Ask HN: What is the best income stream you have created till date?

• open-react-template

  36 3,453 3.4 TypeScript

  A free React / Next.js landing page template designed to showcase open source projects, SaaS products, online services, and more. Made by

  

Co-founder here. We originally made the landing page in Webflow. This worked ok but had some negative SEO benefits because our main app was forced to be on a subdomain.

We remade the page using a Tailwind template, which coincided with migrating our app to Tailwind. I highly recommend just using a template unless you are a designer, plenty of free or low cost ones out there. I like these: https://cruip.com/

Most important thing is having a good CTA, value props, and testimonials. Took us a lot of work to refine these.

We also worked with a graphic designer to make the art assets / logo / etc. I'm sure she would be happy to have more clients, DM me (see bio) for info.

• ddcctl

  22 1,807 0.0 C

  DDC monitor controls (brightness) for Mac OSX command line

macOS apps which I share at https://lowtechguys.com/ bring me $7k/month on average at the moment, and it keeps growing.

It started in 2017 when I shared the first free and open source version of Lunar (https://lunar.fyi/), an app for controlling monitors.

At that time, there was only a command line for doing this stuff (https://github.com/kfix/ddcctl) and I wanted a more visual way of changing the brightness. So I learned Swift, learned how to bridge the ddcctl C code and call it from Swift, then made a rough interface and published it: https://www.producthunt.com/products/lunar#lunar-5

It turned out people did have a need for this and asked if they could donate. I set up a Buy me a Coffee page and in 4 years collected about $5k in donations. That's a lot of money for a Romanian.

When Apple Silicon appeared, Lunar didn't work anymore because the whole hardware arrangement and drivers were different, and there was no documentation on how to send I²C data. I took the plunge and quit my stressful job, bought an M1 MacBook and reverse engineered the I²C communication: https://alinpanaitiu.com/blog/journey-to-ddc-on-m1-macs/

Then published Lunar 4 as a Free version with a Pro paid upgrade. I was reluctant with this, didn't think anyone would buy it, but to this day I'm able to be unemployed and put my ideas into practice because of it.

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com featured

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• Lunar

  192 4,380 9.0 Swift

  Intelligent adaptive brightness for your external monitors

macOS apps which I share at https://lowtechguys.com/ bring me $7k/month on average at the moment, and it keeps growing.

It started in 2017 when I shared the first free and open source version of Lunar (https://lunar.fyi/), an app for controlling monitors.

At that time, there was only a command line for doing this stuff (https://github.com/kfix/ddcctl) and I wanted a more visual way of changing the brightness. So I learned Swift, learned how to bridge the ddcctl C code and call it from Swift, then made a rough interface and published it: https://www.producthunt.com/products/lunar#lunar-5

It turned out people did have a need for this and asked if they could donate. I set up a Buy me a Coffee page and in 4 years collected about $5k in donations. That's a lot of money for a Romanian.

When Apple Silicon appeared, Lunar didn't work anymore because the whole hardware arrangement and drivers were different, and there was no documentation on how to send I²C data. I took the plunge and quit my stressful job, bought an M1 MacBook and reverse engineered the I²C communication: https://alinpanaitiu.com/blog/journey-to-ddc-on-m1-macs/

Then published Lunar 4 as a Free version with a Pro paid upgrade. I was reluctant with this, didn't think anyone would buy it, but to this day I'm able to be unemployed and put my ideas into practice because of it.

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