Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2022 – Show and tell
Previously asked here → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29995152 ↗
An open Ask HN community consultation from 2022 where @doppp 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 86 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 91 comments
Running https://rosterbird.com ↗ on the side for 2 years now. It's oscillating between $800-$900 mrr for the past 3 months.
I originally wanted it to be a passive income project but it has grown in scope before I even realized.
Building and maintaining a B2B SaaS on the side is pretty draining. There's always more features, support requests, etc. Wouldn't recommend unless it takes off immediately or it is within a nice niche or you're planning to take it full time.
I've thought about either selling it (and start any other project) or properly growing it (launch in MS teams, shift capabilites, etc) for many months now.
Would appreciate if anyone has any thoughts.
I make https://bedrock.mxstbr.com ↗, selling a full-stack Next.js & GraphQL boilerplate for building SaaS products, which comes with:
* A complete TypeScript toolchain with end-to-end typesafety from the database to the client
* User authentication
* Subscription payments
* Teams
* Invitations
It's also completely unstyled, which is somewhat unusual in this space. I've found that most of the time, people would just delete all the styling anyway, so instead, the frontend only contains the minimal code necessary to make the functionality work.
I originally launched it in February last year, and it's still going strong now!
I started investing in stocks couple of years ago. It is probably not what you wanted to hear but it makes me a lot of money and allowed me to retire in my 30s, as a minimalist. I am a long-term investor(I hold positions at least 1 year) so the time it requires is essentially none.
Besides that I tried to run multiple project in my past but none took off. The problem is that the internet has been monopolized and it is no longer about the idea or being better than competition but it is 100% about money you spend on advertising. That's what killed all my projects. I still do them because I like to code but I don't expect to ever succeed. The goods times for the internet, around 2010s, are long gone.
I'm running a website for people learning Japanese (a dictionary and an SRS/Anki replacement, among other things) and currently making ~$1300/month from Patreon donations, up from ~$590/month the last time this show and tell was posted.
Link to the website: https://jpdb.io/ ↗
Still only a side-project, and will probably stay that way for a long time still.
Here's some info about the tech stack I'm using: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26693959 ↗
I built OnlineOrNot (https://onlineornot.com ↗) - it's a hosted Status Page, with built-in Uptime Monitoring. It supports:
* Custom domains
* Private Status Pages (password protection)
* Automatically posting incidents to your status page based on uptime monitoring (possible to BYO monitoring via Uptime Robot)
* Subscribing to incident updates via Email
The uptime monitoring itself supports websites, web apps, and APIs, and can send you alerts via:
* Email
* SMS (BYO Twilio account)
* Webhooks
* Slack/Discord