alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
It's the time of the year again, so I'd be interested hear what new (and old) ideas have come up. Previously asked on:
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
Comments
An audiobook streaming service that focuses on timeless classic works in the public domain.
I do everything from building the app to the audio engineering.
One thing I'm especially proud of is the restoration I did on the "War of the Worlds" 1938 Radio broadcast. I'm really happy with how it turned out. I've made it temporarily free to listen to [1] in case anyone is curious. You should compare it with the original [2] and let me know what you think.
[1] https://app.soundreads.io/discover/item/war-of-the-worlds [2] https://archive.org/details/WarOfTheWorlds1938RadioBroadcast...
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.
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.
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.
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 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).
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.
26.3% of jobs found on company websites are not advertised on any job boards but found using this tool.
The app scrapes company's directly (24/7) and give the user:
- a head start over other job seekers
- access to thousands of jobs not listed anywhere else
- daily job filter emails with ability to be highly curated to reduce noise
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’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.
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
BudgetSheet ( https://www.budgetsheet.com ) -> $6k MRR avg. for the year. Will likely have my first $10k month in January.
Live Bank Transactions + Google Sheets. Links accounts with Plaid to track transactions and balances over time with some helpful templates. All the data is yours in your own spreadsheet to do with what you want.
Revenue is somewhat seasonal. Most revenue comes in Q1+Q2 and trails off in Q3+Q4. Used by individuals and small businesses that love spreadsheets and want to manage their own finances.
I run https://aliveai.app a large uncensored (i.e. adult) AI image and video generator.
It started as a small side project but slowly grew every month and recently exploded to well over 50k USD revenue per month. It's fun to have a large community of paying users but honestly I never thought out of all my side projects this one will make it.
I am still a one man show managing everything from development, marketing, customer support and content moderation. If I am honest the money is nice but I am severely burnt out and not sure if I can or want to do this much longer. It is a 24/7 job and I miss the days where I can just sit down and code a nice feature that people will like. Also looking at NSFW content all day kind of messes with your mental health.
I had some discussions of potential buyers but selling something for less than its monthly revenue seems crazy so I am still here trying to do my best and waiting for the right exit.
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.
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).
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)
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
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
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.
About 8 years in, Escape Team steadily keeps growing, which surprises me (I didn’t add any new missions for about 5 years):
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!
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
Route weather forecasting based on date/time, speed/pace, ideal conditions in Settings. As also go/no go callout windows, AI nutrition/gear list. Deterministic engine of fitness readiness, being able to see progress and fitness and overall body health.
Used it for: Skiing, hiking, cycling. Any outing with a route.
Import a route from Strava, RideWithGPS, GPX/FIT, Apple fitness. Plan for weather forecasting! Fitness readiness is obtained from metrics collected from a smart watch.
I actually turned it free recently. But barely reached over 400 MRR then started dropping. Consumer market is hard and I'm more interested in learning about AI and a full stack side project.
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."
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
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/
I earned more than $500 a month once: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lyoc/last-year-of-carbo...
This game was developed by my friends and I during college, then we Kickstarted a few years after.
Sales have dwindled since, but I still like the game. So much so that I turned it into a free web app. Still a WIP but it's maybe 75/80% there.
Play for free here, you will need to make an account: https://lastyearofcarbon.com
Buy a copy here, but you should play the game first to see if you like it: https://lyoc.shop
Still doing https://hackernewsletter.com/ after 15 years thanks to many of you.
I made a public transportation departure board (for Switzerland) for your home or business.
while not exactly $500/month, my side project Whenish (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/whenish/id6745035749) makes me some beer money.
I made Whenish cause i was frustrated with apps taking you outside of group chats to schedule events and find out dates when people are available. Whenish is an iMessage extension app and it works pretty nicely so far.
recently got my first user feedback email which was really exciting!
hope to figure out how marketing works to get some more users and hopefully double downloads + sales next year.
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 :)
Cold call training aka 'exposure therapy'
Just a call a number and practice a cold call with a bot. People seemed to like it when I built it so I made a free and paid tier. Getting like 3-5 new users per day without really doing anything.
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.
Back when I was in the Air Force, I hated the UX for referencing Air Force publications on mobile. So I created an iOS app called AFI Explorer [0] which has continued to get hundreds of downloads every month for the past 5 years.
Since I’ve been shifting more towards platform engineering work in my career, the best reward abut this side hustle isn’t the financial benefit, but is the opportunity to stay grounded in software dev. I love seeing the changing APIs each year with the new iOS updates. And the seasonal approach to doing updates is always fun too.
