My work came up with a bonus structure around a certain set of industry certifications. I looked at all the certifications available and worked out a strategy to max the bonus each year. It comes out to about $2.5k/month.
So my side hustle is studying and taking tests. Over the last 5 years or so of taking tests + investing I’ve built a nice chunk of change set aside to help pay for college for my two boys (age 14 and 16).
The scoring system is complicated but it comes down to passing about 4 new ones per year and then passing the renewal exams for all my current certs. Each exam takes about a month for me to be ready, maybe a total of 40 or so hrs. I have a family and my day job is very demanding so not a lot of free time.
There’s about 60-70 available certifications but they have various prerequisite certs so you can’t just go down the list. I was fortunate in that when the bonus structure first came out I had a lot of experience but not many certs so it was easy at first but now I’m running out of certs to get that are related to my actual day job.
However, I get the feeling the cert bonus thing is going to be cancelled next FY anyway. Sucks but at least I maxed it every year it was available and I have probably 75% of college for my kids paid for.
I do actually enjoy them and they’re pretty much all in my wheel house. Well I enjoy them when I have plenty of time to sit down with a cup of coffee and study. A few times I’ve been under basically deadline pressure to get the exams passed in time to qualify for the bonus, that’s not fun at all. Over about 20 certification attempts I’ve only failed one :) (they’re all pass/fail).
Pretty basic ones, I got into AI images cause of that viral AI avatars thing that levelsio made 2-3 years back and have just been iterating on that idea(even though I think if I went into the AI text side of things, I'd have been much bigger at this point):
https://admakeai.com - Recently got this to 800 MRR , kinda trying to make it the main thing since the LTV on it is the highest. So if I could just figure out ads, this has the highest potential
https://aieasypic.com - First project that I made that made money from subs vs making money from ads, whole reason I continued to indiehack. Its kinda dying but core users still bring in 3-4k/mo , altho actual MRR is 1k/mo
https://bestphoto.ai - Made this after I got frustrated from the bad decisions I made on above, basically a tech rewrite + clone + simplification of aieasypic. Currently makes the most but at a lower margin than aieasypic. Not gonna say exact numbers, but lets say 5k+/mo
Two weeks ago, I released the tactical map-based WW2 submarine sim Silent Shark (which I got feedback on from HN for beta test a few months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48180924 ) and it's gone extremely well for a side project - I've had over 100 Steam reviews, 99% of them are positive, and I have sold a few thousand copies so far.
I began working on this game just 6 months ago and have only worked on it in my spare time in evenings and on weekends, instead of playing computer games. I made the early decision to use Codex for 100% of the coding, that has been a phenomenal experience.
The only Image Gen AI I've used has been to clean up 2 old and weathered historical maps I found, to make them readable.
Still have over 25,000 Steam wishlists and growing. I'm super thankful and having a blast.
A friend and I host a monthly dinner club for people interested in exploring ethnic cuisine on Long Island. We work with one restaurant each month to create an 8-12+ course all inclusive price fixe menu. The food is usually served family style (the ambitious ones individually plate everything) and is authentic to the region we are hosting. We typically host the dinners on a Tues and Wed when the restaurants in our region aren’t too busy and could use business.
We started this in 2023 with 13 of our friends as guests. Since then the group has grown to over 1,200 members and well beyond our circle of friends. August was our 52 second restaurant. In 2025 we served 1,099 guests and generated $126k in revenue.
Love this idea! Any time I visit a place that specializes in a cuisine I'm not familiar with, I tend to struggle with what to order because I don't want to commit to just one entree. Having a curated tour of tastes, so to speak, targeted to folks exploring the cuisine would be absolutely perfect. Wonderful!
The world is changed - given the low cost of reverse engineering and implementation, it would be product suicide to openly call out a money making product.
I don't expect too many actual >500$ moneymaking projects to be listed. Would love to be proven wrong.
Yeah, the only time I see people talking about money-making side projects is when it's practically impossible to copy them. I can't see the advantage of bragging about a side project if the threat of losing marketshare for it is on the table.
My side project isn't software and doesn't make $500/mo, but I still just don't talk about it.
