
Ask HN: Inspirational money making web apps made by hackers. - clyfe
Please post money making web apps that you know of, like 37signals stack, dabble etc. That<p>1. were made by single hackers (or verry small teams)<p>2. make money<p>If possible add a short description.
======
podman
I've made three:

<http://www.boostcam.com> \- Built it in a weekend a couple of years ago.
costs next to nothing to run and makes money on adsense.

<http://www.sproutvideo.com> \- SaaS video hosting platform that I built with
a partner (I coded everything and he's the business man) in a couple of weeks.
We've got a lot of paying customers already.

<http://www.physicalfix.com> \- Fitness web app that I've been building with
another partner (Again, I'm the coder and he's the talent) for a couple of
years and just launched. Taking a little time to get tracking but doesn't cost
much to run and has a few paying customers already.

None of them make me enough money to work on them full-time yet but it's a
nice supplement to my day job salary.

~~~
ammarkalim
What kind of video player are you using in the video hosting platform? I want
to sell finance courses as screencasts but i am having huge problem with video
hosting platform. All the html5 players i have seen are crap. Vimeo is good
but it does not support commercial hosting.On the other hand Viddler is
AMAZING. Their video player is amazing and the streaming is quite good as well
but i am ready ready to pay $100 per month in the start. The only option i
have is screencast.com. What do you recommend?

~~~
podman
We use a flash player and 'fall forward' to html5 when flash is unavailable.
We do this because most people do have flash installed and this covers about
99% of the use cases. In the case that flash is not available, we fall back to
the default html5 player of the browser and currently don't use any custom
chrome of our own.

------
swombat
<http://www.github.com> seems wildly profitable and was created by a team of 3
hackers, afaik.

------
user24
<http://www.bingocardcreator.com> \- made by HNer patio11, here's his
(amazingly interesting and useful) blog: <http://www.kalzumeus.com/>

~~~
patio11
I'll elaborate to answer what I think are the questions behind the question,
since I answered them a hundred times in the last three days at the Business
of Software conference and one more time won't kill me:

a) It makes bingo cards for elementary schoolteachers, which is one very
specific problem a large group of people know they have, is close to trivial
technically to solve, and for which almost all solutions suck. This makes it
very achievable for one guy to tackle as a hobby project. (It eventually got
to the point where full-time employment was my poor paying quirky hobby
project.)

b) The business, as distinct from the application, works because over the
course of four years I became very good at organic SEO and metrics-based
optimization. These are broadly applicable skills in software (and marketing
generally). Surprisingly few people can do them well.

c) No, I do not see myself being the bingo guy for forever. If you wanted to
address a similarly small niche yourself, I would say it is a wonderful
learning opportunity and has been lifechanging for me. I wouldn't recommend
starting with bingo cards for elementary schoolteachers, because if you are
capable of beating me at it your skillset is worth a heck of a lot more money
than can ever be extracted from that market for that problem, but virtually
any developer can find something similar and learn enough to make it work. The
amount you learn from having your own experimental laboratory is better than
grad school, and you get paid to study. I wouldn't particularly recommend that
route if you take money from investors. Two models, vastly different
lifestyles, pick your favorite.

------
arn
<http://appshopper.com> \- I contracted out the design, some of the backend
code. I coded the rest and tied it together. Since then, have hired a
programmer to handle maintenance, new features. pays his salary + makes a
profit.

~~~
tocomment
Cool. How does it work? How does it make money?

~~~
arn
ads + affiliate referrals.

------
chrisrhee
<http://lighthouseapp.com> — Bug tracking app created by 2 people. Used by
businesses big and small, as well as some popular open-source projects (like
Ruby on Rails)

<http://tenderapp.com> — Customer support app created by 2 people (out of
necessity when Lighthouse started getting big).

Both apps are by ENTP. We have 2 programmers & 3 designers now and are working
on redesigns for both Lighthouse & Tender. We actually just released a sneak
peak yesterday: <http://hoth.entp.com/2010/10/5/sneak-peek-tender-admin-2-0>

~~~
mitjak
Oh boy, I _love_ Lighthouse (worked for Bluenotion over the summer). Pure joy
to use!

~~~
imagetic
Thank you!

------
acangiano
<http://anynewbooks.com> is made by me and it's already bringing in some
revenue. Not serious money yet (hundreds not thousands of dollars), mind you,
but it has been profitable from day one and growing relatively fast.

