
Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2019 – Show and tell - folli
It seems this question hasn&#x27;t been asked for some time, so I&#x27;d be interested hear what new (and old) ideas have come up.
======
matt_the_bass
I’m almost there. Hopefully that will be the case by 2020. But mine is not a
Saas or app. I actually make things as a hobby and sell them in low volume.

A few years ago, I started making word clocks as presents for people. After a
while I started teaching a workshop on how to make a simple clock at a local
maker space. Now I have a refined design that my wife and I are producing in
our basement and starting to sell at low volume: www.finewordclocks.com Making
clocks is also a great excuse to buy cool tools. We have a probotix asteroid
cnc in the basement. I have a 3yo and 6yo. It’s been fun getting them involved
in making things. Most of the presents for their friends’ birthday parties are
home made (mostly by me but with the kids’ participation) and are REALLY well
received.

~~~
blisterpeanuts
Your clocks are beautiful, and a very clever idea.

~~~
matt_the_bass
Thank you! I appreciate you taking the time to look.

------
synack
Running [https://diskprices.com](https://diskprices.com) and
[https://battprices.com](https://battprices.com), I've been consistently
making >$500 in Amazon affiliate fees each month for the last couple of years.
It's still growing, slowly. I'm working on some improvements to the software
to add more metadata about the drives like warranty and advertised performance
numbers.

~~~
sp332
Has Amazon made it more difficult to make money with affiliate fees in the
time you've been running the site?

~~~
synack
They added new "efficiency guidelines" that require you to make at least one
sale a month or the account gets dropped. This hasn't been a problem for me,
but definitely adds a barrier to entry that wasn't there when I started.

------
marktucker
[https://amazingmarvin.com/](https://amazingmarvin.com/) has been my side
project since 2016 (wow!). I will finally quit my job at the end of the year
to go full-time on it (co-founder is already full-time). I worried a lot about
doing something that had already been done 1000 times (a productivity tool),
but now that it's working out I realized there's always room for a better
mousetrap! Another surprising learning: it's still possible to have a product
that people will pay for in 2019 with a mediocre phone app.

~~~
rapdev
Dang, this looks so close to being what I’ve been looking for (and failing) in
terms of an “organizational” manager. I find that not a lot of tools let you
go from macro to micro planning and back very easily and efficiently and are
either long term focused or daily/weekly focused.

If I purchase lifetime access will that include future updates? Will I be able
to retrieve all my data if you stop offering the product?

------
folli
I'll start: I'm still actively working on my Android app, Sun Locator, that
helps photographers and outdoorsy people to predict the position of the sun
and the shadows caused by mountains and hills. It helped me to learn quite a
lot about Android programming, the app ecosphere and costumer support, and it
makes a bit of spending money on the side. More info:
[http://www.sunlocator.com](http://www.sunlocator.com)

~~~
arel
Great job! I'd love to hear more about the calculations involved for the sun
and moon paths and the implementation of the shadow maps. If you have the time
and haven't already perhaps it would be worthy of a blog?

------
segmondy
Go to indie hackers

[https://www.indiehackers.com/products?minRevenue=500&sorting...](https://www.indiehackers.com/products?minRevenue=500&sorting=lowest-
revenue)

~~~
andreygrehov
I'm sure OP knows how to google. Nothing against IH, but HN is a medium that
allows you to talk to authors directly, which is an invaluable experience.

------
QueensGambit
Download Amazon product categories as a CSV file -
[https://www.browsenodes.com](https://www.browsenodes.com) . Interestingly, I
bought this domain with all the backlinks for $500 and made more than $500 in
the first month itself.

~~~
throwaway13000
Man. This is a wonderful little niche product. How did you stumble upon the
website to buy?

~~~
QueensGambit
Thanks! Actually, I was a user of that website. The previous owner put a
notice on the landing page that he is selling it. I saw it and bought it
immediately because, I didn't want it to go away. But I didn't expect to
recover the money in the first month itself!

Since then, I have expanded it to Amazon product data as well -
[https://www.commercedna.com](https://www.commercedna.com) . But, haven't
started charging for it yet.

