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InfluxDB
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.
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HackerNews-personalized
Discontinued Telegram bot for all kinds of notifications from Hacker News [Moved to: https://github.com/lawxls/HackerNews-Alerts-Bot]
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SaaSHub
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
Building and selling macOS apps is a pretty good niche to be in right now.
I escaped my stressful corporate job 1 year ago and I’ve been living comfortably since then from app revenue only.
I’m making between $3.5k and $9k per month with https://lunar.fyi/ and the smaller apps I create at https://lowtechguys.com/
It’s not much for some parts of the world. But I’m well enough from this that I even took the time to build a small calendar app (https://lowtechguys.com/grila) from which all the funds will go to my brother’s college costs so he can stop working 12h/day jobs.
Before this I tried creating paid web services but none took off. I realized I actually don’t use any indie web product after 8 years of professional coding. I’m only using web products from big companies like Google, fly.io, Amazon etc.
Desktop apps on the other hand, most that I use and love are made by single developers.
With the ascent of Apple Silicon, and the ease of SwiftUI, this has the potential of bringing a modest revenue while also being more fulfilling than a corporate job.
In case you’re curious how the code looks for something like that, here’s a small open-source app that I built in a single (long) day, which has proven to be useful enough that people want to pay for it: https://github.com/alin23/Clop
Building and selling macOS apps is a pretty good niche to be in right now.
I escaped my stressful corporate job 1 year ago and I’ve been living comfortably since then from app revenue only.
I’m making between $3.5k and $9k per month with https://lunar.fyi/ and the smaller apps I create at https://lowtechguys.com/
It’s not much for some parts of the world. But I’m well enough from this that I even took the time to build a small calendar app (https://lowtechguys.com/grila) from which all the funds will go to my brother’s college costs so he can stop working 12h/day jobs.
Before this I tried creating paid web services but none took off. I realized I actually don’t use any indie web product after 8 years of professional coding. I’m only using web products from big companies like Google, fly.io, Amazon etc.
Desktop apps on the other hand, most that I use and love are made by single developers.
With the ascent of Apple Silicon, and the ease of SwiftUI, this has the potential of bringing a modest revenue while also being more fulfilling than a corporate job.
In case you’re curious how the code looks for something like that, here’s a small open-source app that I built in a single (long) day, which has proven to be useful enough that people want to pay for it: https://github.com/alin23/Clop
I have mild success at $500/month by selling my $5 Video Hub App (though I donate $3.50 of every purchase to a cost-effective charity). This is averaging 100 sales per month for several years now.
https://videohubapp.com/ - though I also have it open source: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App
https://github.com/lawxls/HackerNews-personalized
This is a telegram bot for managing personalized feed of stories from Hacker News. Just add keywords, and maybe set score threshold.
Was this a good self plug? :D
My most ambitious web project was https://noiseblend.com which is a web app for discovering music on Spotify.
It’s a next.js + React slow and memory hungry mess [1] which could have been static HTML with some JS for the dynamic bits.
Experience taught me to keep it simple nowadays, but I had to go through the Noiseblend mistakes first.
The stack is Python with Sanic for the backend, Postgres for db and Redis for cache.
That’s what remained after removing all the unnecessary services I implemented because I thought they were paramount: high availability, data locality, time series databases, performance monitoring, alerts etc. Forget about those until you start making money on the product.
The biggest disadvantage a web service has over a desktop app is that you have to keep it up. No matter what, you have a server to manage and make sure it keeps responding. That worry doesn’t exist on offline desktop apps.
The other is finding the market for it. Noiseblend didn’t have a market, and it being dependent on Spotify didn’t allow me to ask for money unless I did something more. That’s another problem, avoid creating functionality that depends heavily on big companies.
I thought about “pivoting” and turning it into a playlist building tool for DJs. I added filtering songs by key and mode (e.g. A minor) and asked a few people if they would use such a thing. Turns out that they use a semi-offline desktop app [2] that already does that and is much faster and powerful.
Oh well, at least now I have a way to find songs to improvise on with my Kaval and guitar.
From my observations, people are reluctant on paying for websites. I guess they don’t feel as “owned” as a desktop app.
[1] https://github.com/Noiseblend/ui/blob/master/pages/artists.c...
[2] https://mixedinkey.com/camelot-wheel/
For non-AppStore apps like Lunar, I use the macOS SDK from Paddle.com. It provides trials, license activation UI, payments and checkout UI, both in-app and on web. Here's how I use it: https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/Lowtech/blob/main/Sources/Lowt...
For App Store apps I have my own custom solution which uses https://github.com/IdeasOnCanvas/AppReceiptValidator to see if the app has been bought, and if it isn't, I have a time and usage based expiry logic. When the timer expires, I block key functionalities of the app and show this screen: https://shots.panaitiu.com/o6qnP8
For non-AppStore apps like Lunar, I use the macOS SDK from Paddle.com. It provides trials, license activation UI, payments and checkout UI, both in-app and on web. Here's how I use it: https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/Lowtech/blob/main/Sources/Lowt...
For App Store apps I have my own custom solution which uses https://github.com/IdeasOnCanvas/AppReceiptValidator to see if the app has been bought, and if it isn't, I have a time and usage based expiry logic. When the timer expires, I block key functionalities of the app and show this screen: https://shots.panaitiu.com/o6qnP8
Thanks! I only learn by building small ideas and looking into the Apple documentation through Dash (https://kapeli.com/dash) and searching "how to do X" on Google. So I can't recommend material from first-hand experience.
But I've heard good things about this university video course: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9VJ9OpT-IPSM6dFSwQCI...
On a first glance it seems to cover a lot of stuff I use regularly in SwiftUI, but also some videos are quite long. It depends if you like learning by watching, or by doing.