll get back into 3d printing once life slows down a _little_ bit again)
Any tips on that? My wife is starting her Etsy shop (https://www.etsy.com/shop/BravinaPrints) but she is not really getting any visits and still trying to figure out what kind of stuff she wants to draw.
Nice one! I love the Our Lady of Lourdes patterns.
How have you promoted it so far?
Yeah, these are super fun! Good luck!
Wanted to teach my little brother about logic gates. Saw that for him to truly grasp the idea of it, he needed some "hands on" experience to develop the intuition about it. I decided to develop a PCB board that basically turns-on-off the lights based on the inputs. He was like "cool" and kind of threw it in the corner. Rather than just leave it, I decided to further develop it and make it as a learning tool for myself as well(web design, marketing, BOM optimization etc).
Then I started to get feedback on the initial project which was quite helpful(universities, EEVBlog and colleagues) and based on that made a "Logic Trainer" which is like very advanced version of the initial idea. It has so many features and it kind of has taken off in a sense that 2 universities want to buy it for themselves. Also I didn't expect it but most people who buy it do it for their kids. IMHO its way too complicated for kids, but practice and feedback that I have gotten shows that it really isn't. I haven't made any profits from the project yet (due to high development cost) but hopefully in the future it help to pay my rent :).
Check out the website at https://logicgat.es
I run OnlineOrNot - https://OnlineOrNot.com
It started as just an uptime checker for websites, eventually I added support for APIs and cron jobs, and automated status pages (you may have seen this one yesterday: https://hackernews.onlineornot.com/)
I started it in 2021, I give it two hours a day before work every workday, and I cut scope on most features to ensure they're shippable in two hours. Then I iterate. It works because it's default-alive. I keep a full time job to be able to build it exactly how I want.
Like my React blog, I started it knowing thousands of others were doing the same thing. I made a bet that my unique perspective would be useful to others, and it paid off.
Has been above $500/mo since 2022, growing steadily since (still a few years away from being able to replace my salary).
Humadroid (https://humadroid.io) - AI-Assisted SOC 2 & ISO 27001 compliance for small teams. $125/month flat (for now, during beta).
Recently crossed the $500/month mark after a painful pivot from HR tech earlier this year. The whole thing started because I did ISO 27001 back in 2019 and was completely lost - overpaid for consultants, got lost with policies and controls, figured it out the hard way.
Passed SOC 2 Type I earlier this year using only Humadroid (yes, dogfooding a compliance tool through an actual audit was... an experience).
Currently finishing automated evidence collection (AWS and GitHub integrations first). Pretty proud of that one - compliance shouldn't mean "panic-screenshot everything before audit."
Really cool stuff, I thought about launching something similar earlier this year, there's definitely a market there. I see a lot of AI-ative startups coming up against compliance requirements way earlier than before, with much smaller teams, and most existing solutions just need too much from you as you engage.
How do you see yourself against someone like delve.co?
Honestly, Delve is great. Them and Compai are leading the front of modern AI-assisted compliance right now. I'm chasing them.
What I'm trying to do differently is depth of context. Humadroid learns about your company first - how you operate, your stack, your processes. From there it generates control descriptions that are actually actionable for your setup, and policies that need minimal review rather than a full rewrite.
Whether that's enough differentiation? Ask me in a year.
Not clear on site if it integrates third parties for test automation.
Not yet - but literally finishing this week. Promised a customer I'd ship it before Christmas, so that's been my deadline.
AWS and GitHub integrations first. It auto-fetches and verifies the data (where applicable), creating read-only evidence snapshots. No manual screenshots or "I swear this config was set correctly" moments during audits.
Part of the standard price - no integration tier upsell.
What's the USP over something like Vanta/Drata (aside the cost being much lower currently)?
The big difference is context-awareness. Vanta/Drata give you templates and checklists. Humadroid starts by understanding your company - what you actually do, how you operate, your tech stack.