~~~
jazoom
Interesting. Any reason why you don't have amazon.com.au?

~~~
QueensGambit
I need Amazon Australia API key or someone with that API key to use my shared
cache. Only then, will I be able to collect that data. As of now, no one from
au has used it. So I don't have any data on that.

~~~
jazoom
Ah. Sounds like the cache wouldn't be much use for .au since nothing is in it
currently. Gotcha.

------
dangrossman
I opened an Etsy store selling laser-cut crafts.
[http://ligninandlight.com](http://ligninandlight.com)

~~~
auxym
Neat stuff, I've also made a few things (nursery wall decoration for my son)
using my job's Trotec cutter. The machine was bought for around 30k USD I
believe, so buying one for a small etsy operation sounds like a long ROI! Do
you own your own laser machine?

~~~
dangrossman
I'm using a Glowforge Pro which was only $5500. It paid for itself in about
two months.

------
DarrenDev
SmartEdit — [https://www.smart-edit.com/](https://www.smart-edit.com/) — A
Microsoft Word Add-In for creative writers. It’s been around for a few years
now, brings in a good bit more than $500 a month, but nowhere near enough to
quit the day job. Doesn’t require much upkeep either. It just keeps rolling
on...

------
seanwilson
Checkbot for Chrome: [https://www.checkbot.io](https://www.checkbot.io) :)

It checks 100s of pages on your website at a time for SEO, speed and security
problems like broken links, duplicate content, invalid HTML/CSS/JavaScript,
insecure pages, redirect chains and 50+ other issues.

------
blisterpeanuts
Playing in a band! It's a side project, earns me between $4K and $6K per year,
depending how many gigs of course. Last year was huge for me, around $8K, and
this year is slow, probably will be about $4K.

I'm just about to upgrade my sound equipment to probably the Electro-Voice
Evolve system, which has bluetooth, can be operated by a phone app, sets up
easily, and sounds incredible. This is an investment which will make my band
more marketable but also set me up to do more paid sound gigs. The day job
will always be my main gig but this is a great side project.

------
scottjg
i run [https://zeromac.com](https://zeromac.com) , a hosting service for Mac
VMs. i charge by the hour. the margins aren't as lucrative as a traditional
software startup.

i'm considering two new offerings:

1\. lower-priced option where the servers would be overcommitted.

2\. bringing up a SAN (VMs currently run on local storage) and charging for
storage and compute time separately. this would also enable things like
spinning up VM based on a custom disk images.

~~~
devm0de
Very cool, but Apple seems to come after these types of services, no?

~~~
scottjg
there are quite a few similar services so i don't think they're very strict
about it

~~~
SkyLinx
What about os licensing?

------
throwaway13000
Also, does anyone want to sell their side project?

~~~
jozi9
[https://www.apilope.com/](https://www.apilope.com/) \- 0 revenue, 0 users, 0
traffic

~~~
quickthrower2
> 0 revenue, 0 users, 0 traffic

Not as bad as it seems. You can ignore the first two for now and fix the "0
traffic". How are you marketing it? Maybe try some SEO, paid ads, speak at a
conference. Maybe convince some friends to get their companies to buy a
license. $49/m is reasonable.

If I get it correctly this is a more sophisticated pingdom? Definitely a need
for that I'm sure?

------
entrepre1999
Adpexity.com - $200,000 a month , AMA

~~~
anotheryou
you mean [https://adplexity.com/](https://adplexity.com/) ?

------
AwesomeFaic
Managing the tech/business side of wanderandponder.com, making about 30/mo
between Brave tips and nanoinfluencer gigs. Looking to increase traffic and
find more influencer opportunities right now.

------
flignats
[https://reqloot.com](https://reqloot.com) \- an online cryptocurrency game
that is close to generating that per month. ~100-150 daily active players.

------
anmolparashar
useCastup.com — Professional Podcast Editing services, starting at 40¢ per
published minute.

I have been running this for a while, along with my full-time job.

------
shrutipathak
[https://trafficticker.com](https://trafficticker.com)

Husband doesn’t talk about it a lot.

------
erulabs
Were making about that - but as we have recently quit our jobs, it’s no longer
a side project :P

