
Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what? - marioluigi
The last two threads by the same name got a lot of attention (and a lot of love from patio), but seeing how its been over a year since then it would be interesting to hear from new people (HN userbase is ever growing) and also get updates from some people who posted in the previous threads.<p>Previous thread: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=4467603<p>Previous to Previous thread: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=2567487
======
simonswords82
TL;DR: The top of our funnel is fine, and our app is making money, but it's
not "easy money" and our trial to paying customer sign up needs some serious
attention.

I run a HR app for SMEs called
[http://www.staffsquared.com](http://www.staffsquared.com). We're making a
comfortable 5 figures each month.

We're reinvesting this income back in the product either in the form of new
functionality (paying programmers) or advertising (paying Google Adwords).
We've increased our Adwords spend, invested in SEO (on page and off page) and
a recent redesign saw a decrease in bounce rate and increase in trial sign up
rates.

Our site visit to trial sign up rate for the last five months looks like this:

April: 13.02%

May: 12.37%

June: 13.76%

July: 15.61%

August: 16.46%

Our bounce rate for the last five months looks like this:

April: 39.54%

May: 40.06%

June: 37.21%

July: 32.8%

August: 31.17%

So both of those top end of the funnel stats are moving in the right
direction.

Our free trial to paying customers is the area we're really focussing on at
the moment as it's really not high enough. So we're re-targeting accounts that
have expired to find out how we can serve them better and tell them about new
features. We're also working hard on our onboarding stuff (the type of stuff
you'll read patio11 talking about) including more intelligent automated
e-mails based on the status of their account at a point in time.

Happy to answer any questions you good people might have where I can...

~~~
jey
Apparently "SME" means "Small & Medium Enterprises".

~~~
epoxyhockey
Thanks for this clarification, as I'm used to SME meaning Subject Matter
Experts (which also applies to the product).

BTW, the Staff Squared homepage is really impressive! My eyes are directed to
all of the right places on the page to sign-up and learn more. I also like
that clicking the Roadmap link on the footer leads directly to the Trello
project page.

~~~
simonswords82
Thanks so much for the feedback, really nice to hear that people who haven't
seen the site before think we're doing it right :)

For the record, if anybody thinks we've made a huge mistake on the site I'd
love to hear about it!

~~~
BryanB55
Not a huge mistake at all but shouldn't the email address box say "No card
details required" instead of "require"
[http://bryan.cx/7OXv/K6kIrX0S](http://bryan.cx/7OXv/K6kIrX0S)

~~~
simonswords82
Yep, thank you. I'll get that fixed.

------
jaytaylor
Previous discussions:

Sep 3, 2012:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4467603](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4467603)

Sep 4, 2012:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4470293](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4470293)

Sep 24, 2011:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3029771](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3029771)

May 21, 2011:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2567487](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2567487)

Mar 9, 2011:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2300599](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2300599)

~~~
joshdotsmith
Thanks for sharing the past discussions. The more often we can talk about
this, the better off the community can be.

------
drpancake
I'm making roughly $300/month from three iPhone apps. They're all quite simple
and I'd estimate that I've put in less than a month's actual work building
them; although as a disclaimer, this is my day job so I can put these together
relatively quickly.

My fourth app was a larger time investment and gets quite a lot more
downloads. It makes no income now, but I'll add In-App Purchases soon.

I'm freelancing for ~45 hours a month to fund this while backpacking all over
the world. I should blog about it.

\---

Edit: I put up a LaunchRock page, if you would be interested in a blog about
this stuff, leave me your details:
[http://theoreticalblog.launchrock.com](http://theoreticalblog.launchrock.com)

~~~
scrrr
Telling people that you should blog makes it actually less likely that you
will actually do it. Read that on some psychology website once. ;)

~~~
rooster8
Anyone recognize this phenomenon by name or have a link?

~~~
ilconsigliere
most people are familiar with this notion due to this post:
[http://sivers.org/zipit](http://sivers.org/zipit)

tl;dr “Symbolic Self-Completion"

~~~
DigitalJack
I've long noticed this in myself. Very neat to see it isn't just me.

------
emhart
I've usually read these threads without thinking about my own situation, but
suddenly realized, I'm getting checks every month. It's not much, only
$100-$250 per month, based on advertisements on my youtube channel, most
coming from a 24 part series I made on locks & lockpicking a few years ago,
but it's passive to the point that I literally forget about it.

Unfortunately I'm the sort who is very uncomfortable asking for money, or even
advertising on my content (only about 50% of the videos I put out have ads at
all, and many of the most popular do not), but at the same time I'd love to
have the time & resources to produce more & better content in the future.

Not looking for advice, as my disposition away from revenue is much stronger
than my wish to get money, and I've learned that lesson many times, just
adding another voice to the thread.

~~~
NovemberWest
I am a lot like you temperamentally and currently homeless, though the two
things are not really directly related. I have thought a lot about it over the
years. For me, part of it is that I was one of the smart kids in high school
and got a lot of not subtle messages about how I owed the world benefit for my
gifts and would be evil incarnate to try to, gasp, get rewarded for them. For
me, I think gender also plays a role. I am female and a lot of my strengths
have a social element which is routinely treated by other people like I owe
them some free motherly love, I should be a total fucking martyr about it,
and, to add insult to injury, making people feel good is not some sort of
intelligent, valuable skill set or knowledge. It is treated like I am just
cute and lovable like a tribble.

I have my own ideas on how to solve these issues for me. I sm not giving you
advice here. Just saying it resonates, fwiw.

~~~
emhart
It's worth a lot, and while I am not female, and can't fully empathize, I
would like to say that I at least sympathize and that I see and try to speak
against what you are describing. Women in particular seem to be taught not to
profit. In fact, I think on the other side of the equation it is part of what
has been awkward for me. Many of my closest male friends see profit as part of
their self-identity and it wasn't until your post here that it clicked for me
that it may be related to gender identity.

So, like I said, worth a lot. And making people feel good, caring for people,
it's the most valuable skill so far as I'm concerned. Glad there are other
people who value it.

~~~
NovemberWest
My situation is complicated. I am not making much money but I am "saving"
millions kind of by not being sick. Long story. So can't really be too
terribly unhappy about it. At some point, the dough will role in but I will
know I am doing stuff I am okay with...etc...

((hugs)) & take care.

------
toumhi
I didn't post on the last threads I think, but I have had some modest success
with passive income, was making up to 700 euros a month 2 years ago, this is
down to 130 euros a month now. Still not too bad considering I haven't really
touched the site for almost 2 years. But my heart isn't in that kind of
projects anymore. Passive income is a bit overrated in my experience.

Still nice to get a small check at the end of the month.

The site in question is
[http://www.giftcertificatefactory.com](http://www.giftcertificatefactory.com),
it provides printable gift certificate templates.

EDIT: I should add the money comes in from Adsense. I tried other monetization
schemes as described there [http://www.sparklewise.com/my-first-passive-
income-project-o...](http://www.sparklewise.com/my-first-passive-income-
project-one-year-later/)

~~~
marioluigi
Nice site. Has the income come down due to a reduction in traffic spend or
just a loss in rankings due to reduction in freshness metric wrt SEO or any
other reason?

~~~
toumhi
My site got slapped by Google Penguin update, lost 90% of its traffic and
never really recovered. It's going down steadily now for some time.

As for the Google penguin update drop in rankings, it might have been a stale
content penalty, or a devaluation of spammy links - I wrote manually lots of
articles for supposedly respectable article directories pointing back to the
template website to go up in search engine rankings and it worked well for
some time.

The idea was to extract myself of this process at some point since it was
painful to write not very interesting articles. But didn't get around doing
it, or outsourcing it.

~~~
erichocean
_My site got slapped by Google Penguin update, lost 90% of its traffic and
never really recovered._

It's funny how you don't really build websites anymore (did we ever?), you
build sites for Google's search engine.

Even thought websites are conceptually different from writing a Photoshop
plugin, in reality? Not so much. You're just as dependent on Google as you are
Adobe, it's just hidden.

------
TamDenholm
Bit late to the boat but:

Around $700/mo from a themeforest account.

And the more interesting story, about £4.5k/mo from a cleaning business that i
bought.

I will at some point write the story up, but the TL:DR is: Spotted vastly
under valued cleaning business with complete staff. Turnover of previous owner
£190k a year. Profit of previous owner £18k. Yup, £18k.... Bought it for
£13.5k.

Still in the early stages and still changing things but the previous owner
was/is in massive debt, little free time to put into the business, did
EVERYTHING on paper/fax/phone and had enormous monthly costs.

Theres a much longer story to this but i'll write it up in a few months when
its a bit more proven.

~~~
tocomment
Any tips on finding undervalued small businesses? How did you come across this
one?

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
A day late and I'm not the OP, but a friend of mine did this by talking to a
business broker. He found a small technology business that was operated by an
old couple that needed to quit.

The couple had been making sensors for a niche industry forever and were still
charging prices from 10 years earlier. His first order of business was to
contact all the customers and tell them prices were going up.

------
vldx
It might sound kind of obscene here on HN, but I'm making about 3500 euros per
month, semi-passive from adult related site/community. It's subscription based
and the content is user submitted (that's why it's semi-passive). Some
moderation is necessary, as well basic user support, but overall - not so much
hustle.

