Ask HN: What's your side project and how much recurring income does it generate?
Try to be descriptive in your comments. When you started, what you've done, challenges you've faced, methods of earning revenue, we want to hear it all!
An open Ask HN community consultation from 2014 where @coffeecodecouch 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 23 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 20 comments
TheSquatRack.com - workout tracking, analysis, as well as ( macros, body measurements, workout-journals, data-export options, import options, etc.). Current features being deployed include workout routines that span weeks and months, with progressions and deloads of weights, macronutrients adjust up or down (you can have customizable targets like = 1.5g/lb bw protein, etc), adding/removing sets or reps, etc. Also allowing you to schedule workout repetition patterns or meta routines, where you're routine responds to the data logged (use case: your FitBit logged less than 5 hrs of sleep, today's workout should be pushed back a day), and you automatically see that in your dashboard. Of course, all the routines are in a database anyone can review and rate. And since the workout schedule is known, it can log it for you, or just keep it scheduled. more info - https://thesquatrack.com/soon ↗ . I've taken it from idea to approaching-sustainable living income on my own. Started in August 2012 as a shits-n-giggles side project, got a bit more serious in October, did a lot from Jan-May, took a couple months off, started back up, decided to go all in, and quit my job at Intel doing preboot storage drivers. Now I'm getting a decent subscription rate considering private-beta (I'm sure that'll change once it's public), but I have no true idea how it's going to scale ... so that'll be fun.
The hard part has been managing burnout, stress, backlog stuff, and generally just everything ... there's so much non-programming stuff that goes into a business. Once I can get someone to manage all that stuff, it'll be interesting to see what I can do with all that extra time, haha. That and revenue/funding. I'm completely bootstrapped and solo on this, no cofounder, nothing ... what a pain in the ass, why can't someone just manage the business stuff and marketing stuff.
As far as revenue, I've gone with a subscription model. I tried to split the features so that as a free user, you have no ads and you can manually everything. Subscribers get power-user-esq tools like slice-n-dice analytics, soon the routines and auto-logging, etc. As far as managing the users, I just try to be honest and transparent with them, and actually take their feature requests into consideration. A lot of times it's userA wants feature ABC and userB wants XYZ, clearly not the same, but if you step back you realize the just want special-use cases of '123', see if there's a couple other cases for it, and build it if it fits with the direction of the site. Sometimes features take a long long time to get implemented, but I get to them because I have several more pre-reqs to do first, I just try to weave them into the pipeline as logically as I can because it'll be a different problem to solve and help the users so why not.
How's that for a response? Any questions or anything? I try to be open and honest about myself and TSR because I want to be proud of what I made, it's like digital legos.
I run https://rrandomize.com ↗ (it ships random items to you). It's currently earning about $150 a month or so. Most of the money comes in through one-time payments, since I pocket the change after purchasing an item for the user. The idea is simple, so it didn't take much work coding at all. I'm still pretty new to web development so this was a chance to practice execution and security.
My side project http://assembleyourpc.net/ ↗ (pc builder tool) is now generating around 200-300 USD per month from adsense and affiliate programs. I started this an year ago. I've made few improvements (added new features, improved UI etc) over the year (0-6 hours of work per month) and I'm going to add some new features this week, automate few backends works or so.
I run http://releas.io ↗. It generates download cards for physical music releases (typically vinyl). It yields around 400€ per month but I don't do any biz dev. I don't think it's a viable project (beyond a side-project) so I didn't try to make it full-time.
I created this side project : www.snailmailpics.com and www.snailmailpics.com/DropBoxHome
for printing photos using text message and through DropBox.
We generate around $100-$200 every month..mostly through our DropBox application