Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2026 – Show and tell
60
kkaladan about 24 hours ago 77 comments
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There was another one of these a couple of months ago and it did not get any traction. Lets hope this one does better. I myself am at $0/mo from my side projects and am really hoping side projects still have a future.
So, those of you making $500/month or more on side projects in 2026, what are you doing these days?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39110194 (2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34482433 (2023)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29995152 (2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29667095 (2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24947167 (2020)
Discussion (77 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
So my side hustle is studying and taking tests. Over the last 5 years or so of taking tests + investing I’ve built a nice chunk of change set aside to help pay for college for my two boys (age 14 and 16).
There’s about 60-70 available certifications but they have various prerequisite certs so you can’t just go down the list. I was fortunate in that when the bonus structure first came out I had a lot of experience but not many certs so it was easy at first but now I’m running out of certs to get that are related to my actual day job.
However, I get the feeling the cert bonus thing is going to be cancelled next FY anyway. Sucks but at least I maxed it every year it was available and I have probably 75% of college for my kids paid for.
/i've replied to every comment, i know this isn't an AMA and I hope it's not too off topic.
Let me know if your company wants to put me on staff at $0 salary and just get paid for the certs.
We started this in 2023 with 13 of our friends as guests. Since then the group has grown to over 1,200 members and well beyond our circle of friends. August was our 52 second restaurant. In 2025 we served 1,099 guests and generated $126k in revenue.
https://www.deadchefssociety.com/
I began working on this game just 6 months ago and have only worked on it in my spare time in evenings and on weekends, instead of playing computer games. I made the early decision to use Codex for 100% of the coding, that has been a phenomenal experience.
The only Image Gen AI I've used has been to clean up 2 old and weathered historical maps I found, to make them readable.
Still have over 25,000 Steam wishlists and growing. I'm super thankful and having a blast.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4705650/Silent_Shark/
I don't expect too many actual >500$ moneymaking projects to be listed. Would love to be proven wrong.
My side project isn't software and doesn't make $500/mo, but I still just don't talk about it.
It helps that it's cheap, I guess, but it also operates in a market small enough that anything with less than minimal time commitment will lose money. That's why there are tens of former competitors who have all shut down now.
The cost of engineering and implementation has always been low. Passive income has always been a subtle lie. The money has always been in providing a well-supported service.
No customer has ever cared about implementation details beyond what is outlined in the contracts they have with you and the nth-order effects of the contracts they are under with their own clients.
Advertising is the opposite of suicide, but since we have so much negativity on HN in the past few years this is no longer the best place to do that. Every potential customer here is vastly outnumbered by people who belong on reddit.
With Opus and fable and sol at dozens of dollars for a month, i don't know how you can straight-faced say that. But you do you.
Paying for an LLM is always more expensive. If you're attempting to create a startup without knowing how to write code, you've always been fucked and still are. Every time you avoid getting your hands dirty, you incur cost. How can you already incur cost from just the code? Really bad start.
Recently, I have a few Digital Nomads in Europe switching over from Nomad to me due to very good pricing [1]. A lot of customers have also come over from Airalo due to customer service. For example, recently major eSIM providers had a huge incident and left customers stranded for Internet. Akariq had backup resources and replacement eSIMs during those upstream telecom providers issues. I even wrote an Incident Report here [2].
Customer satisfaction remains my highest priority these days.
[0] https://akariq.com/en/
[1] https://akariq.com/en/esim/region/europe-31-areas/
[2] https://akariq.com/en/blog/akariq-backup-esim-service-interr...
https://admakeai.com - Recently got this to 800 MRR , kinda trying to make it the main thing since the LTV on it is the highest. So if I could just figure out ads, this has the highest potential
https://aieasypic.com - First project that I made that made money from subs vs making money from ads, whole reason I continued to indiehack. Its kinda dying but core users still bring in 3-4k/mo , altho actual MRR is 1k/mo
https://bestphoto.ai - Made this after I got frustrated from the bad decisions I made on above, basically a tech rewrite + clone + simplification of aieasypic. Currently makes the most but at a lower margin than aieasypic. Not gonna say exact numbers, but lets say 5k+/mo
The only reason I'm sharing these is cause AI image generators are already like thousands in the market, so I mean if someone wants to go through the hell, I don't think its really that easy a market to succeed in anyways.