~~~
agilord
Which payment provider are you using? AFAIK most of them are very picky on the
subject.

~~~
vldx
CCBill, SegPay and Achbill.

------
tachibana
I am a data point for the worst-case example. I don't have a hot application
or a popular website, and most of my money is earned the old-fashioned way.

My passive income from my investments in government bonds is enough to cover
mortgage, basic living expenses for my family, and two family trips a year.

Source of money for investments:

\- savings from many years of working and diligently saving

\- some real estate investments

~~~
pilom
I'd like to put some math with this because this is the path I took too. 4
years ago I was offered a job with a startup and a job with a government
contractor at the same time. The contractor was offering 15k/year more and I
took that offer and saved all 15k of it every year (index fund investing). 4
years in, with reinvesting dividends, my passive income from the money is
around 400/month. Very happy I made the choice I did.

~~~
tachibana
Kudos on the great rate of return!

I tell everybody around me it's surprisingly easy to become financially
independent. By saving s% of my income investing with a rate of return is i%,
then the worst case is that I should be able to completely replace my income
in i%/s% years. I was saving 30% (actually more) and investing at around 5%,
which resulted in complete income replacement in around 10 years.

------
maxprogram
~$1000 a month. Designed, edited and published a book of Warren Buffett's
letters to shareholders (see
[http://amzn.com/1595910778](http://amzn.com/1595910778)). An opportunity I
stumbled into. But I suppose "get publication rights from Warren Buffett"
isn't a repeatable business model :)

~~~
BMarkmann
Not repeatable in that specific case, but have you thought about doing the
same thing for other high-profile figures (either in finance or elsewhere)?
You might be able to leverage your experience and success to get them to agree
to a similar sort of thing...

~~~
maxprogram
I have thought of this but haven't really pursued anything yet. I also have
permission from Buffett to publish his early partnership/hedge fund letters
from the '60s, so will probably be doing that in the next year.

------
23andwalnut
I've made about $3k a month in semi-passive income from my codecanyon
portfolio in 2013. I call it semi-passive income because I have to spend some
time on support each day, but it usually doesn't take more than 30 minutes.

EDIT: My portfolio
[http://codecanyon.net/user/23andwalnut/portfolio](http://codecanyon.net/user/23andwalnut/portfolio)

~~~
peacemaker
I sell on codecanyon as well though only make around $300 a month right now. I
have almost the same number of items as you do yet can't seem to get the
visibility. Do you have any tips you can share?

Also, completely agree about the semi-passive! Lots of questions to deal with
daily.

~~~
23andwalnut
In my experience quality sells. Quality code. Quality feature set. And most
importantly, quality design. I think a lot of items on codecanyon neglect the
design aspect and therefore don't sell as much as they could.

Also, I've been somewhat lucky in that almost all of my items have been
featured. This probably has something to due with how much time I spend on
design - at least 40% of my total development time is design. Feel free to
email me with a link to your portfolio if you want some specific pointers...

~~~
peacemaker
You're probably right about the design side of things, mine is definitely
lacking I just have zero ability in that area.

I've send you an emails, thanks!

------
euroclydon
I make $300-$500 per month with an online design tool for printable cupcake
wrappers. I don't do any advertising. I get 80-100 uniques per day. I have
very few quality inbound links. I do rank high for a few keyword combos, but
their monthly traffic isn't that big.

I spent quite a bit of time early on writing the website, and lost some hair
recently trying unsuccessfully to upgrade the OSS libraries, but for the most
part it runs itself, at least when GoDaddy's $60/month VPS isn't flaking out.
The only other expenses are the domain, e-junkie, and payment processing fees.

[http://www.makecupcakewrappers.com](http://www.makecupcakewrappers.com)

~~~
petervandijck
A whole new world just opened for me.

~~~
markdown
Imagine all the cupcakes you could buy with the profits!!!

------
gravitronic
Last year I made a decent DJ application for Android. I probably invested a
few thousand hours into it & the framework I built it on that could compile to
Android, Blackberry Playbook, and HP Touchpad. I grossed just under $10k
between sales on the three platforms, and advertising on Android. That works
out to a few dollars per hour, last year.

This year, I don't have time to work on it further but between advertising and
sales I'm still making ~400-600 USD/month. For 0 hours investment. I love the
long tail.

~~~
jtheory
:) It's not 0 hours investment, just 0 hours investment _this year_. All of
that work last year was investment that's now paying off, bit by bit.

Your hourly rate from last year will look slightly better now if you add in
this year's earnings...though it's still a rough game to play. Good luck!

------
domrdy
I feel a little bit ashamed to post this but whatever. I used to write bots
for a popular online game that would harvest materials and sell stuff in the
games auction house. At first I only wanted to automate some tedious, boring
tasks in the game, but over time I got really good at it to the point where I
wouldnt have to touch my guy for days. Anyway, there where lots of bots on my
servers and we would all undercut each other to a point where our materials
where worth almost nothing. Around this time the company released an API where
you could pull auction house data for your server. I wrote some scripts that
would pull the data, store them in redis and crunch some numbers that I would
later feed to my bots, to gain some advantage. Basically, I was able to
withhold my stock when the price reached a certain threshold and buyout all of
my competitions stock at super low prices. By that time I had already "scaled
up" and ran several instances on various servers, all full automated by some
python scripts. I wrote a web socket based web interface that allowed me to
see my bots log messages in real time from work. I set up alerts when game
masters messaged so I was able to answer them to prove that I was not a bot,
all remotely. It was so much fun. At the end of each month I would sell the
in-game currency to some chinese companies, the last few months I made between
300-500 € / month, double that amount around christmas. One day, the bann
hammer (rightfully so!) hit me hard and I lost all my accounts. It still was a
fun experience that introduced me to several new technologies.

------
n1c
I'm not sure if my project counts; 'cause it's running at a loss?

[http://dressed.so](http://dressed.so)

I made it because it seemed like /r/malefashionadvice needed somewhere to host
their fits with a little extra functionality. Every now and then I build a
feature or two but mostly it just ticks over.

For revenue I make a little via adsense but mostly try and focus on the
affiliate products, for example on this page
[http://drsd.so/15YxDWv](http://drsd.so/15YxDWv) the 'shop this look' links
earn me affiliate revenue.

~~~
masonhensley
Neat, I've seen your site on /r/malefashionadvice.

Since your site is focused on men, you should try and filter out women's
products in your shop section.

Example for a search on "sperry" topsiders:
[http://dressed.so/shop?q=sperry](http://dressed.so/shop?q=sperry)

I'm guessing that mixing in women's products will hurt your conversion rate
for affiliate products. If your affiliate network can't filter like that, you
may want to check out [http://prosperent.com/](http://prosperent.com/) or
[http://www.cj.com](http://www.cj.com)

~~~
n1c
Yeah I've been quite slack about optimising the search stuff. It should just
default to 'male' and have a radio to change.

Thanks for the links; just yesterday I put 'investigate alternate affiliates'
on the top of my list.

------
trevorcreech
$2500/mo from AdSense on
[http://coverphotofinder.com/](http://coverphotofinder.com/)

Zero-maintenance, which is nice.

~~~
TallboyOne
You know, what I would love to know is how you attracted the initial audience.
This stuff is always so easy to make, but my past attempts never really got
enough traffic boost. I'm wondering how you got over the 'plateau' (which in
my experience seems to be ~1000 visitors a day.

~~~
gesman
This site forces you to login via facebook and then sell all your friends by
forcing you to allow it to spam to all connections, thus promoting itself.

Dirty "viral" tactic.

~~~
mapster
seems Google, Facebook, Yahoo etc. have been using this practice for decades.

------
clarky07
I make between 5-10k a month on my apps and book. (It depends on the season.
Summer and Christmas are best.)

[http://buildanappbusiness.com/](http://buildanappbusiness.com/)

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/30-south-
llc/id331245760](https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/30-south-llc/id331245760)

~~~
withoutfriction
Derek, you're missing out on an extra ~7%!

Sign up for Amazon's affiliate program and use your own affiliate links on
your links to amazon.

\-------

Also, as commented below - I posted the first of these recurring income
threads almost two years ago - I'm now compiling some stats, data and insights
[1] for myself so that I can learn how to boost my numbers closer to yours :)

[1]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6432851](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6432851)

~~~
clarky07
That's actually a good call. I'm already an affiliate from another blog I
have. I've been meaning to change those links and I hadn't gotten around to
it. Thanks for the reminder.

------
leviathan
$0.1/month from ads in a free iPhone app.

~~~
donutdan4114
I think this represents the majority of HN user's attempts at monetization.

~~~
b_emery
The other long tail!

------
xoail
Few years ago I wrote a solution manual to one of my text books (half of it
was part of the assignments). I sell it on Amazon for $30 for pdf download.
Been making around $200/month.

~~~
Phlarp
How much time did you put into this upfront? Seems like the most "passive"
item in the entire thread so far. Can I ask what book this is for? whats the
lifespan of a solutions manual like this? Have you been selling it for several
years or does it obsolete itself in sync with the aggressive textbook
versioning schedules?

~~~
xoail
I guess I am lucky that the text book still gets prescribe in some
universities. I also think there is no other version of the text (I need to
check that) I do not maintain it at all. And like I said, I solved most of the
questions as part of the assignments and later worked out the left over ones,
packaged it into a pdf.

~~~
Casseres
When my professors found out that there was a solution manual floating about,
they changed the textbook. Apparently all of the student's answers started
looking the same.

------
kbelbina
I generate around $2,500/mo. I operate a company which mines poker data and
have a couple of partners, plus some large server / tech / support costs. No-
one is full time on the business any more as after Black Friday there isn't a
lot of $ in poker: [http://hhsmithy.com/](http://hhsmithy.com/)

~~~
asciimo
This is fascinating. It took me a while to discover the purpose of subscribing
to this data, and I finally found it at
[https://www.hhsmithy.com/tour](https://www.hhsmithy.com/tour)

"Finding the best tables to play on is impossible without up to date
statistics and data on the player pool and consistently playing pots against
opponents with no reads or statistics is a sure fire way to lose your bank
roll fast."