From there, the AI generates policies that are yours, not generic docs with [COMPANY NAME] placeholders. Same with control descriptions - they're specific and actionable for your setup, not "implement access control" with no context. It also identifies risks based on what you actually do and helps build business continuity plans around your real critical processes.
You still review everything (it's compliance, not magic), but you're editing 80% done work instead of staring at a blank template wondering where to start.
The price difference is real too, but honestly that's a side effect of being early and solo - not the core value prop.
Gotcha. And then how does that translate into the audit process? Because Vanta/Drata have auditors they work with regularly, there's a bit of an incentive on both sides to use these templates because then it speeds up that part tremendously. I can't imagine the auditors being happy about really diving into hyper bespoke documents for every audit.
Your product seems great for actually doing the spirit of these frameworks (reducing risk, improving controls and processes etc.). However from what I've seen the reality of these audits is it's a box ticking exercise for everyone involved, and so improving the efficiency there tends to be the goal. How do you position yourself in that?
Also hope this doesn't come off too critical, it's just something I've been through recently and love seeing new things! I'd definitely add a vanta/drata comparison to your website though as that is inevitable.
Honestly, great questions - this is either good exercise for me or actionable feedback. Both valuable.
Right now I recommend auditors but don't have formal partnerships. Vanta/Drata's auditor relationships are... let's say on the edge of conflicted? I don't want to go that route. And at $250/month I can't play the referral game anyway (Vanta pays hundreds per referral - that math doesn't work for me).
What I can do is democratize access. I've watched too many small teams get excited about SOC 2, then ghost once they see the total cost - $15k+ for the platform, $20k+ for consultants, $15k+ for auditors. I want the barrier low enough that smaller businesses can actually get certified and compete with bigger players.
On the checkbox vs. real security thing - you're right, it's tricky. I don't want to be another "generate docs, tick boxes, forget until next audit" platform. But targeting smaller businesses actually helps here - when you're a 10-person company, management is in the compliance process, not just signing off on someone else's work. It tends to stick better.
That said, sometimes I wonder if I help too much. My System Description assistant is almost unfair - what used to take weeks now takes minutes. Is that checkbox-enabling or democratizing? Genuinely not sure.
And yes - "vs Vanta/Drata" pages are going on the list. You're not the first to ask.
https://dreamandcolor.com/ has been a fun solo bootstrapped side project for me for the past 2.5ish years - (specialize in converting photos to coloring pages for parents, educators, etc)
I started it primarily wanting to take a shot at productizing an image diffusion model (Stable Diffusion 1.5 when I started) in a novel (at the time) way and it ended up growing legs of it's own.
She's steadily chugging along, growing about 10-20% per month with minimal marketing, exceeding all expectations I had for the project when I set out
Well done! How does it compare to using built-in image models like nano banana?
You can get great results with nano banana nowadays (ex: "convert this image to a coloring page") - I'd say we focus on 1. consistency with our base style from image to image, 2. likeness (still really tough to get 100% right but we've come a long way since our MVP) and 3. offering fun alternatives (South Park inspired coloring pages, Minecraft style, etc)
We also handle all the post-processing (upscaling, image cleaning, etc) that you need in order to get great printed results - with Gemini (Nano Banana) or ChatGPT you've got to pull each image out, possibly remove the watermark, set the curves/levels in photoshop/gimp, upscale it, etc then print the page - you can just hit Export and download a pdf ready to print from our site
Here’s my own side project that’s been earning a bit on the side:
I built DedupX, a macOS app for finding duplicate and visually similar files fast - especially useful for photographers and anyone with big local storage collections.
What it does
- Exact duplicate detection using incremental hashing so it doesn’t have to fully load huge files.
- Perceptual image matching finds similar images even if they’re resized or lightly edited (not just byte-for-byte duplicates).
- Native macOS integration with a Finder right-click scan.
