Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell

I am the co-creator of ShoppingScraper. Convert an EAN / GTIN to pricing information, product specs, content or image. API-based and rapid with pricing and barcode data.

The website needs some love, but the webapp is going well.

https://shoppingscraper.com/features

https://codeapprove.com

Basically it’s a code review UI on GitHub for ex-Googlers who miss Critique.

I work on https://theblue.social which provides Bluesky native tools and cross-posting tools.

I built a SaaS for photographers specifically designed for latam’s market: https://pickyour.photos/

Been running 1.8 years, current mrr is ~$790 usd.

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

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://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've been helping with a small portfolio of Slack apps under the brand https://happybara.io, including Nightowl (multi-DM broadcast for Slack, like BCC for email), and Channitor (channel management & auto-archiving).

It's been a really interesting journey making mistakes & learning from them. One mistake that made me feel foolish: I assumed no one would ever pay for one of the apps. A paywall was added "just in case" -> boom, customers almost immediately started signing up. I felt incredibly silly after that, especially for the number of times I've read on HN and similar sites "your work is valuable" and "charge more".

Right about $500 now, down from $5K at peak

AI assistant in your iMessage group chats https://olly.bot

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

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.

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

does negative 500 count?

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!

Save For Later – an AI-powered bookmark manager that resurfaces what you save

Link: https://saveforlater.pro

Made PrivacyPolicyURL.com => get a live URL for all the forms asking for it in under a minute.

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

I sell the canvas space within https://www.minigenitals.com to private parties looking to settle scores. Between the coffee's I'm bought and averaging out the monthly "ad buys", it's just over $500/month, usually 3 or 4 $50 2-day campaigns a month and then a bunch of satisfied fans, apparently ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ We recently had to reset the coffee account due to phishing, but otherwise it's been a riot. I think there are a few backed up in the IA

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.

Courses and books about Python, Pandas, XGBoost, Visualization, and soon AI

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!

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Trendyzip.com Home sale trends to help buyers make informed decisions. A basic report is $5

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.

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/