How do you harvest this data? Do you use player bots?

Also, you have a typo on that page: "Your on the cut off with AJo and a player
under the gun has opened". Should be "You're".

~~~
kbelbina
The data is used with 3rd party tools that scan tables, find the best seats,
display statistics etc. The most popular tool is holdem manager
([http://www.holdemmanager.com/](http://www.holdemmanager.com/)). After buying
data off our site you can import hundreds of millions of hands and have
detailed info on almost every player on a poker site (how often they raise,
fold, call etc etc). If you also scan tables and sit with the "fish"
(recreational players) then you will win a lot more. One day I'll write a blog
post about what online poker is really like (game theory, tools, and
statistics).

On the tech side its some fully reversed clients that we just have linux
command line clients which connect to sites, and other sites its a ton of
Windows XP VM's which open tables and observe. At the heart of it all we have
some command servers which handle distributing the table load, parsing and
aggregating all the data etc. Each day we "mine" over 10 gbs of data zipped
and at peak times can be watching over 10,000 poker tables. It's pretty nuts
that it somehow all works.

And yeah, lots of typos :-O

~~~
bjterry
It's crazy to me that online poker companies make this information available.
Shouldn't tables be private or something to stop this?

~~~
kbelbina
Yeah, a few sites have made it so you can't observe tables but most sites
allow it. You'd have to ask them why but I assume that casual players like to
observe before depositing and they don't want to scare away the casual players
(who are the life blood for a poker site).

------
wellboy
$2000/month from free Android apps.

I just copied existing apps on android like Logo Quiz, 4 pics 1 word etc. that
were number 1 in the play store. Just took 24h to rebuild this apps, since
they're quite simple. Did that around 10 times.

Admob makes $500/month, Airpush $1,500/month.

However, Google just shut down Airpush push notifications, so the latter is
now gone. ha.

~~~
pjbrunet
I hate to play Devil's advocate (please prove me wrong) but you have almost a
million app downloads (more successful than most) and high school kids at Taco
Bell make more than you. And that's before taxes. What will you owe the IRS if
you're in the US? What are you paying in hosting? Is this really the "mobile
revolution" glorified day after day in the news? So $500/month after Google
pulled the rug from under you? Only "24 hours" but what about tech support,
compatibility issues, the market research, artwork, learning to package the
apps, complying with Google's rules, setting up your development environment?
How many days does "24 hours" add up to, start to finish? But forget the
money, at the end of the day this sounds like unrewarding work: ripping off
other people's ideas. Which makes me wonder, you're obviously clever enough to
get a million downloads, why such an uncreative approach? I'm just trying to
understand the app market everyone is raving about. How many times have we all
heard "the future is mobile, the future is mobile." Is making these apps
(games?) really that enjoyable? I'm curious because I'm thinking of making an
Android app. When I read stories like this, makes me think twice. What you're
doing sounds really smart from a marketing perspective because 1. you're
making games which are by far the most popular apps and 2. you're replicating
the most popular games. So you _should_ be killing it, making 100x more than
all the other app developers who didn't sell out, the developers building
interesting, original, useful apps. Yet, you're not. Am I over-analyzing this?
Or is the "apps market" totally overrated?

~~~
tluyben2
These ideas were not original to start with; 4 pics 1 word (which is, imho,
incredibly boring) somehow got a lot of attention, downloads and money but was
never original. Then 100s of devs copied it in some way or another. All these
'games' look / work the same. I made one for a client and the 24 hours sounds
plausible including artwork but excluding the actual levels. That would take
around another day. Making a few $100 / month constant for a few days work is
ok in my book, although it's not the work I would want to do; like you say,
it's uncreative and actually boring.

However; for these kind of games there is no 'support'; people like it or
don't like it, but you don't get support requests; people who experience
issues with the software just uninstall it. It's not worth actually fixing it
for a few outliers with crap white label phones. So you don't actually have
any work with these things and that beats Taco Bell.

I think the reason he is not killing it is the nature of these games; they
_are_ very easy to make so there are 1000s of clones in the Play Store, people
usually cheat (look up the answers) and those who like them have more than 10
installed on their phone. So the ad exposure is very short lived. Installs are
not a very good metric; play time is; you're not going to keep apps like this
active for a long time.

If you make an app which gives value to people or games with fresh content
every week , you will make a lot more money. But that's not automatic; it's a
job :)

~~~
pjbrunet
Seems to me someone with this much skill/ability could easily make $100k/year
($100 x 1000 successful app months) plus pension/benefits just working for the
government. 10x easier work with 10x the pay and more stability. And "mobile
apps" is supposedly the promising, high-tech growth segment of the economy
everyone is harping on. What's wrong with this picture?

~~~
tluyben2
Well it depends on what apps; these are not brilliant examples of app and app
economy. There are people making that kind of money you are talking about with
games like this (4 pics 1 song is top free in the Appstore for instance at the
moment and that is known to make quite a bit of cash), but the things you
don't see 'in the Appstore' are apps which save companies money, for instance,
by optimizing their internal HR or support workflow. Or for instance an app
helping chronically ill elderly managing their meds so the on call nurses and
doctors have a significant % less workload thus saving money and lives.

These apps will not be in the store, but they are making or saving companies
millions. These kind of apps are already critical to a lot of enterprises and
are a real opportunity for developers to make your $100k/year and much more.

The promising factor _can_ be in games, but then rather games people stay
engaged with (Minecraft, Plague, Plants vs Zombies; not saying if they are
good or bad; saying they are liked for years in a row because they are better
gameplay and polish wise). Next to that the aforementioned apps either to save
or make money; mobile, unlike laptops/desktops, brings apps to everyone, all
the time and there is a _lot_ of money to be made in all market segments
because of that difference. Both for devs as well as companies hiring these
devs.

Oh and, this is definitely a matter of taste, but I rather make $2k/month from
home than $10k/month in some gov job in an office. Where I live, you are
allowed to work from home in some of those jobs, but they do expect you to be
in the office at least 2 days/week and that is definitely something I wouldn't
do very unless there is really no other way out.

------
ghc
I generate about $900/month of semi-passive income from
[http://algorithmic.ly](http://algorithmic.ly), but the initial setup cost is
high. In the future I want it to be the goto-company for adding generalized
algorithms to apps, products and services (provided as a service), but while I
validate the market there's a huge initial setup cost (about 10 hrs), spent on
data modeling, cluster deployment and secure key generation.

~~~
WesleyJohnson
Closing out of your site crashes my browser; just a heads up. Windows 8,
Chrome Version 29.0.1547.76 m.

~~~
ghc
Hmm, can't replicate under the same conditions. Do you have any chrome
extensions installed that the site might be interacting badly with?

------
withoutfriction
It's good to be back!

I guess it was around 864 days ago that I posted the original one of these
threads!

My current stats:

$~500/mo from a few supplement related websites, and some fitness stuff. Last
worked on these back in April. Total work/month is roughly 30 minutes.

My current project:

Doing the research so that I can boost this to around $5000/mo :)

I figure this is as good a time as any to announce that I'm actually putting
together a little recurring project of my own - and it's pretty meta.

It's pure stats and useful information on who generates recurring income, how
much work they had to do to get there, what they learned/should've
done/shouldn't have done. I'm researching this purely for myself, because I
want to get to more recurring income faster (because recurring income is so,
so, so freeing) - but a few friends asked me to package it up so I'm doing so!

Check it out [1]. Also I figure I should post it to HN, so I'll update this
comment when I do so :)

Thanks guys - and really glad to see this thread live on longer than when I
first posted it almost three years ago!

[1]: [http://recurringincome.meteor.com/](http://recurringincome.meteor.com/)

Edit 1:

On HN. [2]

[2]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6432851](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6432851)

------
dangrossman
Improvely reached $10,000/mo RR recently, less than a year from launch
([https://www.improvely.com](https://www.improvely.com)).

I also run W3Counter (freemium) and a couple smaller services and paid plugins
for Shopify stores.

~~~
xpose2000
Well done... those numbers are impressive to reach. How many other people do
you work with or are you solo?

~~~
dangrossman
It's just me, working from home or wherever I feel like bringing a laptop for
the day.

~~~
Nord20
This is meant in the best possible way: I hate you. My hate is constructed
entirely of jealousy.

------
mhartl
The Ruby on Rails Tutorial
([http://railstutorial.org/](http://railstutorial.org/)), conceived as a
_4-Hour Workweek_ –style product business, makes low five figures per month,
requiring just about the proverbial four hours of work per week (mostly minor
book updates and customer service emails). New editions are a lot of work
(e.g., ~2 months full-time to redo the screencasts), but the new sales cycle
typically yields a mid-five-figure income spike the month of the launch.

I'm currently working on a project designed to help make Rails Tutorial–type
stories more common among hackers. Stay tuned...

~~~
emilioolivares
Super interested in what you're building, huge fan (but not a customer) of
your tutorial and story. If you could offer a SquareSpace type of solution for
selling screencasts including international billing, account management, it
would be killer! Where do I sign up for the mail list? :)

~~~
mhartl
Glad to hear it. :-) I'm working on a publishing platform that makes it easy
to produce and sell Rails Tutorial–style products. If you'd like to get
involved, just send me an email (address in profile) and I'll add you to the
notification list for the private beta.