And here's my list of things that didn't work out: https://mesmer.tools/
Launched this a few months ago for free to gather user feedback and iterate, but didn’t get much traction.
Finally got burned out last week and decided to charge $10 for it, thinking I could at least justify abandoning it once my downloads went to zero. But was pleasantly surprised to see I still get 3-5 downloads a day. And these paying users are much more likely to actually provide feedback.
May rethink monetization model later, but currently happy charging a flat fee and just having people use my stuff.
-> https://bookdna.com/
We started with the website, and now we are building a full app: a private, personal way to track your reading and get personalized recommendations based on your tastes.
-> https://building.bookdna.com/
We are aiming for a soft launch in a few months :)
If you want to be an early user and give us feedback, sign up here, and I'll get you going with the early version. We are adding imports from Goodreads now, and user folders to organize books how your brain works.
-> https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeOdeqpZCS95FMRy_tE...
I spent a lot of time on positioning and design. The thing is like 10% model 90% unique, random, obscure features I had to run into walls for days to identify how to solve. Even with AI.
Lots of respect to the leaders in this space. So I ended up open-sourcing the core.
https://github.com/tohmsc/resonant-community
Started last year with a problem I faced personally playing TTRPGs with newcomers. Built Overseer over a year to where it is today.
It's well on the way to make $600+/month now, almost doubling since last month. I've realised given the ease at which software can be ideated and maintained, i would rather focus on having a more dataset-intensive moat.
It's a database of website section screenshots I've been hand collecting with others for almost 2 years now (it's crowdsourced via a seperate chrome extension), each section has styling metadata linked - typography usage (leading, weights, tracking, sizes,etc), font details (foundry, designer), colors and alot more.
What really helped was my positioning, instead of trying to compete with established players (mobbin, landbook, refero), decided to focus on the MCP integration; the giving LLMs design taste angle.
If time allowed, I'd focus on the AI photo and video generation. Have seen friends hit $500 relatively quickly by targeting niches.
Sounds like a played out category, but if you look closer it's a bit of a potemkin village - many incumbents are not that good or haven't kept up with the latest models.
Each year it gets more crowded out there, but almost always room for better.
presale here if anyone interested! https://antics.gg/sideout-presale
Once, a girl had committed suicide and used the service to send accusing emails to her friends and family two months later. That was tragic all around.
launched around 4 years ago, crossed $100k in LTR.
Building it in public on X: @rrmdp
https://username.md
Launched and happy to answer any questions.
It started as a side project in 2001, but now it’s my main business.
Here's my own profile if anyone's interested: https://volt.fm/soheilpro
Those making $645/month…
Why does everything have to be a side project that needs to make money?
There are some weeks where I'm doing almost no work at all, but then there are some weeks where I'm interviewing daily and maybe have a video call with a client. I've found that the interview process to get contract jobs is MUCH shorter and simpler than getting full time jobs. They are often done by a non-technical person and are 30 minutes long. There might be another 30-minute interview, sometimes by a technical person but not always. This means that I can interview daily without it causing much disruption to my regular job.
I won't lie, it is stressful at times trying to juggle so many things, and the cognitive dissonance of lying to people is not great. I used to get really anxious about interviewing, but this experience has helped me a lot with that.
Once I understood the proposal, I thought this would be horror job cognitive dissonance-wise. So unethical.
I also had a conspiracy theory – perhaps the "we can't pass interviews, so you do the interviews, and we do the job, win-win" is just a cover for the real play – shady anonymous orgs getting access to infrastructure and data of various western businesses, using you as a facade.
Fraudulently doing so probably opens you up to a decent amount of legal risk.
Just crossed $1.45K/mo!