My side-project makes money because it's in a specific niche: It requires trust that the service will still operate tomorrow, and the fact that it's been going for nearly 20 years is a selling point you can't just have Claude copy.
It helps that it's cheap, I guess, but it also operates in a market small enough that anything with less than minimal time commitment will lose money. That's why there are tens of former competitors who have all shut down now.
My first instinct was that side projects can’t make good money anymore. Monthly new repos on Github increased 5x. Also any good project can be cloned immediately. Maybe people
here can confirm if it’s a good time to start indie projects.
I also feel the same all the masterclass about making money using x,y,z is either showing things in past which no longer work or very steep upfront cost/efforts.
I offer some absolutes in reply and would also love to be proven wrong.
The cost of engineering and implementation has always been low. Passive income has always been a subtle lie. The money has always been in providing a well-supported service.
No customer has ever cared about implementation details beyond what is outlined in the contracts they have with you and the nth-order effects of the contracts they are under with their own clients.
Advertising is the opposite of suicide, but since we have so much negativity on HN in the past few years this is no longer the best place to do that. Every potential customer here is vastly outnumbered by people who belong on reddit.
Building a multiplayer game platform. Built a multiplayer pong game to dog feed the platform, and it got viral. Decided to make presales for it and got a little over $700 sales so far . if you want to give it a try, play it here https://antics.gg/p/side-out-94df7d
https://overseer.studio - Infinite canvas for apps, browser tabs, PDFs, and more. Primarily focused on Game Masters for TTRPGs but I've heard from many that it would be an excellent general purpose digital binder.
Started last year with a problem I faced personally playing TTRPGs with newcomers. Built Overseer over a year to where it is today.
I'm making about $260 monthly playing play money poker, adjusted for price level it's like $400 in the US. I sell the virtual chips I make to other people. My side project is automating this and scaling 2x.
Solo iOS app that I have been working on since January: https://bhol.app - crossed 500 MRR in June. Seeing the traction and feedback from users is the best form of motivation to keep going.
Now working on scaling it via UGC/social media, landing deals with local language schools, and upping the design with more Rive assets.
I am working on making the Dropbox launch first comment a reality: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash It gives you the Dropbox experience on any storage you want inclusive of FTP but also let you access your Dropbox storage via FTP, SFTP, S3, ...
nokeep.ai - private, uncensored AI -- launched it cause most folks who want privacy or less censorship attempt to run models locally but that obviously doesn't work unless you invest in hardware / want speed etc.
I had an idea in 2008 to make a website that emailed your friends when you die. I built https://www.deadmansswitch.net/ in a weekend, and it's been making money since. Around $1k/mo now.
Doubt so, none of the links is working on the site. It doesn't inspire trust, wouldn't spend money, yet even create an account, on a site that has no privacy policy or terms of use.
Generally the reason you have a links section in the footer is for them to be actual links, not text. I wouldn't trust this product as far as I could throw it given how many issues the site seems to have
I've grossed 17,531.33 so far this calendar year. You know those cold emails you get sometimes where they want you to get contract jobs and them do the work? I've been doing that for 18 months now and I average roughly 2 hours/week throughout the year.
There are some weeks where I'm doing almost no work at all, but then there are some weeks where I'm interviewing daily and maybe have a video call with a client. I've found that the interview process to get contract jobs is MUCH shorter and simpler than getting full time jobs. They are often done by a non-technical person and are 30 minutes long. There might be another 30-minute interview, sometimes by a technical person but not always. This means that I can interview daily without it causing much disruption to my regular job.
I won't lie, it is stressful at times trying to juggle so many things, and the cognitive dissonance of lying to people is not great. I used to get really anxious about interviewing, but this experience has helped me a lot with that.
My work came up with a bonus structure around a certain set of industry certifications. I looked at all the certifications available and worked out a strategy to max the bonus each year. It comes out to about $2.5k/month.
So my side hustle is studying and taking tests. Over the last 5 years or so of taking tests + investing I’ve built a nice chunk of change set aside to help pay for college for my two boys (age 14 and 16).
How much time are in investing in these certifications on average? i would imagine running out of things to study/certify in such a long time
The scoring system is complicated but it comes down to passing about 4 new ones per year and then passing the renewal exams for all my current certs. Each exam takes about a month for me to be ready, maybe a total of 40 or so hrs. I have a family and my day job is very demanding so not a lot of free time.