------
IgorPartola
Meta note: please don't be shy to share links to what it is that's generating
your income. I hate reading things like "I have this simple app that's making
me $X/month" and not be able to see the context. Who knows, maybe I'll find it
useful and pay for it too.

------
ape4
It seems the big winner is Apple and Google. They passively collect 30% on the
apps we spend months making.

~~~
mansigandhi
Nothing about what Apple and Google provide for developers/App Store is
"passive".

~~~
pjbrunet
I disagree. Nobody at Google would have a job if it wasn't for
Adsense/Adwords, which hasn't changed since the Goto.com days. It's a fancy
click counter script paying everyone's salary. Search = content to sell
clicks. You could fire 99% of everyone at Google and they wouldn't lose one
penny of profit.

~~~
mansigandhi
So the App store infrastructure, support, etc just built itself automatically?
The entire eco-system would not have been possible without them making it.

I've been an App developer for 4 years now and have no qualms with apple
taking the 'passive' 30%

------
snoonan
Interesting point against recurring revenue for some products: We increased
overall sales by charging a fixed price for permanent access vs. recurring
billing. The lifetime value of the customer turned out to be less in the
recurring model. It took us about 2 years to discover this. Just something to
keep an eye on.

~~~
jdlshore
Very interesting. I've gotten a decent number of requests for a la carte
purchases on my site, so I'm strongly considering doing it. (It's a big
change, though, which is why I've held off.) Can you say more? I'm
particularly interested in how you set your prices, whether you kept the
recurring model alongside the permanent model, and how you saw customer
behavior change. Thanks!

~~~
snoonan
I'm reluctant to give harder details since I am in what could be a "passive
income" niche, but I will try. We originally set our monthly prices in line
with comparably similar produces - about $20/mo, with discounts to purchase 6
& 12 months in advances. The final fixed cost (lifetime access) account ended
up costing less than a 12 month discounted subscription.

The feedback was that a) some people bought precisely because they didn't have
a recurring bill hitting their account, even a small one. b) some people found
the fixed price too expensive to buy and were disappointed they couldn't buy
it. c) The ones that did buy the fixed price were happy with their purchases.
Overall, however, we ended up with fewer total buyers each paying above the
average lifetime value of the monthly buyers.

When we offered BOTH subscription AND fixed price access for individual units
for a period of time, people tended to buy the lowest cost subscription
instead of the lowest cost unit. They shopped on price. They were not as happy
with their purchases in either case, though more so for the cheapest
subscription.

In the end, it was counterintuitive to what is commonly considered "good
business" to have recurring revenue from customers. We still think there's a
place for monthly recurring billing somewhere, but we don't have the catalog
or products to support a mix. It would be great to provide Level 1 at a fixed
price and Level 2 at a lower monthly fee because we know they are the "stick
with it" customers and so will likely have a better lifetime value.

Sorry to be vague here. The numbers vary over the years, but started about
$2500/mo and grew to about 10k/mo over about 6 years. It is for a learning
endeavor that people SHOULD commit a year+ to learning, but tend to quit for
very human reasons. We think people who make commitments are happier because
a) that cool TED talk about irrevocable choices that everyone talks about and
b) Committing to putting in the time on our product DOES result in a new skill
set, so it has tangible personal improvement if it is used as directed.

------
jaymzcampbell
Around $40-50 from admob and amazon affiliate links. It pays for my netflix. I
originally set myself a goal "just to see" of buying myself one pint of ale
from a pub over the course of a year for app sales/ads - not exactly ambitious
but I thought i'd end up at best shifting a few cents a month.

I had already an app on android with ~3000 active installs for doing simple
shopping look ups. I changed it to throw in some affiliate codes and fixed a
crash and updated it approximately 18 months ago now and haven't made a single
update.

It's next to nothing but it encouraged me to look more into at least trying
things out for myself - I would never have thought (and still can't) it would
be any more than a personal exercise. If I look at it as "free netflix for 2
years" then it's a real thing to me and "means something".

------
zrail
I wrote a guide to integrating Stripe payments into Rails applications that
expands greatly upon the 10-minute quick-starts[1]. It launched a little over
a month ago and has generated more than $10k. I'm expecting that to drop quite
a bit going forward but I'm still hoping for ~$500 in monthly revenue.

[1]: [https://www.petekeen.net/mastering-modern-
payments](https://www.petekeen.net/mastering-modern-payments)

~~~
terhechte
How do / did you market it? As it seems as if you're only hosting it on your
personal website? How do people find it?

~~~
zrail
I set up a mailing list right at the beginning (there's a signup link _way_ at
the bottom of the landing page, need to make that more prominent) that
generated quite a bit of interest. My website by itself generates a decent
amount of traffic as well. It's also been featured in a few podcasts and email
newsletters which generate traffic and sales.

~~~
terhechte
Thanks for the info! Did you ever consider also selling it via a couple of
ebook sites?

~~~
zrail
I've been considering selling on other sites (maybe Amazon) and/or doing some
limited affiliate deals, but I haven't put any serious work into it yet. What
sites were you thinking of?

------
europa
Making $4000 + / Month profit . Running a consulting firm. I have two direct
employees and few pass-through 's . Revenue is much bigger a number at
$100,000 + /Month . Effort is very less to maintain this profit as only spend
few hours /month to run payroll , invoicing clients and make timely payment
out to the vendors.

 __pass-through : Consultants not employed by my company but work for my
clients.

~~~
peterjancelis
You only take 4% profit margin? Seems very low.

~~~
hartbren_
This rate is not an atypical profit margin for partners (owners) of a
consulting firm. Keep in mind that if the parent poster is really only
spending a few hours a week then his hourly rate is fantastic. In many
consulting firms the partners are also active employees, and so receive salary
as well as a portion of the profits.

------
clemesha
I make ~$400 per month off of [https://itunes.apple.com/app/the-wiki-game-a-
wikipedia/id459...](https://itunes.apple.com/app/the-wiki-game-a-
wikipedia/id459318432) (and counterpart:
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wiki-game-hd-wikipedia-
game/...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wiki-game-hd-wikipedia-
game/id616897548)).

I started 'The Wiki Game' by building this web game:
[http://thewikigame.com](http://thewikigame.com) \- but all revenue comes from
the iOS apps, not the site. Been meaning to potentially monetize the site some
day. It gets ~30,000 players per month, with time-on-site ~9mins.

~~~
cageface
Nice artwork and presentation. Looks a lot better than most of the one (wo)man
show apps I've seen.

------
jdlshore
I gross just under $10K per month from
[http://www.letscodejavascript.com](http://www.letscodejavascript.com), a
subscription-based JavaScript screencast for professional developers [1]. It's
a full-time job: I put out two new episodes every week, plus a "special" every
month that takes quite a bit more effort. That leaves me with about half my
time for developing the business. I'm bootstrapping this, so it's just me. I
don't plan to hire any employees until there's more money coming in. (I also
make a few hundred a month from royalties on my book [2], which is truly
passive.)

I've talked about Let's Code JavaScript on HN before; check out the previous
thread [3] for some details about how I started and market the site.

Since simonswords82 was so generous with details about his business, I'll do
the same. About 2% of the visitors to the site sign up for the free trial.
That seems poor, although I don't have a lot of insight as to what the number
"should" be. I do require a credit card in order to sign up for the trial. The
trial automatically converts to a subscription after seven days.

About 70% of trial subscribers convert to a paid subscription. This seems
pretty good to me, although I'd of course be happier if it was higher. Once
they've subscribed, I lose about 25% of subscribers in the first month, and
then the number drops asymptotically down to about 5% (of the initial total)
per month. I'm reasonably happy with this as well. It's poor by the standards
of a SaaS, where a churn rate of 1-2% is doable, but I think it's pretty good
for a content site.

My most recent push was an inbound marketing campaign: I took one of my
monthly specials and turned it into a dedicated site on object-oriented
JavaScript [4]. That was very successful; it nearly doubled traffic in the
first month (from 2,800 uniques in the previous month to 5,400) and looks like
it will permanently add about 1,500 uniques per month. Trial rates went down
slightly as a result, but overall subscriptions went up.

The biggest challenge for me is having lots of things I'd like to pursue, but
not enough time to do them all. The Object Playground inbound marketing
campaign was successful, but a lot of work. I recently released another
special that might make a good inbound campaign (on large-scale JavaScript
fundamentals: modularity and automated cross-browser unit testing), but I'm
not sure it's worth the time it would take to create a marketing site for it
on the scale of Object Playground.

For now I'm focusing on A/B testing various ideas for improving conversion. It
takes less effort and potentially has longer-term impact. So far, I've
improved the subscribe page [5] by adding testimonials and a better design.
Next, I'll probably provide more opportunities for people to preview the
series without signing up, as well as more obvious calls to action on the
video pages. I also have some other plans in the works that I can't talk about
yet. :-)

[1] My screencast is _Let 's Code: Test-Driven JavaScript_, a series for
professional JavaScript developers. It's available at
[http://www.letscodejavascript.com](http://www.letscodejavascript.com). I'd
love to hear your feedback.

[2] My book is _The Art of Agile Development_. It's been out for over five
years now, so it's nice to still be getting royalties from it.