Why I built it: My brother kept running out of space because of tons of photos, and every existing tool I tried either missed similar images or was slow and clunky - so I spent a couple of weekends building something that felt fast, accurate, and native.
Business side
- Free trial (no CC required).
- Paid tiers: ~$5.99/yr or ~$16.99 lifetime.
Got positive feedback and 100+ paying users shortly after launch. Been growing steadily ever since.
Link: https://maheepk.net/projects/dedupx/
Smart and affordable app.
https://canine.sh - makes it dead simple to turn your Kubernetes environment into a Heroku like PaaS.
Mainly used in organizations with developers who want to deploy to a corporate Kubernetes environment, but don’t want to deal with the complexities.
It’s fully open source so we’re covered by sponsors, the largest being Portainer $5k+ / m from sponsorships.
Makes it possible to keep the cloud offering totally free.
Is canine for kubernetes as coolify is for docker? Lovely!
You know what, that’s a better way to describe it than I’ve ever been able to come up with!
Holy cow! That’s exactly what I’ve been looking for my homelab.
Give me a shout if you need help setting it up!
On the discord, or chris@ canine<dot>sh
https://cluesbysam.com
I started making a daily logic puzzle called Clues by Sam in May and it's been stadily growing since. The number one thing people were asking for was more puzzles, so I started selling puzzle packs instead of monetizing with ads. The reception has been great, and the revenue has been enough for me to decline some consulting gigs and instead focus on improving the game.
I love the puzzles, I played once and already got the Pack #1, it's a great game! As soon as I finish #1, I will for sure get #2!
Love it, I discovered it last week and bought a supporter pack after two days! Everytime I get stuck I'm 100% sure you made a mistake... Until I find my own mistake
Thank you so much! Indeed, it's quite tempting to blame the game, but the algorithm that ensures all valid deductions are enabled hasn't been wrong a single time since it was finished in June. Often I don't believe it myself, but it always turns out to be smarter than me!
Hi Sam
I made a public transportation departure board (for Switzerland) for your home or business.
https://stationdisplay.com/
This is pretty cool, can I ask why you decided to ship hardware and not a subscription to a dashboard that people could put on any mounted monitor?
Making almost exactly $500/mo on an Anki extension that embeds AI / text to speech / image gen deeply into the app, allowing you to generate example sentences, audio, explanations, etc, for whatever you’re studying, in bulk.
https://smart-notes.xyz
Still holding off on the show HN post for now; have a few more features and QoL things I’d like to add first.
It’s been an enormously gratifying project and I hear from users all around the world who have feature requests for their specific use cases. Easily the most fun I’ve had working on a project.
Save For Later – an AI-powered bookmark manager that resurfaces what you save
Link: https://saveforlater.pro
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-mathemat...
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 :)
lovely, bookmarked!
I run a Substack where I show programmers how to turn advanced math papers into C and Python code.
I'm a math guy who codes and I do it for fun. I'm shocked people are interested in this stuff.
LeetArxiv Substack: https://leetarxiv.substack.com/
2024 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42373343
2023 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38467691
2022 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34190421
2021 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29667095
2020 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24947167
2019 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20899863
2018 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17790306
2017 → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15148804
https://www.repth.com, an AI cycling coach that I vibe-coded back when gpt-3.5 was hot and vibe coding wasn't yet a thing. We've come a long way!
Free for athletes, but I license the underlying "coach" logic to actual, human coaches.
Neat! We made a similar thing years ago in the pre-AI era, with strong focus on detection of how the planned workouts were executed rather than making plan adjustments just on a single scalar metric (e.g. TSS). Didn't really go anywhere unfortunately.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1725424103/summit-train...
Congrats. This sounds like a great way to build a "wrapper" product. Gather clean data on a particular niche and keep it in one place. Have something that's good at processing that data. No matter what "startup killers" the big boys release, it's still resilient and valuable.
How does this compare to Trainer Road?