There’s about 60-70 available certifications but they have various prerequisite certs so you can’t just go down the list. I was fortunate in that when the bonus structure first came out I had a lot of experience but not many certs so it was easy at first but now I’m running out of certs to get that are related to my actual day job.
However, I get the feeling the cert bonus thing is going to be cancelled next FY anyway. Sucks but at least I maxed it every year it was available and I have probably 75% of college for my kids paid for.
That's clever and entertaining. Have you actually enjoyed any of them?
I do actually enjoy them and they’re pretty much all in my wheel house. Well I enjoy them when I have plenty of time to sit down with a cup of coffee and study. A few times I’ve been under basically deadline pressure to get the exams passed in time to qualify for the bonus, that’s not fun at all. Over about 20 certification attempts I’ve only failed one :) (they’re all pass/fail).
Pretty basic ones, I got into AI images cause of that viral AI avatars thing that levelsio made 2-3 years back and have just been iterating on that idea(even though I think if I went into the AI text side of things, I'd have been much bigger at this point):
https://admakeai.com - Recently got this to 800 MRR , kinda trying to make it the main thing since the LTV on it is the highest. So if I could just figure out ads, this has the highest potential
https://aieasypic.com - First project that I made that made money from subs vs making money from ads, whole reason I continued to indiehack. Its kinda dying but core users still bring in 3-4k/mo , altho actual MRR is 1k/mo
https://bestphoto.ai - Made this after I got frustrated from the bad decisions I made on above, basically a tech rewrite + clone + simplification of aieasypic. Currently makes the most but at a lower margin than aieasypic. Not gonna say exact numbers, but lets say 5k+/mo
Two weeks ago, I released the tactical map-based WW2 submarine sim Silent Shark (which I got feedback on from HN for beta test a few months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48180924 ) and it's gone extremely well for a side project - I've had over 100 Steam reviews, 99% of them are positive, and I have sold a few thousand copies so far.
I began working on this game just 6 months ago and have only worked on it in my spare time in evenings and on weekends, instead of playing computer games. I made the early decision to use Codex for 100% of the coding, that has been a phenomenal experience.
The only Image Gen AI I've used has been to clean up 2 old and weathered historical maps I found, to make them readable.
Still have over 25,000 Steam wishlists and growing. I'm super thankful and having a blast.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4705650/Silent_Shark/
Do sharks normally make sounds?
A friend and I host a monthly dinner club for people interested in exploring ethnic cuisine on Long Island. We work with one restaurant each month to create an 8-12+ course all inclusive price fixe menu. The food is usually served family style (the ambitious ones individually plate everything) and is authentic to the region we are hosting. We typically host the dinners on a Tues and Wed when the restaurants in our region aren’t too busy and could use business.
We started this in 2023 with 13 of our friends as guests. Since then the group has grown to over 1,200 members and well beyond our circle of friends. August was our 52 second restaurant. In 2025 we served 1,099 guests and generated $126k in revenue.
https://www.deadchefssociety.com/
Love this idea! Any time I visit a place that specializes in a cuisine I'm not familiar with, I tend to struggle with what to order because I don't want to commit to just one entree. Having a curated tour of tastes, so to speak, targeted to folks exploring the cuisine would be absolutely perfect. Wonderful!
The world is changed - given the low cost of reverse engineering and implementation, it would be product suicide to openly call out a money making product.
I don't expect too many actual >500$ moneymaking projects to be listed. Would love to be proven wrong.
Yeah, the only time I see people talking about money-making side projects is when it's practically impossible to copy them. I can't see the advantage of bragging about a side project if the threat of losing marketshare for it is on the table.
My side project isn't software and doesn't make $500/mo, but I still just don't talk about it.
My side-project makes money because it's in a specific niche: It requires trust that the service will still operate tomorrow, and the fact that it's been going for nearly 20 years is a selling point you can't just have Claude copy.
It helps that it's cheap, I guess, but it also operates in a market small enough that anything with less than minimal time commitment will lose money. That's why there are tens of former competitors who have all shut down now.
Precisely what has effectively killed off the "building in public" trend that was all the rage just a two years ago.