[3] I talked about my experiences launching and marketing the screencast here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6038226](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6038226)

[4] My recent inbound marketing campaign was Object Playground, a tutorial and
visualizer for object-oriented JavaScript:
[http://www.objectplayground.com](http://www.objectplayground.com).

[5] The Let's Code JavaScript subscribe page is at
[http://www.letscodejavascript.com/v3/subscribe](http://www.letscodejavascript.com/v3/subscribe).

~~~
davetong
I really like what you are doing, but after seeing what happened to RailsCasts
I am a worried what will happen to this business model once it hits 400+
episodes. Hopefully your "other plans" have this part worked out?

~~~
jdlshore
I assume the screencast has a limited shelf life, so yes, my "other plans" are
about that. Although at this point, I think the problem is more about
organizing the content so it's not overwhelming. I'm not worried about running
out of material or burning out, at least not for a while.

What happened to RailsCasts?

~~~
davetong
[http://railscasts.com/announcements/11](http://railscasts.com/announcements/11)
[http://railscasts.com/announcements/12](http://railscasts.com/announcements/12)

------
jamesgagan
I make around $5 to $10 a day from my site [http://tunes.io](http://tunes.io)
I haven't put any effort into marketing it or trying to monetize it other than
adsense. Maybe I should be trying harder!

~~~
asciimo
I was about to post, "How do you make money on this?" And then I remembered
that I use AdBlock. D'oh! I paused it and refreshed a couple times.

~~~
jamesgagan
Yeah I use adblock too - even on my own site ;) I was thinking maybe I would
make a tunes.io android app and sell it for a buck just to see what happens.

~~~
ashray
I'll tell you what will happen. I would pay for it! tunes.io is great!

~~~
jamesgagan
Thanks! Tell your friends ;)

------
cageface
I make about $500/month from my iOS apps. Considering how much time I put into
them I can't say it's really been worth it yet but I plan to at least upgrade
them for iOS 7. They did open the door for some unsolicited contracting work
though.

[http://www.plastaq.com](http://www.plastaq.com)

------
Ologn
Between $1450 and $1650 a month from ads on Android apps. One app does about
$1100 a month, another does $325 and the rest collectively maybe $150.

~~~
jamesgagan
Do you think ads are a better way to make money than charging for the app?

~~~
epoxyhockey
I am also wondering about this. I have an app selling at $0.99 and make a
couple hundred per month in sales. It's hard for me to project how much ad
revenue I could make, especially since I don't know how many additional people
would use it if it were free.

~~~
GVIrish
Is your app for Android or iOS?

~~~
epoxyhockey
Both iOS and Android.

------
asciimo
I mine about .0015 BTC a day, a figure that has been declining consistently
and rapidly.

~~~
redblacktree
Time to pony up the cash for your very own ASIC!

------
jsleuth
Been earning a couple hundred per year with a time-tracking/report-generating
site for therapists-in-training. I think one of the big downfalls of the
concept was that I chose too small of a niche to serve (marriage and family
therapists in training in the US). The most tangible benefit from building the
service was the coding knowledge gained which serves my freelance work very
well.
[http://www.therapyhourstracker.com/](http://www.therapyhourstracker.com/)

~~~
tankbot
You should consider expanding this to include other types of therapy workers.
I know from doing tech work amongst mental health professionals that most are
required to log x amount of hours doing y before they can obtain licensing as
a z. Since you have the platform and domain knowledge you should be able to
add features to widen your target demographic.

~~~
jsleuth
Thanks, that's a great idea.

------
jarofgreen
In the UK I started and ran a site listing tech events:
[https://opentechcalendar.co.uk/index.php](https://opentechcalendar.co.uk/index.php)
It's just had it's first birthday and is doing well.

This was done in a "maybe-a-bit-to-lean" fashion. There was a previous
facility run by a local meetup that suddenly stopped, so I knew there was
demand before I started. The first version was a MediaWiki site with a hacked
open source calendar plugin that took 4 days from buying the domain to public
launch. This was then later replaced with custom software.

This now picks up a small amount from direct sponsorship (as in, I directly
approach ppl and don't use something like Google AdWords).

It took a bit to write, but I've realised the specific niche functionality
could serve others and I'm currently working on turning this into a platform
for any area. It's early days for that, but it works and it's up at
[http://ican.hasacalendar.co.uk/](http://ican.hasacalendar.co.uk/)

(I also have some recurring income supporting a freelance contract I did which
now takes a couple of days per month but I don't think that's what most ppl
here are interested in.)

------
IgorPartola
I net roughly $230/month from a rental property I own. I have a realtor I
trust manage it for a "first month + 5% of rent" fee. The property is located
in a market where rent is much higher than the mortgage (about 150%), so I end
up making a profit while building equity into a house at a low interest rate.
Not exciting, but it is a viable model and management fees seem very
reasonable for the amount of work the realtor does.

~~~
tocomment
Make sure you're accounting for vacant months, and for maintenance.

~~~
IgorPartola
I am. So far, just as pure passive income it has been a loss (not by much, but
still). I do like the idea of building equity into the house though. It is
cheap enough that I can continue carrying it even during the vacant months and
I do believe the prices in that market will stay stead or rise somewhat slowly
over the years. In the wosrst case, it can be a nice retirement home.

------
xur17
I make anywhere from $300 to $800/month on
[http://pizzacodes.com](http://pizzacodes.com). About 3 or 4 months ago I
switched domain names to make it more memorable, and I dropped out of search
results for everything but my site name. Traffic has increased pretty
substantially from other sources over the past few months, so I'm back just
over $600/month again.

~~~
Nord20
Hmm. Lovely concept, but when I put my address in, it says there are no
results - mainly because it thinks my UK address is just between Tuvalu &
Tokelau in the South Pacific (so technically, the results were correct - Papa
John's are unlikely to deliver there).

~~~
xur17
Unfortunately it's US only right now. It appears to default to 'just between
Tuvalu & Tokelau in the South Pacific' if no results are found - I'll fix
that.

Thanks for the feedback.

~~~
kngspook
On the East-to-West axis, it's probably defaulting there because it's the
International Date Line. No idea how it's picking that spot on the North-to-
South axis though.

------
pmtarantino
A better question I'd like to read is "Good ideas for recurring income".

~~~
ThomPete
And the only sensible answer you would ever receive should be "anything that
people want to pay repeatedly for" :)

My point being. I don't think anyone would give you a specific idea for
recurring income cause then they would go ahead and do it themselves.

I might be wrong but I doubt it.

------
jakobe
I make around $2000/month from two Mac apps (database tools). Revenue is
falling as multiple competitors cloned my profitable app, so I have to do more
client work again :(

~~~
konradb
Is there any way you find to guard against competitors cloning your app? Do
you have any recourse?

~~~
jakobe
There's pretty much nothing I can do. One competitor even made an icon almost
identical to mine. I contacted Apple, but all they did was forward my
complaint to the competitor. The competitor first sent me a threatening email,
but then they changed their icon.

I think the best way to guard against competitors is to improve your product.
The first one and a half years I was always far ahead of my competition. Since
about a year I haven't had time for any significant new features, so my
competitors have catched up. Some competing apps now have more features, some
are a lot cheaper... Unfortunately the next logical steps for improving my app
are so much work that I don't know if they would pay off.

------
suhastech
[http://thehorcrux.com/](http://thehorcrux.com/) currently making $400-$500.
Fluctuates a bit. I haven't done much marketing (apart from a Show HN)

I'm not even sure how people are finding it. My analytics software says 85%
come from "Direct Traffic" which is weird.

~~~
hamstu
Direct Traffic is either just what it says, or traffic from
'[https://'](https://') (SSL) sites. Your site is just [http://](http://) (no
SSL) and thus can't get the referral information.

------
snori74
My Linux server tutorial course site [http://GREP101.com](http://GREP101.com)
brings in $700 on a good month and $100 on a bad one. Simply a reflection of
the fact that I don't have the necessary things in place to drive consistant
traffic to the site - when traffic comes then I get good conversion and a full
course, but if not, not.

I keep it going mainly because the feedback is very encouraging, (people
really do get a buzz out of learning this stuff!). It requires only a small
bit of work each week to keep ticking over, but honestly it doesn't make
enough to justify that if money was the only issue.

~~~
smu
Seems like you have an extra dot in your link. Should it be:
[http://grep101.com](http://grep101.com)?

~~~
snori74
Yup, fixed now. Thanks - maybe I need a coffee.

------
anovikov
$800 a month for support of a few scripts i written 3 years ago. Drop in the
bucket but still keeps me very motivated doing any work for that customer (and
this is the only work at all that i still do myself, not my employees).

------
otikik
Nil.

~~~
segmondy
likewise. :-(

~~~
kintamanimatt
Can I ask why? Is this intentional because you're busy doing other stuff, or
because your efforts have yet to be successful?

~~~
segmondy
working full time job, don't really have any great idea. fear of failure and
over thinking leads to paralysis.

------
acconrad
Since this thread didn't specify that the recurring income has to come solely
from technology, I make $400-$1k/mo DJing. Technically it's work because it's
not passive, but it is recurring and it is a hobby that requires little to no
work - I have a LOT of fun doing it and it pays well by the hour. I'm only
posting this because I think it's important to also point out that you can
turn hobbies into passive, recurring income and that is a surefire way to
getting the most out of your passive income.

------
JeremyMorgan
I pull in anywhere from $400-$600 in adsense off my blog, it's not exactly
passive because I have to contribute content to it. But I originally only put
AS on there to cover hosting costs (and other servers for dev, etc) but now
it's starting to get closer to "income".