TR's "AI" claims are a bit of a stretch. It basically just monitors fatigue and will ramp down a prescribed workout to ensure you don't overtrain.
The workouts themselves are templates chosen from a list and do not adapt to the rider as an individual. It plugs in a standard periodization schedule with flexible dates.
Repth uses AI for everything with a few guardrails. You pick a peak date, describe your peak event, weekly availability, and ftp.
Repth then generates a macro plan, and the next week of workouts. As you perform, it will monitor for compliance and adjust the prescription depending on your compliance and feedback. All of it is unique per user, optimized for the demands of the specific event.
Overall, TR's approach is fine. Any plan can work as long as you stick to it. I built Repth simply to replace my (human) coach in 2022 and in that regard it has been a huge success
Still doing https://hackernewsletter.com/ after 15 years thanks to many of you.
freshly subscribed - had a peek in the archives, noticed a link to curpress.com that appears to be offline.
I subscribed last december after knowing about it in last year's version of this thread. It is great and gives a very good summary of the HN week, I love it!
About 8 years in, Escape Team steadily keeps growing, which surprises me (I didn’t add any new missions for about 5 years):
https://www.escape-team.com
It‘s making about $700 on iOS and $300 on Android, solely from $2.99 IAPs for the later missions in the game (the first 2 missions are free).
I think a main reason for this is that escape rooms (and games) don’t „saturate“: you play them only once, because then you know the solutions. So another escape room (place, game, app) doesn’t cannibalize the market - it may rather strengthen the others by fostering it as a group activity.
I also put 0$ into ads- it solely spreads itself by being a group activity (3-5 people are best) and through its mission editor (people can make their own missions, used in school and for birthdays etc).
Curious to see where it goes next!
The link to your community built missions is down.
Uh-oh, thank you!
https://fivethreeone.app/ a weightlifting app for 5/3/1 has been earning me ~$1000 a month for over two years now.
I'm actively working on a successor that allows you to create your own custom workout programs using formulas: https://vis.fitness
Love the AI generated image, "Extra-Large (>72pt) Font". Made me chuckle. Definetly a feature of the app.
But looks really cool ill be trialing it this week!
Send me an email (see my profile) if you want to try the custom program creation. I’m starting the beta this week.
Thank you for building this! I've been using the app for almost a year after I switched to the Boring But Big routine.
You’re very welcome. I’ve used it for more than 500 workouts myself, but now that I have young kids, I don’t have the time to do 5/3/1 anymore.
Wow this is pretty cool. I am working on my first mobile app. what tips can you give. I am planning to build in public on twitter, substack and share my coding process here on HN.
It is a carpooling app.
Don’t rely on organic App Store traffic until you’ve hit a certain size.
That looks very cool. Are you planning on adding Apple Watch integration?
I cannot stand having to fiddle with my phone while at the gym.
Yes (for Vis) but I have a medium size list of stuff I want to get to before I work on the watch app.
You can control it via Siri, though that only really works in a home gym
This app is not available for your device
I have a Pixel 6 Pro. That's not thaat old.
That's proper old
4 years. We really should support devices that old. Unless you really need features only available in newer models (which 99% of apps don't)
A Nexus 6 is proper old.
Did you do any marketing for fivethreeone?
I started with some Apple Search ads which worked pretty well and then did some IG ads which worked well too. I haven’t done any in a while though. Bing and Google ads had really bad results
What’s the sweet pup’s name?
Her name is Greta
Launched Standly, a standing desk companion app on iOS and Max in Feb 2025. Steadily grew it by talking to people on reddit and in person. Mostly word of mouth sales and ASO. Initially it was only for mac but launching iOS has been good. Most downloads coming from organic search. Most people like it to build stamina for standing and stretching while working, especially those with lower back pain. Most customers are from EU.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/standly-standing-desk-timer/id...
Disclaimer: I haven't make any money, YET.