It's been like this a long time. Kickstarter was just a platform to test product viability and public response for the big guys.
My first instinct was that side projects can’t make good money anymore. Monthly new repos on Github increased 5x. Also any good project can be cloned immediately. Maybe people here can confirm if it’s a good time to start indie projects.
I also feel the same all the masterclass about making money using x,y,z is either showing things in past which no longer work or very steep upfront cost/efforts.
I offer some absolutes in reply and would also love to be proven wrong.
The cost of engineering and implementation has always been low. Passive income has always been a subtle lie. The money has always been in providing a well-supported service.
No customer has ever cared about implementation details beyond what is outlined in the contracts they have with you and the nth-order effects of the contracts they are under with their own clients.
Advertising is the opposite of suicide, but since we have so much negativity on HN in the past few years this is no longer the best place to do that. Every potential customer here is vastly outnumbered by people who belong on reddit.
Thanks a bingo.
Building a multiplayer game platform. Built a multiplayer pong game to dog feed the platform, and it got viral. Decided to make presales for it and got a little over $700 sales so far . if you want to give it a try, play it here https://antics.gg/p/side-out-94df7d
presale here if anyone interested! https://antics.gg/sideout-presale
https://overseer.studio - Infinite canvas for apps, browser tabs, PDFs, and more. Primarily focused on Game Masters for TTRPGs but I've heard from many that it would be an excellent general purpose digital binder.
Started last year with a problem I faced personally playing TTRPGs with newcomers. Built Overseer over a year to where it is today.
I'm making about $260 monthly playing play money poker, adjusted for price level it's like $400 in the US. I sell the virtual chips I make to other people. My side project is automating this and scaling 2x.
https://volt.fm
It started as a side project in 2001, but now it’s my main business.
Here's my own profile if anyone's interested: https://volt.fm/soheilpro
Who are your clients?
I haven't signed up, though I like the idea. But I wonder how do you monetise this?
There's a Pro plan that offers more complete stats and includes some other features.
Solo iOS app that I have been working on since January: https://bhol.app - crossed 500 MRR in June. Seeing the traction and feedback from users is the best form of motivation to keep going. Now working on scaling it via UGC/social media, landing deals with local language schools, and upping the design with more Rive assets.
I am working on making the Dropbox launch first comment a reality: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash It gives you the Dropbox experience on any storage you want inclusive of FTP but also let you access your Dropbox storage via FTP, SFTP, S3, ...
nokeep.ai - private, uncensored AI -- launched it cause most folks who want privacy or less censorship attempt to run models locally but that obviously doesn't work unless you invest in hardware / want speed etc.
I had an idea in 2008 to make a website that emailed your friends when you die. I built https://www.deadmansswitch.net/ in a weekend, and it's been making money since. Around $1k/mo now.
How do people find it, word of mouth?
Yeah, basically.
If anyone has a website or app that generates revenue, even if it's small, please share it with me.
https://socialmediascheduler.ai/
Just crossed $1.45K/mo!
Doubt so, none of the links is working on the site. It doesn't inspire trust, wouldn't spend money, yet even create an account, on a site that has no privacy policy or terms of use.
Generally the reason you have a links section in the footer is for them to be actual links, not text. I wouldn't trust this product as far as I could throw it given how many issues the site seems to have
Erreur 403 : org_internal when trying to create account with google
Access blocked: Growth can only be used within its organisation
.. in token expenses :-D
I've grossed 17,531.33 so far this calendar year. You know those cold emails you get sometimes where they want you to get contract jobs and them do the work? I've been doing that for 18 months now and I average roughly 2 hours/week throughout the year.
There are some weeks where I'm doing almost no work at all, but then there are some weeks where I'm interviewing daily and maybe have a video call with a client. I've found that the interview process to get contract jobs is MUCH shorter and simpler than getting full time jobs. They are often done by a non-technical person and are 30 minutes long. There might be another 30-minute interview, sometimes by a technical person but not always. This means that I can interview daily without it causing much disruption to my regular job.
I won't lie, it is stressful at times trying to juggle so many things, and the cognitive dissonance of lying to people is not great. I used to get really anxious about interviewing, but this experience has helped me a lot with that.