~~~
run4yourlives
I've been using this since you mentioned it a couple of weeks ago on HN. I
like it. Can I offer a couple of suggestions?

1\. The first thing I go looking for is a synopsis. Amazon isn't always good
at this, you should try to incorporate this somehow. (I realize the difficulty
with email)

2\. On your "staff pick" could you do a bit of a review?

3\. Canada. Give me some Canada options eh! (I know, I know, bigger market etc
etc)

Keep up the nice work... I will buy books from this.

~~~
acangiano
Thanks for being an anynewbooker, and for the feedback.

> The first thing I go looking for is a synopsis. Amazon isn't always good at
> this, you should try to incorporate this somehow.

Unfortunately, I tried this one week and it didn't work. The emails ended up
being very long, the click through fell down, and I received a few emails of
complaints from people who liked the more compact email without descriptions,
because they didn't feel obligated to read the whole thing.

It's possible that I may make this an option in the future, but at the moment
I'm dealing with other items on the todo list.

> On your "staff pick" could you do a bit of a review?

This is a very valid suggestion and it will probably be implemented soon
enough. I think even a one liner saying why it's our pick would help.

> Canada. Give me some Canada options eh! (I know, I know, bigger market etc
> etc)

I added this feature this week: [http://blog.anynewbooks.com/2010/10/new-
feature-for-internat...](http://blog.anynewbooks.com/2010/10/new-feature-for-
international-readers.html) BTW, I'm in Canada myself. :)

> Keep up the nice work... I will buy books from this.

Thank you.

------
modoc
<http://10MinuteMail.com> was written by me as a learning exercise. It's
profitable and low maintenance.

~~~
mdolon
Out of curiosity, when did you launch the site? Did you do any marketing or
was it natural growth? I ask because the temporary inbox market seems pretty
saturated already.

~~~
modoc
I launched it in November of 2006. The temp inbox market had several players
in it already, and if I'd actually looked around at all I wouldn't have built
it:) But it was just something to learn Seam and scratch my own itch, so I
didn't even check to see if there was already a product in the space, much
less several.

I didn't do any marketing, just mentioned it to a couple of friends.
Apparently those friends know some crazy people because in ~24 hours it was on
the front page of Digg, Slashdot, and Yahoo Tech.

Since that initial spike of traffic, and the settle-out afterward, it's been
growing slowly but steadily ever since.

~~~
HardyLeung
10minutemail.com is cool. Thank you. But recently it has not been working for
me. Are websites catching on and blacklisting 10minutemail domains? Anyway to
counter that?

~~~
modoc
By not working you mean sites won't let you register with e-mail addresses
ending in lhsdv.com? Or that they do, but there's some issue with
10MinuteMail.com itself that doesn't show you the e-mail? If it's the former,
then not much I can do, other than rotating domains every few months, which I
do. If it's the latter, email me with an example and I'll try to fix it.
devon@digitalsanctuary.com

~~~
catch23
Maybe you can have people donate their junk domains that they bought out of
whim. I'm sure every HN reader probably have a few dozen domains that they let
expire every year.

------
niyazpk
<http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/> \- by HNer paraschopra is arguably the
best A/B split testing tool available. It was developed without any outside
funding, by an extremely small team (1-3), and it is making decent amounts of
money AFAIK.

~~~
paraschopra
Thanks for posting this Niyaz. Yep, it is a specific niche tool developed by
me (but have tiny part-time team now) and is making decent money, which I
expect to grow.

------
dangrossman
<http://www.w3counter.com> \- developed and operated by myself, profitable
since 2006 - real-time web stats, which I've been offering since before Google
Analytics and such existed, tracking all activity on over 50k websites

<http://www.w3roi.com> \- developed and operated by myself, profitable since
2009 - real-time conversion tracking for online advertising

------
tumblen
I made <http://nicetranslator.com> in Nov. 2008.

Probably 2 weeks of work all said but by far my biggest success in terms of
sheer numbers.

It makes money to help pay bills now via AdSense and is totally hands off.

Actually, given our analytics, I think that it's really underperforming
monetarily. My partner and I have largely moved onto other things, but if
anyone out there loves to do that kind of stuff, maybe we can work something
out?

