Ask HN: Has anyone here successfully earning side income from an app?

I built and run a Minecraft server hosting service for parents to enable young kids to play online safely and with less hassle (https://minecraft-playdates.com). Been slowly growing it while adding features, and it's bringing in about $150/mo now. Potential for much more if I were focused on it.

I have been building a job board for more than a year now. It makes decent money, more than I expected it to. It's somewhere around 1.000€+ on good months.

On the other hand, it's not quite so passive. I constantly work on it, because I really enjoy working on it. Be it sales, marketing, SEO, building it - love it.

This is also my way of putting the work in to progress my career. I'm learning a lot; experimenting with tools and languages that I want - although I keep it to a bare minimum.

https://www.arbeitnow.com/

I bootstrapped this myself:

https://www.checkbot.io/

"Checkbot is a Chrome extension that tests 100s of pages at a time to find SEO, speed and security problems before your users do. Test unlimited sites as often as you want including local development sites to find and eliminate broken links, duplicate content, invalid HTML/CSS/JavaScript, insecure pages, redirect chains and 50+ other common website problems."

> I frequently think about doing writing an app or web service, but then talk myself out of it by thinking that the effort is much greater than it sounds and those efforts would be better off trying to progress my career.

It's a lot of effort to launch stuff but with that you get a lot of rounded experience and perspective from it you might not get elsewhere even if you don't make a profit. For example, you'll have to do at least a little marketing, content generation, web design, UI design and product design on top of regular programming. This all helps your next app launch be successful and maybe your future career is working for yourself. Not everything is about money either.

Hey OP, I'd highly recommend adding info product to your list of ways in which you could earn a few hundred dollars online.

I run both apps and info products. For earning a few hundred, info products are infinitely easier, usually take a one-time upfront effort and have little to no maintenance, bugs etc. to fix.

In your case, an info product could be a short course on a very specific skill that you have, maybe related to coding.

For example, I created this course called Learn Programmatic SEO[1]. Created it in Feb 2021 and after the initial launch high, earnings stabilized to around ~$500/mo. I haven't put any more effort or time into it since launch except reply to 3-4 doubt emails a month.

This year, I'm putting in a little more effort (equivalent of 4-6 hrs/month) in order to double earnings to $1000/mo by end of 2022.

[1] https://www.preetamnath.com/programmatic-seo

I've built a few:

- https://onlineornot.com (a SaaS)

- https://maxrozen.com (info products)

- https://deploywithflags.com (another SaaS, started recently)

The effort to build a SaaS is immense, and I imagine building a SaaS to be like building an app on easy-mode. While building a SaaS, you're in full control of the entire customer journey - from discovery and getting their email, to convincing them to trial, to converting to a paid customer. While building an app, you're stuck with whatever your walled garden lets you do.

The learning curve to convincing people to spend a recurring sum of money with you is very steep compared to getting them to pay for something once. Consider writing what you know about a topic for a blog, then use that blog as marketing while you write a small book on how to solve a thorny problem for that topic. Significantly lower time investment for a decent pay-off (a few thousand bucks if its your first time, and it's a valuable problem to solve).

That being said, the part that makes it "worth it" for me is how much I've learned about running a business, marketing, sales, and product management. Things I never get a chance to explore as part of my day job as a frontend software engineer. If I purely measured hours spent vs money earned, no, not worth it, but sometimes things are worth doing for reasons other than money.

I guess it depends on what you classify as “advancing your career”. If you’re a software engineer, building a side project from start to finish is valuable experience that translates. It’s especially valuable experience for devs with less work experience.

That said. I’ve learned that building out a product, even seemingly small things, takes a huge amount of effort as a solo dev. I built https://fretpro.app and it makes about $100/month (has been very slowly growing for the last year). I thought it would be quick and easy, but it took months of early mornings and weekend mornings (can’t code all night like I used to anymore), and can’t lie, my health and mental health suffered during that time. I’m much more selective with side projects these days.

For years I created many different apps in any niche I found. My idea was building these apps very quickly but lightweight, so I created my own WebView/JS interface instead of using Phonegap/React/Electron. Received lots of spam from ads/marketing/design companies, youtubers, and others. Last year got one of these emails from an affiliate marketing company, but seemed honest. I tried it out and for the first few months didn't receive a penny. I just forgot about them, but suddendly started receiving $200-$500/month. Guess these actually work if they match your niche.

Recently had some success with a service where I collect about 4 cents per item. This is only feasible because Algorand fees are like 1/10th of a penny. People mint hundreds or thousands at a time so it's adding up a little bit.

It's really more my main thing along with a few tiny contracts but those are hopefully also spawning two other services with per-transaction fees.

Made a word game Word Hookup https://www.wordhookup.com. Haven’t had time to update it in 2 years but still get $100 on average. It has come down over the last year from 500+ initially. finally getting down updating and reviving it.

I use side projects to figure out the next place to put my 100% full time effort. This way the side project does not need the unnecessary pressure of making money, having customers, a worthwhile use of time, etc.

In March 2016 I started writing an Android app ( https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.unwrappeda... ). In May 2016 I released it. You can set wallpapers on Android with it. The last new wallpaper I put up was in November 2018. Early May 2019 was my last app update.

I did not run ads in 2018 until I ran <$15 worth in November-December. I ran ads one day in 2019 (the day of the last app update) and got less than 350 clicks on the ad. I have not run ads since.

So I have done nothing since early May 2019. From June 1st 2019 to Jan 31 2022 I made over $3500 on ads for it. It made $70 in October 2021, $87 in November 2021, $104 in December 2021 and $82 last month. In March 2020 it made $264, then $242 in April 2020, then $264 in May 2020. This is from ads.

My expenses are a $10 a month Ramnode VPS, a $20 (probably overkill) a month Linode VPS, a yearly Namechap domain name expense of maybe $30 or so. It kind of pays for itself, plus a little more.

I could make more money on it with some work, or release another app, but my current direction is "those efforts would be better off trying to progress my career". Studying Kotlin helps me at my day job, but also could potentially help in the future if I decide to revisit the app.

I had another app which in late 2013 and early 2014 was making $2000 or more a month. My expenses were about the same, I ran no ads at that time.

> the effort is much greater than it sounds

The initial effort for both apps was a lot but then less work was needed to be done. I also learned how to put a whole "modern best practices" app together (plus the backend REST API, plus the relational database and its normalized schema etc.)

> was worth it after your initial effort and ongoing maintenance

For 2 1/2 years my ongoing maintenance has been next to nothing. I had nagios watching it while working on it, but a change on the nagios server broke nagios and I have not fixed that yet. Every once in a while I try the app out and see if it is working.

My Android (and Python REST API) skills are much better than they were when I wrote the app and if I released an app (or apps) now, I'm sure I could hit the $2000 a month mark again and then start pushing that up, even with existing competition. But I make multiples of that in my day job and with study can level up my title and get the pay that goes with it.

There are different motivations to do it or not do it which fluctuate with time. I could see going back to writing my own apps at some point.