I'm still putting it into things like Raspberry Pis, Arduinos, Parallellas etc
for stuff to write about on the blog. I use that money to try out other
services as well, it's nowhere near what I'd call a "business" at this point.

~~~
tokenizer
That sounds really cool you should provide me (us) link.

For niche blogs that do well like yours;

What year did you start? How was growth? Posting frequency?

Thanks for any insights. I'm really curious because I'm slowly starting to
realize I can maybe earn some beer money by being an active part of the
community for a hobby of mine. Your case is a perfect example, as you do
adsense, have a similar niche (newish tech) and seem like you started our of
fun/love of your hobby. Cheers

~~~
justadude
Might be this one?

[http://www.jeremymorgan.com/](http://www.jeremymorgan.com/)

------
prepaidcc
Created
[http://www.canadaprepaidcreditcard.com](http://www.canadaprepaidcreditcard.com)
in June last year. Traffic has grown steadily to 3000+ unique / month. A large
Canadian daily newspaper included link to site in a story on prepaid credit
cards which spiked traffic for a week. Otherwise traffic is almost all organic
search. Adsense revenue grew steadily and is up to $120+ / month. I have one
affiliate ($35 per sign-up) that has paid once. Have to look into this some
more.

Created
[http://www.australiaprepaidcreditcard.com](http://www.australiaprepaidcreditcard.com),
[http://www.usprepaidcreditcard.com](http://www.usprepaidcreditcard.com) and
[http://www.ukprepaidcreditcard.co.uk](http://www.ukprepaidcreditcard.co.uk)
sites recently. So far only UK site is following steady growth pattern.
Apparently no one is interested in Australian cards and US has trillions of
similar sites so mine is drowned in search.

I did Canada site card research myself. But didn't have time for Australia, UK
and US site research. So I created 3 Fiverr jobs with template Excel workbook
asking person to search internet and fill with as many cards as they could
find. I got 4 people per card so between them I got good detail though had to
clean it up and fill in the blanks.

Sites requires minimal ongoing maintenance. Actually I have had customers and
several card companies contact me to make corrections and updates.

------
callmeed
I have 2 companies in the professional photography space:
[http://bigfolio.com](http://bigfolio.com) and
[http://aphotofolio.com](http://aphotofolio.com). The first serves wedding and
portrait photogs and the second high-end editorial, commercial, fashion. We
provide website designs and a custom CMS for managing galleries. We get a
setup fee (though that is going away soon) and monthly hosting. They aren't
exactly equal but each is making in the low six figures per month.

On the wedding side we also have [http://nextproof.com](http://nextproof.com)
which is sort of a "shopify for wedding photos". It makes around $30k/month in
subscription + transaction fees.

On the commercial photo side, we have
[http://editdrop.com](http://editdrop.com) which is a feedback/collaboration
tool for photographers and their clients. It makes about $2k/month at the
moment since we haven't done much marketing yet.

Overall, I'm bearish on the professional photo space so we are actively
looking into other verticals and doing a lot of customer dev/research.

My wife and I also run [http://cheergram.com](http://cheergram.com) in our
spare time. Right now we are making a few hundred bucks a month in sales but
we did almost $3k in Instagram Christmas cards last year between thanksgiving
and Christmas. I'm hoping we can top that this holiday season.

~~~
sashagim
That's very impressive - both in terms of revenues, and product development!
Are you doing all the design and development work yourself?

~~~
callmeed
We have employees and stuff

------
jonstjohn
About $100/month on
[http://www.climbingweather.com](http://www.climbingweather.com)

It was ad-free for years, finally put some ads up last year and now it's
covering my expenses. Haven't done much development in a couple years, but
working on an updated Android app. A bit skeptical that I'll make much money
from it, debating pay-app vs ads vs free-free. Now trying to pick up some real
advertisers (currently adsense).

~~~
hanley
Why would someone use this instead of Weather Underground, Weather.com,
WeatherSpark, Forecast.io, etc.? It doesn't seem very specific to climbing and
there doesn't seem to be much room for growth since Mountain Project is
already the go-to site for route and community information.

~~~
jonstjohn
I think the main benefit of ClimbingWeather.com is ability to quickly find
climbing areas. Looking for the forecast for Indian Creek, Joshua Tree, the
Gunks, Cathedral Spires? You don't need to find the nearest town or hope the
forecast is right (maybe you'll find it is 10 degrees difference due to
elevation). Agreed that the growth potential might be somewhat limited, but
there is still a small and solid audience that likes the format.

------
jeffwilder
Every year around Halloween I make $400-600 via adsense with
[http://trickortreattimes.com/](http://trickortreattimes.com/) which lists
trick or treat times for cities/towns. It felt like a good service to provide
as you really have to hunt for the data. First year I did the aggregating
myself, last year I added user submission which made it much more passive.

It's time for me to update it for another year!

~~~
diydsp
I make about $200-$300 per evening during Halloween. I go around to websites
that list trick or treat times, I am short, dress like a ghost and collect
candy for free than re-resell to convenience stores.

------
yumraj
My wife just posted an eBook - Startup Financing, Equity & Tax, which might be
of interest to some folks here. Link:
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/startup-financing-equity-
ta...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/startup-financing-equity-
tax/id701661334?mt=11)

There is no sale data yet, but would be happy to share in the next thread.

Also, if anyone has any pointers on how to market an eBook, would love to
hear.

~~~
matznerd
It seems you already found one vector of marketing... dropping links on niche
related forums ;)

------
ChrisNorstrom
This is one of the greatest motivations for young and budding entrepreneurs.
Even more so than aspiring speeches or conference talks.

I'd like to thank everyone that posted links and revealed your numbers. People
usually don't do that because it invites competition but it's amazing to see
how nice and inviting the HN community is. I'm also AMAZED at the familiar
faces. I've seen and bought a lot of code from some of you guys without
realizing many of you visit HN.

Here's my crap:

[http://dayonepp.com](http://dayonepp.com) \- Maybe $100/month (down season)
then I think $500/month (up season) NOT passive. Lots of work. I handle
fulfillment.

[http://affordabl.es](http://affordabl.es) \- $0, just launched

[http://residentevilradio.com](http://residentevilradio.com) \- $0, (ran
Amazon affiliate links)

[http://timeforzen.com](http://timeforzen.com) \- $0, needs redesign, will
monetize later this year.

BTW, where's [http://CandyJapan.com](http://CandyJapan.com) guy? Last I heard
he told us his project was successful at around $3,500/month in revenue.

~~~
kehers
This may be off topic but I'd love to where you registered your domain
affordabl.es. Last I tried registering a .es tld, I got some "Syria
residents/biz" restrictions.

~~~
ChrisNorstrom
lol NameCheap:
[http://www.namecheap.com/?aff=56383](http://www.namecheap.com/?aff=56383)

They're great. I'm switching over to them from 1and1. I own about 65 domains.

------
nihaar
I make about $300/mo with
[https://broker.mapthatpad.com](https://broker.mapthatpad.com). Not even close
to what I originally was intending (and the amount of time I've spent building
it) but to be honest, I have not been doing a whole lot in terms of marketing
and selling it at the moment.

I hope to do more selling/marketing in the future and get this monthly number
higher.

~~~
santa_boy
What is your revenue model? How are you able to reach out to users and make
them pay for it? What are the marketing tactics you have in mind?

That is decent revenue btw! Good luck!

~~~
nihaar
Its a monthly recurring model. I actually partnered with a small company in NY
that sells a tangential product to the same market. They do the marketing
within the NYC market for me.

I can try to sell this more actively to other markets, SF being next since I
live here, but with a full-time job and a baby, its hard! In terms of
marketing, I think I could manage a small AdWords budget to run but it would
initially be more just me cold calling and setting up demos - starting with
smaller shops with a shorter sales cycle first.

------
britcanpakus
There are some interesting lessons with my pay-what-you-want approach,
although I haven't quite nailed it down.

I run a DC-based service called Linktank
[[http://dc.linktank.com](http://dc.linktank.com)] that offers limited access
to registered users and full access to PWYW subscribers:
[http://dc.linktank.com/subscribe](http://dc.linktank.com/subscribe)

After launching my subscription service this past August, I have about a 6%
conversion from freemium registrants, although that has been picking up
steadily this month and will continue to rise in October.

Users have an option to pay $3, $5, $7, $9. Most users choose $3 but slightly
less than that choose $7. On average, I am getting about $5.25 per user.

I'm generating about $1,400 from subscriptions alone but that number is
increasing by a hundred or so every week.

I started this service as an email roundup. That list has now grown to about
23K subscribers and I'm now monetizing with subscriptions, advertising, and
job postings.

What do you think of my approach? Where am I leaving money on the table? What
are some missing opportunities?

------
kephra
\- I'm doing between l$20k and l$30k per month on commissions on vendor
systems that rent out shoutcast servers to musicians and DJs in Secondlife.
_oups_ thats only us$80-$120, but its game money, that I can drop into
tipjars, if I like music, or use it pay graphic designers.

\- I'm doing Linux maintenance for a dozen servers (Debian, Linux Container,
Nagios, Make+M4 as management - hey puppet, chef and cfenginer are for quiche
eaters) for Euro600/year each, basically for doing backup, apt-get, and having
a nagios screen open.

\- I have sold the 3rd w3dig.com installation, with an Euro1000 anual
maintenance contract recently. This will hopefully become my next 'big'
software.