I recently open-sourced my first ever tool! and I'm super excited about it guys
It's an HTTP request replay and comparison tool in Go. You can replay real traffic, compare multiple environments, detect broken endpoints, generate HTML/JSON reports, and analyze latency
It’s currently at v0.4, so I’d love any feedback, suggestions, or ideas for improvements. (Be gentle, I haven’t used Go professionally, however it’s my main language for personal projects )
https://github.com/kx0101/replayer
Here's the landing page too: https://www.replayer.online/
I think you should better post this separately, e.g. as “Show HN”. It’s off-topic for this thread (hence, I assume, the downvotes).
Not consistently, but there have been a few months this year where I have hit $500 selling individual commercial use licenses for my tiling window manager[1]
https://lgug2z.com/software/komorebi
Nice licensing
I'd buy it for a 20 USD one-time fee
The experiment is end-user mediated wealth redistribution from large corporations by leveraging reimbursement mechanisms, and so far I'm content with the results
I like this, bookmarked in case I'll ever be forced by work into MICROS~1 operating systems again.
https://mergecal.org - First project I built when learning Django a couple years back. Takes multiple iCal feed URLs, merges them into one feed. Turns out people actually need this!
cool project, but what on earth is going on with scrolling and back button?
I started my project in 2023 and posted here, made 20k that year. The traffic has been slowly decreasing during 2024, and last October, I was officially entering losing territory, where the cost of running it exceeded the total earnings (mostly due to free trials).
It's been a good journey. Thank you so much to whoever keeps running this thread!
how do you deal with continuous Google-degrading-risk?
I stopped a site lately i ran for 10 years, because Google changed the ranking so often over the years, finally traffic drowned nearly completely like 1k visitors per month, it was so frustrating so I just stopped the webserver after so many years.
What do you think led to the fall off?
Many reasons: 1) lack of marketing, 2) I stopped working on it for a while, 3) because of #2, the app lacks new features to attract users.
Another one but turned out it was never really a big deal: some chatbots from frontier AI labs started to support those niche features (people still coming to my app for the flexibility of using multiple AI models).
I think the biggest problem was #2, life kept pulling me the other way.
Just signed our 3rd customer with TrueCast (600€/month) (https://www.truecast.fr/), which is Granola for tech and non-tech recruiters. Rather than replacing recruiters in the HR process, we want to give them real time hard skills knowledge superpowers so they can better assess candidates before submitting them to their teams. We are convinced that recruiting should remain human-first.
There’s also a bot option, for self-conducted interviews, mostly used for open applications for some pre-filtering.
We are still unsure on how to enter such market, so we are doing direct networking atm, if you guys have an idea on how you’d do it or want a free trial of the product we’d love having a chat with you about it.
I'm…
Oh, making or losing $500/month?
Never mind.
Only $500? Time to increase the number of nodes in your side projects Kubernetes cluster.
I think most ideas should start with the “equivalent” of a cgi bin script and domain name before going crazy with infrastructure. Scaling is so much more fun when customers are maxing out what you have now and improvements lead to direct customer impact.
Misery loves company. I am certainly intrigued to see what is out there.
its just about turnover ;-)
I created Multy 5 years ago. Thanks to a post on HN at that time, it was a small success (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25870504)
Since then, I continue to maintain the website and I have around 50k lists, 8k users, and around 400€ MRR (ads and subscriptions).
I'd love to see more users, but I'm glad of what I did with multy !
If you want to check: https://multy.me
how do you deal with spam/abuse?
Dashboard and moderation. I created an admin dashboard to check users and lists and can easily delete / ban users.
Right now it's fine with the number of lists created per day
I run a keywords research tool, it scans posts across social media sites like bluesky, mastodon, hackernews, etc.
KeywordsPal.com
It's actually super interesting the technical aspects to scan 50k posts a day for as cheap as possible. I write about it here: https://keywordspal.com/blog/building-multi-platform-content...
