Ask HN: Share your profitable side project?
An open Ask HN community consultation from 2020 where @rishiloyola 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 Pandemic Bubble (2020–2022)
COMMUNITY SCORE 39 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 11 comments
It depends on how you define "profit"... I have invested $10 for a domain, and if you exclude my development time, I'm making a profit on UnitPrice.org! [0] It's a website that analyzes specific categories of products on Amazon and calculates the best per-unit price. Lego, diapers, toilet paper, K-cups, etc. Obviously your own time is worth something, but it's fun, and despite barely getting any affiliate fees, it's enough to cover the domain name cost! I also use the website personally, so I've saved money on purchases too.
[0] https://unitprice.org ↗
Webase [1] is a no-code platform for building CRUD apps without writing early code. It has found a niche in being able to dynamically generate PDFs based off of forms combined with business documents for things like Real Estate contracts.
Website still needs to communicate the value more, but it is a fun project to keep improving.
[1] https://www.webase.com ↗
Divjoy is a tool for React devs that generates a custom codebase & UI. It's my main source of income now, in a large part thanks to being on the front of HN 6 months ago.
https://divjoy.com ↗
Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20688044 ↗
ArcartaPay https://arcartapay.com/ ↗
Started off as an email a link to get paid with Stripe for art dealers but now has a focus on the due diligence and was well-timed with some EU money laundering regulations.
Growing revenue 150% month on month and will likely have to become my main source of income soon.
PSA to folks who answered this: if you have a profitable side project, double down and try making it into something more than a side-project.
If you've built something that is actually collecting revenue, you're already ahead of a huge number of folks out there, and you can likely build it into something that can at the very least make you live comfortably, if not much more.