\- I still have 22 XML::Edifact customers, who pay Euro1000 twice a year for
maintenance update, when the next UN/EDIFACT standard is published. A semi-
passive income that requires a week work twice a year, and payed my lifestyle,
free software experiments, slack, and procrastination for a 3rd of my life so
far. Not bad for a software I published under GPL 15 years ago.

------
acketon
I do a bit of freelance design work each month, but I've been working on a few
products for designers to generate recurring income and solve some annoyances
I have in my workflow and tools.

The first ( [http://www.mockuprocket.com](http://www.mockuprocket.com) ) is
close to finished and will be a desktop app to help quickly create design
mockup presentations and upload them to your server. There are some services
that do a similar thing but I've always preferred to keep client work on my
server...especially for designs that need to kept under wraps until release.
The app will also handle different layouts and let you customize the templates
for each client so you can setup branding and so forth.

I'm a designer and front-end developer so it is my first serious attempt at
building and creating something more involved and it's been a fun learning
experience. Hopefully some other designers will find it useful and I can make
a few bucks on it.

My wife is a self-published fiction author ([http://www.amazon.com/Stephanie-
Void/e/B0035Z08GI](http://www.amazon.com/Stephanie-Void/e/B0035Z08GI) &
[http://www.stephanievoid.com](http://www.stephanievoid.com) ) mostly young
adult fantasy/scifi. Visibility is the hardest thing when going independent
because the Kindle/iTunes book stores are very hard to get found in. I
actually think there is some sort of opportunity for a startup offering some
kind of better book shopping experience with a bit of Netflix's recommendation
engine or something.

She hasn't gotten enough visibility yet among her young adult audience to
really take off but has been making enough each month that it is worth it. She
keeps writing more books though so it should slowly increase over the years.

------
benhirashima
i make around 1300 USD a month from this android app i made two years ago. i
have to update it every time a new version of android is released, and i spend
maybe 5 minutes a day on email support.

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.benhirashi...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.benhirashima.unlockwithwifi)

~~~
asenna
The app looks pretty cool. Could you please share some of your thoughts on how
you settled on the price?

I am about to launch an App and this app would later have a web backend to go
along. I am not sure whether to launch the app for free and have some kind of
subscription on the website or make the app paid.

------
anonymous1983
I gross approximately 75k a month in RR, split between my business partner and
I. 60k from IPhone apps and 15k from Android apps.

~~~
kristianp
That sounds great! Can you expand on that? For instance, did you develop the
apps, how many apps, what niche? Were you first-to-market?

~~~
anonymous1983
I don't want to reveal the apps that I make, but I can answer your questions.
I did develop the apps. There are 4 main apps that bring in all of the
revenue. The apps are gaming and entertainment categories. None of the apps
were first to market, but most of them did provide a much better experience
than what was available at the time.

------
amberes
About €1000 from a subscription based web analytics niche thing and another
€2500 from my wife as she works for the government.

------
mVChr
Small stakes, but completely passive. About ~$500/mo from Adsense on what are
essentially niche long-tail SEO targeted yellow-page-like regional sites for
very specific verticals. Not a lot of money, but I haven't touched them since
2007 (when they were averaging closer to $800/mo). Initial investment was
mostly time doing research, implementing, and SEO stuff. Also experimenting:
abandoning failed sites or improving ones with potential. Now the successful
ones are completely passive sources of income and the only expenses are
hosting and domain renewal.

Right now I'm working on a more substantial side-project that will provide an
actual service that hopefully people will actually want to use and subscribe
to for their businesses. It will require more maintenance and time and
monetary investment, but in the long run should be much more satisfying and
potentially bring in more income.

------
morphar
I have a simple IP lookup site ([http://showip.net](http://showip.net)) that I
created many years ago. I created it because I needed it (but mainly too learn
at that point ;) Since then it has gotten better and better indexing on Google
until it reached a steady level at around 100.000 - 130.000 visitors / month.

The ads has been fluctuating quite a bit, but overall it has been going
steadily up. Currently I earn somewhere between $250 - $500 / month.

I haven't done much but a bit of tweaking now and then since the initial
version, though I have had plenty of plans... I have changed the GEO IP
location DB a couple of times, but the only major change was a rewrite from
PHP/MySQL to Node.js and a GEO IP database directly in NginX.

------
MrBigJoe
I make roughly £60 a month from
[http://www.phonecompare.co.uk](http://www.phonecompare.co.uk)

It's written in PHP/MySQL using Symfony 2 and hosted on a UK based VPS.

It's only been online for a short period and I'm working on it all of the time
to increase what it's making so we'll see how it goes. At the moment it's
pretty bare and doesn't have a huge amount of value so it's not doing very
well in the search engines, but I'll keep plugging away and give it a
reasonable chance to see what its potential is like.

I'd like to add a comparison feature which will allow people to compare the
specs of the handsets against each other which will hopefully give it a bit
more of an edge.

------
llogiq
Whenever I hear an evangelist (and I label everyone dealing in absolutes like
'is X worth it?' without at least asking 'what?' and 'for whom?' evangelist),
my gut reaction is to dismiss everything without even reading it.

I work in an unconventional setting, where my code runs for a potetially long
time and where failure means trying again. This has led me to use a lot of
assert statements, both in a pre-/postcondition/invariant checking and in a
more general assumption checking style. I still use unit tests, but only to
exercise portions of the code quickly - the tests are often devoid of
assertions.

I find that this style gives me the best test coverage + internal code
documentation for the time invested.

------
Shpigford
Making around $5000/mo between [http://popsurvey.com](http://popsurvey.com)
and [http://temper.io](http://temper.io) (recently launched).

But that's rising a bit more rapidly now: [http://joshpigford.com/kill-the-
free-how-to-increase-revenue...](http://joshpigford.com/kill-the-free-how-to-
increase-revenue-by-40-percent)

Slow, but steady, growth. Definitely a prime example of the "Long, Slow, SaaS
Ramp of Death." [http://businessofsoftware.org/2012/10/gail-goodman-the-
long-...](http://businessofsoftware.org/2012/10/gail-goodman-the-long-slow-
saas-ramp-of-death/)

------
darkcatstudios
I WAS taking around £1000 PM through an online printing service which i sold
off about 3 years back as i hadnt got time to put the effort into it that it
involved. I am now looking at re-launching that as the new owner disolved it
and let the domain lapse (www.a2prints.co.uk) (i didnt sell the IP) As you'll
see the site is very dated now so im in the middle of a compete rebuild, hope
to launch again in a few weeks. Currently adwords is basically paying for
itself, but the bounce rate is understandably very high due to the very dated
nature of the site.

Should turn around £7k pm after relaunch with a realistic initial estimate of
10 1-print jobs per day.

------
chromaton
I'm at around $12000/month REVENUE from my side business doing online
machining. Unfortunately, it's neither as passive as I'd like it to be, and
much of the money goes back out as expenses.

------
ankit70
For me, it's around $200 from Affiliate Marketing. My blog
([http://ankitkumar.in](http://ankitkumar.in)) has couple of articles with
affiliate links in them.

------
rk0567
$500-$1000 per month from my blog [0], Railyo [1] and from another website [2]
from Adsense, Direct Fees and Affiliate programs. I spend 2-6 hours a month.

[0] [http://blog.sudobits.com](http://blog.sudobits.com) \- I blog about free
and open source softwares, tools, news and so.

[1] [http://railyo.com](http://railyo.com) \- Job board for Rails freelancers.

[2] [http://assembleyourpc.net](http://assembleyourpc.net) \- A simple tool
for building pc online.

------
galfarragem
$15/m with amazon affiliate links in a niche blog:
[http://www.archimodels.info](http://www.archimodels.info) (7.5k visits
month). Unfortunately I didn't start the blog thinking about monetizing it.
It's a very bad market (architectural students and teachers). Hopefully I can
get $30 for 5h work every month (10min x 30days). It's just a hobby that
allowed me to learn about web development (that's not my work field).

------
egomaksab
4 figure each month, Breeze ([http://breeze.pm](http://breeze.pm)), it's a
project management app (Basecamp and Trello mashup).

~~~
marco-fiset
The thing with saying "4 figures" is that it can be anywhere between 1000 and
9999, and that is a way too big range to even give us an idea.

------
spencerfry
[https://www.uncover.com](https://www.uncover.com) has been up and running for
about four months now. We're bootstrapped and doing a bit over $5,000/month in
recurring revenue. I wrote a three-month recap on our progress last month:
[http://spencerfry.com/what-i-ve-learned-since-releasing-
unco...](http://spencerfry.com/what-i-ve-learned-since-releasing-uncover)

------
olofsj
A small single-page info-site I made in a day or two some time ago started
picking up traffic and now makes around $500/month from adsense ads. Quite
nice for the work put into it, but of course if you take into account all my
sites and apps that made nothing it's not much for the total effort. But now
that it's getting traffic I have some ideas for building it out into a larger
site, but I haven't found the time yet.

~~~
autotravis
What is the site?

------
nish1500
21, drop-out, profit ~ $7k a month, working part-time, and no partner. Up from
$31/month last December. Comes from sale of plugins. Not recurring, but
stable.

~~~
23andwalnut
Sounds great. What kind of plugins? Where do you sell them?

~~~
nish1500
;) [http://codecanyon.net/user/nCrafts](http://codecanyon.net/user/nCrafts)

~~~
peacemaker
Really like your plugins on CC. I sell on there too but don't get close your
number of sales. Do you have any tips or advice on how to increase visibility?