I also built it as a result of being unsatisfied with f5bot
My product NumeroMoney (https://www.numeromoney.com) is the first I've built that makes over $500, and it's grown surprisingly quickly. I built it because I needed something simpler that the existing solutions I could find for understanding our families spending (YNAB etc were geared too much towards budgeting). It helps users to import and categorize bank statement transactions in a way that makes it really easy to make decisions about household spending.
We're a group of developers who worked together years ago. We meet a few times a year, but scheduling is always a hassle with endless back-and-forth trying to align everyone's calendars. Frustrated by this, I built Troviamo to solve it automatically. I know similar tools exist, but this one is modern and tailored to exactly what we needed.
https://troviamo.app
https://stockevents.app
Created around 2019 and have recently moved it from side project to main job.
https://stockevents.app
Created around 2019 and have recently moved it from side project to main job.
I make https://universymbols.com and it’s still new, but off to a good start. It can create/restyle feature icons to expand an app’s icon set.
It supports SF Symbols, Material Symbols, and a bunch of open source styles, but I’m adding the ability to make a private custom style target.
It's just been a month since I set up a proper website, and I've already received my first $ 500 in a side gig. The jobs started before I set up the website.
I help businesses automate their admin work if they already use Google Workspace products using App Script and Typescript.
https://mereth.dev/
I've got 2 that are kind of intermingled. Each averages a little over $500/mo on their own though.
Sportsbook API (https://sportsbookapi.com/) - A single API to get odds data from a number of US Sportsbooks
Odds Assist Pro (http://pro.oddsassist.com/) - An odds scanner tool that shows both current odds and things like arbitrage, plus ev, middles. This actually started as just a UI for me to quickly do sanity checks on the API data and eventually grew into a full site. The site is on a subdomain of a site my business partner had built long before we met, so it's kind of positioned as the plus version of that site.
API revenue is really stable and has been pretty consistent slow growth. Pro's revenue is all over the place since it's almost all referrals and promos with big spikes around major sporting events. Probably averages at least $500/mo if you look at the entire year.
I have been building an iOS net worth tracker app as a side project for more than 5 years now:
https://www.percento.app
I was an accountant for 3 years before I switched my career to be a programmer, then I kept coding for 10+ years in big tech companies and had always wanted to build a product on my own. Eventually, I found the niche to combine my finance knowledge and my iOS skills into this App and happily building for a few years.
Can I share data with my partner? I’ve been looking for a way to help my partner understand where we at money-wise.
ah sorry currently there is no share data feature although I've heard this feature request from time to time, I probably should consider implementing this later. The premium membership can be shared with family members though -- one purchase for all members.
I’ve created Pixie, a platform to employ and track your kids work. For families with a business, it helps reduce tax burden and fund a child’s Roth.
I’m a physician with some 1099 income, built the platform myself because my kids help with my side projects, and have since onboarded CPAs who now offer it to their clients. I saved 5k this year on my own taxes by employing my kids and it has funded their Roth.
Soon after launching, I crossed the $500/month mark.
Link:https://trypixie.com
What is the maximum amount a kid can earn yearly?
I'm building a "mail merge for PowerPoint": - https://pptxmailmerge.com
Still in MVP mode - but it already made some sales.
What's different about it from similar solutions is the way you can get data from an Excel file (most other companies have the JSON and CSV figured out).
It supports Excel style addressing so it's pretty flexible on how you reach for the data inside a PowerPoint template (access every sheet, every cell, named range or table to use it in merging process).
People use it for various kinds of use-cases - creating certificates, automating pricing offers, delivering employee feedback forms, preparing market research presentations and even subtitles for a theatrical play.
I run SideProjectors - https://www.sideprojectors.com - a marketplace where people can buy/sell their side projects and businesses. I've been running it for over 14 years now.
interesting! how is it going? what’s the average price tag for such projects?
