Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

1. Fider

   1 21 3,551 9.5 Go

   Open platform to collect and prioritize feedback

   

2. InfluxDB

   www.influxdata.com featured

   InfluxDB – Built for High-Performance Time Series Workloads. InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.

   

3. aptakube

   2 16 588 3.9

   Modern, lightweight and multi-cluster Kubernetes GUI. Available on Windows, macOS and Linux.

   

   During my previous job, when we were migrating to Kubernetes I couldn’t really find a GUI app that I liked, and most importantly, that could connect to multiple clusters simultaneously. We had 6 clusters and having to switch context constantly was annoying

   I ended up building one [1] to use myself, shared with a few people and they loved it. I asked if they’d pay for it and to my surprise, a lot of people said yes. I’ve put up a website and a “pre-order” button with a regressive monthly discount. Sales were going up month after month, and a few months later I decided to quit my job to go all in on it.

   Today, I’m averaging on ~€5k/mo from this app, but I’m still doing some part time freelancing, as well as building other products that are not as successful, but are making >€1000/mo

   The latest one is open source, privacy friendly analytics for apps [2] that I’m still very actively working on. This is my current “side project” as the previous side project became my main job :)

   There’s also an open source upvote site [3] that I haven’t had much time to work on lately, but still generating $$ monthly.

   [1] https://aptakube.com

4. aptabase

   3 10 1,369 8.5 TypeScript

   ✨ Open Source, Privacy-First and Simple Analytics for Mobile, Desktop and Web Apps

   

5. swordbattle.io

   4 4 58 9.8 TypeScript

   A multiplayer sword fighting IO game, now fully rewritten!

   

6. realworlddevopscourse

   5 6 257 6.1 Shell

   Accompanying files for "Real world Devops project from start to finish" course

   

   https://sre.rs - DevOps course for small companies and individuals/self-hosters.

   I’ve posted this previously, but it’s been more than a year since I published the course and it’s still right about $500/mon.

   When I was starting all this, I had higher hopes, but it’s been difficult competing with instructors who already have tens of thousands of students and thousands of reviews - they appear on first page when you search for a particular subject and “no one” goes past the first page.

7. Laminar

   6 26 797 7.3 Scala

   Simple, expressive, and safe UI library for Scala.js (by raquo)

   

   My quite niche open source project broke this threshold last year, via Github sponsorships. Of course, I put a lot of time into it, so it's not "passive income" or even "market rate income", but still, without these sponsorships I wouldn't be able to work on it so much.

   The project is Laminar, a UI library for Scala.js https://laminar.dev

8. stratospheric

   7 4 272 8.2 Java

   All you need to know to get your Spring Boot application into production with AWS 🍃

   

   We make about $1300/month (shared among three co-authors) from the ebook "Stratospheric - From Zero to Production with Spring Boot and AWS" and a companion online course: https://stratospheric.dev/

9. SaaSHub

   www.saashub.com featured

   SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives

   

10. ExtPay

    8 57 617 7.3 JavaScript

    The JavaScript library for ExtensionPay.com — payments for your browser extensions, no server needed.

    

    I made a couple browser extensions that make over $500/month each. The key seems to be naming your extension after high-volume search terms and getting good reviews on the chrome store (and obviously having an extension that works well and solve a common problem on major websites). I monetized them with my own service, https://extensionpay.com. Feels so good to eat your own dog food :)

11. tailcall

    9 18 1,377 9.7 Rust

    High Performance GraphQL Runtime

    

    layer by hand? Have you tried https://github.com/tailcallhq/tailcall

    With tailcall, you can quickly bootstrap a GraphQL service on top of existing APIs. I would love to collaborate on this and help you on board.

12. civitai

    10 643 6,689 10.0 TypeScript

    A repository of models, textual inversions, and more

    

    Soz, I don't like to cross link my accounts, especially with all this TSWift shenanigans going around. But, if you look at https://civitai.com/ plenty of people have links to their ko-fi accounts where you can commission them (heck you may even find me somewhere on there).

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