~~~
kranner
Wow. That works really well - hilarious results for a few lines from 'The
Wire' translated to Hindi.

Possible bug: The 'link' button shows a nice popup but did not generate either
of the two promised permalinks in 15 seconds, at which point I left.

------
drusenko
<http://www.weebly.com> \- made by a small team, 2 1/2 hackers if you count
myself as 1/2 time :)

we're _very_ profitable.

~~~
rokhayakebe
Are you telling me there are only 3 people at Weebly? Now that is very very
impressive.

~~~
drusenko
Not quite. Chris (cofounder) works 100% on infrastructure, Dan (cofounder)
works on finances and product. We have a full-time designer, a full-time
analytics person, and a full-time "head of customer satisfaction".

Customer support for 5 million users also takes a bit of time, and we have
several part-time support staff that help people with any issues they run in
to.

Having said that, both of our full-time developers are amazing and get things
done at a pretty incredible pace.

~~~
rokhayakebe
That is still well below what I would think.

------
sahillavingia
Freckle - <http://letsfreckle.com/> \- made by a very small team, very
usability oriented. Came into a tough space, and is now making a ton of money.

~~~
clyfe
Oh, I knew this one, I couldn't find it anymore. It's made by some Ruby star
guy and Amy Hoy designer.

~~~
jharrison
Technically he's a javascript "star guy". Thomas Fuchs, creator of the
script.aculo.us library and core contributor to the Prototype library. Both
libraries have been a big part of Rails development for years although many
people are now moving to jQuery.

~~~
ahoyhere
Yeah, that's true -- I (Amy Hoy) actually have more Ruby fame than Thomas
does. But he's more hardcore in reality. :)

------
garazy
<http://builtwith.com> \- made for fun not to make money but now its
profitable by a team of 1 :)

I think the idea is to not start with the thought "I want to make a web app
that makes money" but "I want to make a useful web app that solves a problem"
- the money will eventually come if you crack that nut!

------
tworats
<http://xpenser.com/> \- Time and Expense tracking via
voice/email/sms/IM/twitter/iPhone/Android/...

Made by a small team, doing well.

~~~
moshezadka
Let me start by saying I love xpenser. But note the following:

"""

Why is Xpenser free? How do you plan to make money?

We'll be introducing premium accounts that'll carry a monthly fee in the near
future. The goal is to keep the base product free and charge for longer data
retention and other services. """

It's not yet making money, which would disqualify it from the criteria for
this Ask HN

~~~
tworats
Thanks for the love :-)

Xpenser for Business is the commercial version of the product for businesses,
and it's bringing in a good bit of revenue. At the moment it's by
request/invite only, but will be generally available soon. Anyone interested
in an invite can send an email to feedback@xpenser.com .

Users sign up for the free product, like it (or love it it :-) ), and ask to
use it in their company. The free product is acting as a very good way of
bringing users to our commercial product, so it's remained free.

~~~
moshezadka
Cool, I'm very happy that you guys are making money!

(For what it's worth, my love is not abstract -- I actually learned something
about my spending habits in the mere two weeks of using Xpenser that helped my
peace of mind. It's something that makes my life demonstrably better!)

------
base
<http://vendder.com> \- made by 2 people with ruby and sinatra. just started
but already have some paying users.

~~~
acangiano
For a second I thought I was visiting <http://shopify.com>. I think it's a
little too close to your competitor look wise.

~~~
base
It's true, there some similarities, mainly the color and wording, but in this
e-commerce shopping cart business to describe the product we always need the
words "shopping cart", "create online store", "sell online"... (at least in
english)