I sell laser cut decorative maps
TheMapsGuy.com
What's your laser setup? 80-100W CO2 laser?
I use a CO2 laser yeah
If you use LightBurn, hi from the team!
Wow! I was using LightBurn this evening for some holiday presents. Hello from a very thankful MacOS user.
These look nice. If I request a custom city, how long would it take?
These are gorgeous. Nice work.
Not quite a side project, but I launched CoPlay about 3 years ago. Slow but steady growth up to 6k MRR for 2025. I think we will just about double that in 2026.
CoPlay is a platform for managing fleets of gaming consoles, users and subscriptions for pediatric hospitals. Think of it as an mdm for Xbox devices/users that does managed subscriptions
https://coplay.io/
Not sure if blogging, collecting blogs, and interviewing people about blogging is considered a side project but ever now and again, depending on how generous the people on the other side are, I hit 500/month in donations.
Everything I do is free for everyone but for the past few years I’ve been running an entirely optional membership program that starts at $1/month.
I’m (probably naively) a big believer in kindness and I keep refusing to monetize what I do in any other way.
Been doing a YouTube channel on Python for Finance for quite a while and make some affiliate revenue: https://youtube.com/@parttimelarry
Oh, it's you! One of my favorite channels on YouTube. Learnt Alpaca and TA-Liband backtesting from you and also built my screener with your vids. Awesome content always. I am looking to go through the IB ones soon.
Jesus, 130k++ subscribers, WOW!!!!
This is a huge success!!! Im also in this field, never thought that you could collect so many people on this niche topic!
If you say: some affiliates - think about getting a sponsoring partner for some B2B stuff, and speak the advertorial by yourself(!), one slot per one video/show. In my country we have a small but good&nerdy startup podcast run by two guys - they do advertising this way, mainly B2B tech stuff (accounting software etc.) - in an interview recently, they unveiled their numbers - per slot (20-25 seconds) they get 8k - 10k. And they have a couple of slots per month.
Sadly not $500/mo, but I do get a few sales on https://dailychinesestories.com each month. It's as simple as it sounds - a story in Chinese at your HSK level for your preferred themes once a day.
https://www.jamp-audio.com I started making audio plugins for iOS 2 years ago. I'm making about $300/month.
I designed a pocket music instrument. I partnered with a company in China called Seeedstudio, they do the manufacturing, shipping, customer handling, etc. and I receive royalties on each sale. I varies from month to month, but above the 500$/month on 2025 :)
I love to be able to focus on the design and not the practicalities of selling a hardware product!
https://minichord.com/
Building version 3 of a front-end SaaS application that services proprietary models for analyzing securities, events/catalysts, etc. I am taking what I have learned from 5 years of users asking questions and basically redoing everything.
This version will hopefully provide a bot free / pump free replacement for iHub, StockTwits, Twitter, etc. to people who manage money professionally or otherwise.
Assuming I get more free time to finish it that is.
Version 2 is live here.
www.gravityanalytica.com
The two products Chat and Horizon both make more than $500/month individually.
This is a just side project. I run a family office.
For those of you who are in your 20s keep it up. In your 40s getting free time can be a real challenge.
https://unrav.io . Lets users reshape any article, paper, or video into the form that actually helps them think, mind-maps, summaries, podcasts, or interactive Q&A. Launched as part of the Bolt.new hackathon in August and growing steadily. Going from a 100% vibe coded web app to a full production system has been quite a ride!
Got two websites but the second one is basically a clone of the first with better visuals and better tech stack that I actually want to work on
https://aieasypic.com - 3k per month (declining cause not working on it a lot, just maintenance) https://bestphoto.ai - 2k per month (increasing cause of better SEO)
Now trying my hand at an actual non-consumer product, not that b2b but something to make making ads easy because that’s where I find myself getting stuck on when doing fb ads or TikTok organic stuff : https://admakeai.com
Formester started as a side hustle but today we make $7000/month.
