Ask HN: How much do you earn from side project or passive income?
What is working for you and how much is your income from side project and/or passive income?
An open Ask HN community consultation from 2016 where @jejuowooe convened hundreds of developers and bootstrappers to share real experiences, hard numbers, and tactics.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
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.
Community Debate Themes:
Hundreds of active indie hackers contributed case studies, pricing heuristics, and pitfalls to avoid when moonlighting on side projects.
CATEGORY Ask HN Roundtables →
HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE 53 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 28 comments
I have a small pile of SaaS products [1] that combine to bring in the equivalent of a nice Senior Dev salary (though far less than I would actually bring in were I to take a full time gig in the Bay Area).
I did a "passivity test" recently where I essentially took October off, just to make sure I still could. I'd do a morning email spin, then shut down and go bouldering or just play with the kids all day, averaging just shy of two hour weeks. Monthly Recurring Revenue grew on its normal path.
This month, I'm back working 6 hour days, 4 days a week, building the thing that will take up the slack [2] once those other products plateau. Fortunately, it's been raining a lot, or I might still be out climbing every day.
I'll reitorate once again that as a software developer, you absolutely should build one o' these SaaS things. It'll change your life.
[1] https://www.s3stat.com ↗ & http://www.twiddla.com ↗ [2] https://unwaffle.com ↗
I have a few [1] Android Apps that bring home around £90 a month. Ironically, the ads from one app (I don't like ads as a business model that much) make as much as the other 4 combined.
I also wrote a book [2] about game development in Haxe, and self-published it on gumroad. That brings anything from £40 to £150 a month.
[1]https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=leoncvlt&hl=en_GB ↗ [2] http://discover-haxeflixel.com/ ↗
Currently ... I aim for $1/day :), but my site is only a week old. I need to figure out SEO for a site like mine, as I don't have content. Right now it is all AdWords traffic. It's amazing ... I literally submit my bids and I have clicks within 60s.
I'd love to know if users would pay for something like unlimited multi-day search or ... more data like UV Index.
http://www.averageweather.io/ ↗
I recently developed/launched http://framestr.com ↗. It's an online form software that I developed, originally, for a few lead generation websites that I own. It currently generates around $950 / month.
I have one project so far http://www.json-gen.com/ ↗ started one month ago. It is service that provides mocking REST JSON response. Could be used in front-end testing. Current income is 5$