------
KamiCrit
~$130 from ads on YouTube videos
([http://www.youtube.com/user/YTBYlover](http://www.youtube.com/user/YTBYlover))

~~~
tokenizer
Hey really cool videos thanks for sharing the link.

I've been extremely interested in starting a youtube channel and ones that are
currently similar are somewhat similar to your youtube stats.

An example:

5,000 subscribers

1,000,000 views

Joined 2011

So my question is how did you monetize your channel? I have a few more months
to go before I can get good equipment for recording and editing so I'm
unfamiliar with youtube's monetization for niche channels. Thanks.

~~~
KamiCrit
Somewhere in the YouTube settings there is a Google Adsense sign up procedure.
It is a bit of a trick but if you can figure it out then your set for life!

------
newppc
I make about $30 a month running a small coupon code website focused on cell
phones. Again it's almost nothing but the upshot is if the site takes off in
any way, it can bring in some ok money on the site. A lot of it can be
outsourced once you get the system down, but there is a good amount of manual
labor. Site:
[http://www.newphonepromocodes.com](http://www.newphonepromocodes.com)

~~~
ajaxguy
would you mind sharing the source of these coupon codes. I am trying to come
up something like this other niche area. But struck in getting the sources for
these kinds of codes/deals. Thanks in advance.

~~~
newppc
No prob - a most of them are from the advertisers/brands themselves through
the big affiliate networks. Almost all of them are on Commission Junction. The
few left over are on Linkshare and even less on the others like Impact Radius,
etc. Google shut down their affiliate network a few months ago and almost all
of the brands went to Commission Junction and Linkshare.

For coupon codes you can't find from the retailers themselves, you can take a
look at competitor websites.

------
bond
Making about $800/month from 2 Android apps. Not much but it keeps me alive.

Trying to release some games and see if I can increase that amount in the next
few months...

------
mapster
$200-500/mo from ecommerce selling digital goods I create.
[http://mapsalesdirect.com](http://mapsalesdirect.com)

------
emilioolivares
This thread is full of HN gold! Thanks everyone for sharing.

I make about $450 dlls per month offering cheap cpanel hosting @
[http://www.simplehosting.co](http://www.simplehosting.co). Interestingly most
of my clients are in emerging markets, such as Latin America, Indonesia, and
Vietnam. It's not totally passive as I have to do support and other admin
stuff, but it's not bad.

Cheers!

------
coherentpony
Run a consulting firm. Make about $250,000 per month.

~~~
Omnipresent
I'm really interested in this. I work full time right now but am thinking
about opening a consulting firm. Could you please share details of how you
started and took the first few steps? I don't plan to quit day time work to
concentrate fully on consulting work (at least not initially)

------
benmorris
$1k-$3k/m (depending on season) mostly passive income from my design online
niche sign related websites. I've done a lot in design online software so I
made my own and farm out the production side. I've automated most of it and it
provides a nice steady income when I'm between clients. I also license the
same platform to clients when it fits their needs.

~~~
euroclydon
I'm curious what exactly you mean by "design online"? I wonder if it's similar
to what I do. Shoot me an email; I'd love to chat.

------
marco1
I make about $15.00 per month with a free Android app [1], although it has
900,000+ downloads and 500,000+ active installations. Seems I have to rethink
my monetization strategy ;) [1]
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.marcow.bir...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.marcow.birthdaylist)

------
leviathant
I have $200-$300 in (mostly) eBay and (less so) Amazon affiliate income from a
message board and news site I run, both about a band.

------
thibaut_barrere
I just crossed 500$/mo with
[https://www.wisecashhq.com](https://www.wisecashhq.com) (cash flow
forecasting for freelancers and small businesses, launched officially 2.5
months ago).

This is far away from passive income since I'm actively working on it (I'm
bootstrapping it + consulting/freelancing the other days).

------
AliEzer
I make enough to buy a Frappuccino from day to day, mostly from a reaction
gifs application on the App Store : [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/my-
reaction-when/id632831985...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/my-reaction-
when/id632831985?mt=8)

By the way, all in-app purchases are free today and tomorrow...

~~~
pa5tabear
How long did it take you to make this app?

~~~
AliEzer
It took me maybe 3 weeks (3 to 5 hours a day) but I experimented many
solutions (APIs, sharing, Vine...). I used RubyMotion and I had prior
experience with the iOS environment.

------
jankins
I'm making $200/mo on average from one iPhone app. It took me a month to build
it a year ago and sales have remained stable, except for one $800 month when I
got featured in a popular newsletter. I'm currently polishing up an iPad
version and will experiment with increasing the price when it goes Universal.

------
Judson
I've been making ~$400/mo for the past 6 years from
[http://askjud.com](http://askjud.com). Its a simple trick you can play on
your friends.

Info about how to use it [http://www.wikihow.com/Use-Ask-
Jud](http://www.wikihow.com/Use-Ask-Jud)

------
handzhiev
$4 - $5k monthly from PHP apps for webmasters and premium Wordpress plugins
(the latter works better recently). This is far from passive though as it
requires constant updating and support.

We have a bunch of content sites but they barely bring $200 - $300 from
adsense and affiliate (used to be 10x a while ago).

------
bmcd
I make under $1,000 per month with a Salesforce.com application:
[https://appexchange.salesforce.com/listingDetail?listingId=a...](https://appexchange.salesforce.com/listingDetail?listingId=a0N3000000B3eYIEAZ)

I'm working on a few more to try and supplement this.

------
acoleman616
I make $0/month now, but I'm working on a book ("Your First Web App",
[http://www.alexpcoleman.com/your-first-web-
app/](http://www.alexpcoleman.com/your-first-web-app/)) and another SaaS app
now to hopefully change that soon.

------
appbot
I currently make betweet $3k and 4k a month from
[http://stuartkhall.com/posts/an-app-store-
experiment](http://stuartkhall.com/posts/an-app-store-experiment) and
[http://appbot.co](http://appbot.co)

------
widdershins
I make around £400 per month on tutorial videos for music production
applications. It used to be more like £1000, but I've neglected the site in
favour of pursuing programming (so I can make my own music applications,
instead of talking about other peoples').

------
jsleuth
I made a few cents selling google ads next to a version of the bubblebreaker
game I built. Seems to be hard to make money on games...
[http://games.jeffslutz.com/bubblebreaker/](http://games.jeffslutz.com/bubblebreaker/)

------
ompemi
Around $5K/mo for few android apps, being 60/40 between paid and inapp + paid
versus ads.

------
abemassry
$2.50/month from [https://wsend.net](https://wsend.net) I'm working on growing
it and developing add ons that use it as a backend. No day to day work, 1 hour
of server maintenance a month approx.

------
veb
I run a Facebook fan page for a TV show, and use Teespring
([http://www.teespring.com](http://www.teespring.com)) to monetize the page.

Every few months I do a sale, which nets around $4,000 USD.

~~~
rfnslyr
Isn't that illegal, making money off someone elses product? How many subs do
you have?

~~~
veb
Hopefully not. :-) I have 345,000.

------
mflanagan
I make 1-2k/month from WindowTabs (windowtabs.com), I've been neglecting it, I
think I could make a good bit more if I put some time into it. It's hard to
say no to the consulting work...

~~~
NicoJuicy
Actually, that's an awesome app :P

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doktorn
Me and my business partner make about $500/month from a simple iPhone app.
([http://varkar.knappra.se/index_en.htm](http://varkar.knappra.se/index_en.htm))

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derwiki
I get about $100/month from:

    
    
      * Lending out my cameras/lenses
      * The cut that CameraLends takes off other transactions
      * Affiliate marketing
    

for my side project CameraLends.com

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wingerlang
Around 0-300 USD from stuff I've developed for jailbroken iOS devices.

Note that that's a couple of months after release, and most of the revenue
comes during the first two to three days.

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kbart
Nothing, 0 ;( But after seeing so many success stories here, I hope one day to
overcome that internal brake inside me that prevents from trying.

~~~
sixdimensional
Ditto! You can do it, just smart small, try it out and start with something
that has almost no impact on your life if you fail. In fact, I like the saying
"fail, and fail often" \- it means you learn a lot!

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gurvinder
About $400 per month from websites ( ads) and iPhone apps. Used to be 2k per
month but has dropped low because of lack of time for attention.

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mgz
Couple hundred dollars from running ads on
[http://standartgost.ru](http://standartgost.ru)

~~~
Eduard
What's it about (cannot read cyrillic)?

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eekfuh
Around $1000 per month for an iOS app I wrote in 2008 and have made some
updates to. It used make around $2k a month.

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Kanbab
low 4 figures from real estate

~~~
nether
Buying/selling? Renting? How long did it take to get into it, and what did you
do previously if different?

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Kanbab
Buy and hold. I had been patient and bought after the market crashed. I bought
it in another state and put 25% down on a 4-plex. Rent pays my mortgage and I
have money in my account every month. I would have tried to earn more money in
order to purchase more.

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wielebny
About 400EUR monthly from running game servers on open-source game.

~~~
andypants
How do game servers make money? Advertisements in the game?

~~~
wielebny
It's free-to-play with paid additions, 'premium accounts', etc.

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benhebert
I earn 1,500 - 2,000 a month off of niche websites. Nothing fancy.

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Omnipresent
would like to find out more

~~~
cotsog
[http://benhebert.com/profitable-niche-site-two-
months/](http://benhebert.com/profitable-niche-site-two-months/)

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beachstartup
in the millions/year and growing. managed hosting and cloud hosting.

the hard part is keeping the profits as we learn to scale the business.