All I wanted was to build a good product which our users feel like using. Help them with exceptional customer service and build a team and a company worth waking up to.
But you didn’t say what you are making!
https://formester.com/ Easiest way to build powerful forms
This is huge, actually I have used this before the free version, is this a 'side-project' or do you have some staff because it seems a big operation. Nice job.
Around 3K/m with my side projects: https://tools.dsebastien.net
Revenue from courses, apps, community, books...
Still not able to pay myself anything though
I work on https://theblue.social which provides Bluesky native tools and cross-posting tools.
So, if these posts come at the same time each year, and IDs are consecutive, then
And the delta is Has HN peaked?I'm pretty sure that the peak b/w 2020 and 2023 was a temporary boost induced by COVID-19.
Everything comes and goes. HN is no exception. With that in mind does it matter for you? Are you here because HN is at its peak? If commenting here makes you life better a bit keep doing that. If not then just don't and go somewhere else. Or stop using the internet altogether and just became goat farmer. Do what makes you happy and not what crowd thinks will make you happy!
Crafting CSVs is what makes me happy.
We're on the verge of an unprecedented economic crisis.
Just over $500 in subscriptions right now since posting on HackerNews and Reddit.
This is mostly because of the posts gaining high engagement and people signing up and subscribing. Many also migrating from other apps.
Expecting the revenue to go down next month
https://onlyrecipeapp.com
https://codeapprove.com
Basically it’s a code review UI on GitHub for ex-Googlers who miss Critique.
Can we establish a convention?
If you sold $500p/m and had costs of zero, then you made $500.
If you sold $500p/m and had costs of $450 p/m then you made $50p/m
I know the saas people have high margins, but some of the commenters clearly have a much lower margin
Angry Scam Altman noises who "made" 20 Billion by spending 100 Billion
Started Find Boxes in 2024, it's a project and inventory management tool for audio visual companies. Took longer than expected to get the first customers, but I'm a bit above $300 a month now. I hope to cross the $500 a month mark sometime next year.
https://www.findboxes.co
This app looks really cool. Did you developed also an ios app for it? It would be much easier to do all the task in an app.
My friends and I are working on Norma. It helps you curate a dataset that captures as much signal as possible for model training.
See norma.grouplabs.ca
My parter and I made a fun erotic story generator called Smitten (https://smittenstories.com ) during the valentine's day weekend as a way for couples to spice things up.
Initially it was running on donations, but with model costs rising we had to add a paywall. I have a full time job but it's still fun to run this on the side by spending few hours on it over the weekends!
I'm at year 1.5 and built this software for making small art books
https://zine.baby
The goal is to make physical books. It's still early days, but fun to see what people are creating.
I see no indications of any revenue?
Made PrivacyPolicyURL.com => get a live URL for all the forms asking for it in under a minute.
I sell photographic prints. A breakdown of income and costs for this year can be found here: https://leejo.github.io/2025/11/01/print_costs/
TL;DR? It's a grind, an absolute grind.
does negative 500 count?
Right about $500 now, down from $5K at peak
AI assistant in your iMessage group chats https://olly.bot
I have a variety of education (books, courses) and run fintech SaaS, which combined are finally providing around $2K/month in profits since around July this year (for a long time, was hovering around that $500 mark)
My first successful SaaS, The Wheel Screener, a screener optimized for selling options: https://wheelscreener.com
A sister spin-off LEAPS Screener, for buying LEAPS options: https://leapsscreener.com
And, just launched in November, but already profitable, VannaCharm, a dashboard to view and watch in real time dealer hedging metrics: https://vannacharm.com
Looking to launch 1-2 more SaaS in 2026, trying to get to the point where I can do this full-time, let's get it folks!
Trendyzip.com Home sale trends to help buyers make informed decisions. A basic report is $5
Courses and books about Python, Pandas, XGBoost, Visualization, and soon AI
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.