
Ask HN: How much do you spend on your side project - shanwang
I mean for side projects that&#x27;s not making any profit. I&#x27;m setting a budget of $800&#x2F;year, including hosting cost like heroku, domain name purchase, etc.<p>If you have multiple projects, can you please say the average and max cost.
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NetStrikeForce
I'm currently spending about £50 on server costs and an average of £200 on
advertising, which will end soon as I'm switching to other methods.

I also spend money on designers and developers. Even for a side project, there
are places I don't have time / skills to go to :) and I rely on external
-paid- help.

~~~
iSloth
Any recommendations on designers? Always got problems finding decent ones,
usually end up chopping Themeforest ones together/appart.

~~~
NetStrikeForce
Unfortunately that has been my weakest point so far. I think I might have the
wrong idea about the cost of a great design (i.e. I might not be offering
enough to go from good to great).

If you like [https://wormhole.network](https://wormhole.network) I can put you
in touch with the designer. She's professional and fast - I just now think it
doesn't look as great as I thought at first :)

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contingencies
I don't look at projects in terms of profit, I look at them in terms of
interest and thus motivation, learning potential, and possibly maybe way down
the line something like profit. The most valuable input is always time, money
is pretty much irrelevant.

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tiplus
$100/month sounds about right. Side projects are hobbies, for which $100/month
is not too bad. Just compare that to the cost of operating a motorcycle, a set
of golf clubs, owning a horse, building RC cars etc.

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mindcrime
Hmm... hosting costs are around $150.00 / month. Github account is $50.00 /
month. Hoovers subscription is $100 / month or so. Co-working at American
Underground @ Main is $200 / month. Domain names are probably $100.00 / year
counting the occasional purchase of some speculative new domain.

So, whatever all that adds up to. We don't have any customer revenue yet, so I
sustain things out of my "day job" salary.

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theknarf
Domain costs, now a day I use github pages for hosting so I usually don't have
to pay for hosting the domain. A subscription for Photoshop. Sometimes I pay
for other software. Might have to start paying for IntelliJ soon.

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soared
All of mine are profitable or have been stopped.

Couple websites net ~$1000 adsense a year, after $8/mo hosting costs.

Smart mirror raised $4k (lol) seed from university accelerator.

Personal website somehow got a random donation that payed for hosting.

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wingerlang
Zero, not including time. This include profitable projects. There might be the
occasional software purchase like Sketch (like $99). I guess I also pay for my
webhost and domain.

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adnanh
5$/mo for DO droplet 7$/mo for private Github repos (could be free if you use
bitbucket, but the UI/UX is horrific :() 12$/yr for the domain

that's about it

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kannonboy
Hi adnanh, Bitbucket dev here. I agree we have a different UI to GitHub, but
horrific seems a little strong. Our designers & front-enders spend a lot of
time pixel pushing to build out a UX focused on professional teams. We even
have a public set of design patterns and guidelines that apply across all of
our products[0] if you're curious. That said, we are always iterating on the
design and you are of course entitled to your own opinion. I'd appreciate any
specific feedback you could give us on the UI/UX if you'd care to elaborate?

[0]: [https://design.atlassian.com/](https://design.atlassian.com/)

~~~
debacle
Not the parent's author, but as a fan of Atlassian products here's some
feedback:

\- All of your tools feel dated and cold. The blue "metro" style design
reminds me of Trello's design, and not in a good way.

\- Each individual Atlassian tool has enough minor style differences to make
the ecosystem feel less cohesive.

\- Administration of your software is opaque, to put it nicely.

\- It seems as though you use color as a crutch for poor layout. GitHub is
fixed width and Bitbucket is fluid but I see so much _more_ on my GitHub
homepage than on my Bitbucket homepage.

\- There is a stark difference in the experience in navigating both sites.
GitHub seems to have to put a lot of thought into page real estate value.
Bitbucket in contrast is much more spartan.

~~~
kannonboy
Thanks for your thoughts debacle! Let me address them slightly out of order:

> Each individual Atlassian tool has enough minor style differences to make
> the ecosystem feel less cohesive.

I think the minor style differences are in part an artifact of our design
process. We have a fairly large portfolio of products these days, and try to
avoid dependencies between the release timelines and roadmaps of each. This
means that a new design pattern or improvement will often appear in one
product several releases before it is syndicated elsewhere. The way this often
works on the ground is that a designer will invent a new pattern in one
product, see it implemented and shipped, and then later abstracted and
incorporated into the Atlassian Design Guidelines and Atlassian UI library
that ships with all of our products.

> Administration of your software is opaque, to put it nicely.

Simplifying administration (particularly initial setup) has been a long-time
focus of ours, so much so that we codified it into our design principles as
"Gracefully reveal depth"[0]. But it's a tough proposition: JIRA is powerful
and flexible, but seriously complex, and we're still figuring out how to ease
administration without removing or reducing functionality that our customers
rely on. We're getting there (check out the admin console in JIRA 7 vs JIRA 6,
or any other two consecutive major versions) but I think it will be more or
less a constant battle as the products continue to expand in functionality. I
appreciate the time you've taken to provide the feedback already, but if you
have any specific pain points regarding administration I'd love to hear them.

> All of your tools feel dated and cold. The blue "metro" style design reminds
> me of Trello's design, and not in a good way.

> It seems as though you use color as a crutch for poor layout. GitHub is
> fixed width and Bitbucket is fluid but I see so much more on my GitHub
> homepage than on my Bitbucket homepage.

> There is a stark difference in the experience in navigating both sites.
> GitHub seems to have to put a lot of thought into page real estate value.
> Bitbucket in contrast is much more spartan.

I'm personally not an aesthete in any sense of the word, but this seems
valuable feedback. I'll bring it to the attention of our design and brand
teams (and see if I can get them to jump in and comment). Thanks again for the
feedback mate.

[0]: [https://design.atlassian.com/how-we-
design/principles/](https://design.atlassian.com/how-we-design/principles/)

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osullivj
I spend about 40USD/month on spreadserve.com. ~10 for Web Hosting, ~10 for
Atlassian Jira, and ~20 for Amazon AWS.

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iSloth
£40/pm - basically some domain costs and a cheap dedicated server from
OVH/Kimsufi

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guda
Spread out one time licenses costs and VPS and domain. Rought 40USD/Month

~~~
guda
It is also a bit tricky to count. Would I have bought as good computer if I
wouldn't spend so much time coding on it etc.

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tmaly
right now, my fixed costs are just the digital ocean vps for $20 and the cost
of the domain names

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malux85
~£200 a month for servers for non-profitable projects

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freek4iphone
about $10 per month got AWS, plus some cost for freelance developers. About
$50/Month and that's not making profit.

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haidrali
Around 50$ on server as cost

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atom-morgan
A libsyn account + time