~~~
mitjak
But hopefully not the same colour scheme and general site layout ?!

~~~
tmatos
Honestly speaking, we've put most of our effort on the back-end development.
Our landing page is just Wordpress with a modified custom theme. A designer
colleague gave us a help on the branding but the same way many banks / big
corps use blue in their logo, green is very standard here. If you think you
could do better we're happy to be helped ;) cause every Photoshop crop we do
take us half of the day.

------
wensing
<http://www.stormpulse.com> \- made by 2 people. Tracks and maps the weather.

------
wushupork
<http://shelfluv.com> \- Single hacker. just launched about a week ago but
making some Amazon affiliate revenue from all the coverage it's getting.

------
nandemo
Nico Nico Douga is a sort of youtube where users can write comments _on_ the
videos (like subtitles). The first version of was supposedly written by a
couple of guys.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nico_Nico_Douga>

I have no idea why no one has made an English clone yet. Apart from messy
copyright problems and hosting costs (which all youtube clones have anyway),
it's practically a guaranteed success.

------
udfalkso
I made <http://isitnormal.com>, which is almost paying the rent now.

------
norbu09
<http://iWantMyName.com> \- built by 2 1/2 guys over the last two years out of
frustration with the domain registrar business practices. we are not hugely
profitable yet but we can live off it and work on our own project which is
rewarding enough for the moment.

~~~
treitnauer
Just would like to add that we're completely self-funded and proud of it... :)

------
eduardo_f
<http://improffice.com> \- online email transfer / email migration for
Gmail/Google Apps.

I built the prototype myself, then my current partner came onboard when the
app started making money. He dramatically improved the code and I'm mostly
working on the business stuff now.

------
ian_h
<http://www.eventhq.co.uk>; online event registration/management for the
UK/European market. Built by 1 person and bootstrapped through contract work.
Still relatively small beer but seeing faster growth now

------
cheald
<http://mmo-mumble.com> is my one-man hobby project, and is solidly
profitable. The app is really the control panel/management interface/widgets,
but obviously the service encompasses more than that.

------
paulsingh
<http://notarycrm.com> \- simple CRM for notaries (and an online directory for
SEO-goodness)

<http://www.mailfinch.com> \- on demand direct mail

Built by me and profitable.

------
kranner
<http://codeboff.in> is done by me. It's a screening platform for hiring
programmers.

I switched on billing just this morning so it hasn't actually made anything
yet.

------
JangoSteve
<http://www.ratemystudentrental.com> \- student rental housing ratings and
reviews; sells private-label housing portal version to colleges and
universities.

<http://www.leadnuke.com> \- B2B sales lead generation by monitoring online
conversations.

Both built by me. Both make money. Not yet enough to support me full-time.
Still consulting to bootstrap.

------
japherwocky
<http://simplemailer.pearachute.com/> \- latest incarnation of a mailing list
engine that has had subscribers since 2006. Pays for it's server!

(I feel like we just got Mechanical Turked to an SEO farm, but hey- $GOOG
juice!)

------
jfno67
<http://www.seeyourhotel.com> \- Hotel locator with Google Maps. We (2 guys)
did it in 2006 and added some features here and there. It's still making
money, but we haven't added to it for more than a year.

~~~
rwhitman
So its all just affiliate revenue from the hotel bookings?

~~~
jfno67
For the revenues yes, it's just affiliate revenue. At first it was a huge job
to clean up the data for the locations. Back then about half the hotels had
errors in their locations.

------
theycallmemorty
<http://www.cupcalculator.com> \- Slightly profitable. Its essentially a
static page with some adwords but the ad revenue has more than covered the
cost of the domain name and hosting.

------
damoncali
<http://trackjumper.com> \- A simple bug tracker for freelancers and small
software teams. I started last summer, and it's been growing ever since.

------
IgorPartola
<http://www.pingbrigade.com/>. Not exactly profitable yet, but brining in some
revenue.

~~~
al_james
Thats pretty awesome. Cute logo as well.

It would be great to add some more locations around the world.

If you add monitoring and alerts I would probably pay. Not that much as its
already a corwded space, but I think a cheap alternative could get traction.

I wonder if its possible to have a business model of only charging when it
alerts you to a site being down? E.g. we just alerted you to a site being
down. Donate and we will do it again! Dont donate and I will delay my alerts
by 1 hour next time!

~~~
IgorPartola
Thanks for the response. Yes, monitoring is in the works. That is certainly an
interesting business model, thanks for suggesting it.

------
dholowiski
This is possibly the most inspiring post on the internet. Thanks.

------
lefstathiou
www.scriblink.com - made by me and partner in 2006. currently the number one
online whiteboard. makes several thousand a month.

~~~
ritonlajoie
clicky <http://www.scriblink.com>

------
sgt
How about a money-making spell checker?

~~~
Aetius
How about a monney-making spell checker. FTFY.

~~~
drusenko
not. reddit.

