Ask HN: Help me find profitable side project
Can you recommend any kind of (small/middle/big) side project which may lead to some cash (even small).
Project you might use for pennies but didn't find any.
Maybe image resizing, watermarking or any other you wish existed.
An open Ask HN community consultation from 2015 where @tuyguntn convened hundreds of developers and bootstrappers to share real experiences, hard numbers, and tactics.
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Participants share raw revenue figures, churn rates, and stack decisions that corporate PR never publishes.
Recurring answers reveal that distribution, not coding skill, is almost universally the rate-limiting step in developer businesses.
Practical recommendations on bookkeeping, payment gateways (Stripe vs Paddle), and freelance-to-product transitions.
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CATEGORY Ask HN Roundtables →
HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE 23 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 7 comments
I'd pay $10 to $20+ / month for high volume, high bandwidth, cheap image hosting outsourcing with a great API. To be used for offloading image hosting for web services. Aka industrial scale image hosting as a service.
The current solutions are comically expensive compared to doing it yourself. I'd like to see a Digital Ocean-like solution cost wise.
Take for example Cloudinary, which basically offers this type of service. Their $49 / month package offers 15gb of storage and 50gb of transfer. It's so expensive as to be silly if you want scale. By contrast the $40 Digital Ocean package offers 60gb of storage and 4tb of transfer. Cloudinary's $149 (!) package offers 50gb of storage, and 200gb of transfer.
Why not leverage AWS or similar? Their bandwidth costs are obscene, at least 20 times higher than what you can get with a cheap dedicated server.
Someone should be able to do this service for $10 / month, with a minimum of 20gb of storage, and maybe 500gb of transfer. And scale packages up from there.
I and my friends have purchased items at https://wrapbootstrap.com/ ↗ several times. If you have the skills, it might not be a bad way to go. Similarly, though some people will barf at this, you can still get a decent amount of money just doing a WordPress install with some customization for folks. I recently spoke with a designer who does a little bit of jQuery and JavaScript, and he mentioned that a lot of sub $1000 projects to local shops and things were done with WordPress templates, a few slight modifications, and that's it.
Care to check out "SideProjectors"?
http://sideprojectors.com ↗ (I run the site by the way).
It's a market place where people buy/sell/discover side projects. You might want to check some of those projects. Maybe there might be some that you would be interested in buying, or just to be inspired from. :)
Which skills do you have? Are more technical, creative, or business-oriented?
Without knowing anything, I would suggest selling services/freelancing. Your gross margins are high and you usually don't need initial investments.
I made http://probhunt.com ↗ to help people discover problems to solve. I've had some really good feedback so far. Would this help you?