[0]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/afi-explorer/id1564964107
Because I was frustrated of the pricing and feature list of TrainingPeaks, I've built my own training planning and analytics platform for endurance athletes (and coaches too!). It is called Tredict (https://www.tredict.com.) and it covers almost everything for runners, cyclists and swimmers over training effort forecasting and prediction, a comprehensive training log, training plans, workout planning, Vo2Max calculation, FTP assessments and collaboration with other athletes and coaches, equipment tracking and so on and so on. Quite a lot of things TrainingPeaks offers too. It has integrations for sending and execution of planned workouts to your watch with Garmin, Wahoo, Suunto, Coros, icTrainer and it receives executed trainings or health data from Polar, Dropbox, Oura, Withings and others! I think I did more then 15 oAuth integrations in total over Tredict's existens? And the platform offers an oAuth2 API for 3-party integrations on its own.
The payment model is a pre-paid model for 12 months of write access to your calendar. It brings ~500-600 Euros (before taxes) a month since 6 years.
I made https://meetinghouse.cc as a way for twitter people to put themselves on a map and write a bio, and what they're looking for. It's a way to find and be found, if you want to see who's interesting nearby for friends, dating, new parents meeting new parents, etc.
Pins cost $12, there are 474 pins placed so far. This keeps the quality high (there are no spam pins, only real people) but will fundamentally limit the growth, I think.
I run Brick Ranker a website that tracks the value of LEGO sets and minifigures. You can also signup and catalogue your own collection so that you can track it's value or just see what you own.
It makes around $500 a month from a mixture of adsense and affiliate schemes. Would be good if I was making more but I've automated most it so I spend maybe 1 hour on it a month.
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!
So, if these posts come at the same time each year, and IDs are consecutive, then
year,id
2025,46307973
2024,42373343
2023,38467691
2022,34190421
2021,29667095
2020,24947167
2019,20899863
2018,17790306
2017,15148804
year,delta
2025,3.9M
2024,3.9M
2023,4.2M
2022,4.5M
2021,4.7M
2020,4.0M
2019,3.1M
2018,2.6M
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]
I'm selling browser extensions on the App Store, but the main money-maker is currently https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-twitter
When Twitter killed off third-party apps, the browser extension I'd been developing ever since "New Twitter" launched in 2019 suddenly became one of the few ways to make Twitter more tolerable to use, and the number of users of the Chrome version tripled from 30k to 90k in a fortnight (mostly in Japan).
When they confirmed third-party apps had been killed on purpose and jacked up the price of the API to discourage new ones, I started selling it on the App Store the next week and it's made more than $500 per month ever since.
Before the end of the year I'm hoping to roll out a single paid subscription which works across all my extensions when you sign up for it, which enables syncing settings across all your browsers and devices, unlocks additional subscriber-only features, and will enable creation of extension-specific APIs if there are future features which require one. Between Control Panel for Twitter and https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-youtube I have ~390,000 users, so, y'know, please like and subscribe.
That will _eventually_ include my free Hacker News extension ( https://soitis.dev/comments-owl-for-hacker-news ) so things like new comment counts, user notes and muted users can sync across every browser and device you use Hacker News on.
If that takes off, I hope to make the App Store versions free and figure out how to give anyone who bought it 3 months of the subscription per extension they bought as a thank-you. If anyone's done something like that before, I'd be happy to hear about it via any communication method in my HN profile!
I run a podcast app for flip phones called PodLP. Revenue hasn’t always been $500/month, but averaged over the past 5 years it’s been over $500. It’s been primarily from sponsorships (podcasts get featured on the homepage to get more listeners), although next year looks more uncertain so I’m looking at other avenues.
I put sponsor information on my open source project, and it has been giving me $600/mo in the past few months. There are only a few thousand stars on GitHub, but it's already the most popular tool in a paticular niche area.
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).
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!
https://martiansoftware.com/chatkeeper/
I built ChatKeeper because I wanted to treat my ChatGPT history like a local knowledge base, with local-first access to my data.
It’s a command-line tool (GUI in progress) that takes a full ChatGPT .zip export and syncs it with local Markdown files. You can move and rename them freely and they will stay in sync on future runs.
It pairs well with tools like Obsidian and lets you link your own notes to specific conversations or even points within them.
Revenue is modest but growing month over month. It’s a one-time purchase, not a subscription.
Most users so far are researchers and other ChatGPT power users who already live in Markdown or want to do things like curate and compress the context of very long-running conversations.
My wife runs https://www.saviament.com/, an open-access educational website in Catalan. She also sells printable content following the same style as the website, which has exploded in popularity this year and has become a decent source of income.
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
kitecourier.com - the end-to-end certified mail platform that makes sending legal notices as easy as sending email.
Revenue is very spiky. Some months ~$10k, some ~$100.
Inspired by this Patrick McKenzie thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7135833
Certified mail is weirdly powerful leverage. I decided to productize that.
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