Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

779 points by djadmin 9 years ago | 678 comments

Any side projects, Game, OSS, Hacks.

gottebp 9 years ago |

Breville coffee grinders are impossible to get internal parts for. I designed a 3D printed upgrade for the main wear-part in their BCG800XL SmartGrinder.

The storefront is through ShapeWays[1] and I use ifixit[2] to drive the traffic. It's passively making ~$425/mo with about 10 minutes of work per week on my end. This all happened because my grinder failed and I couldn't get parts.

[1] https://www.shapeways.com/product/NASLAGCCP/breville-bcg800x...

[2] https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/BCG800XL+Grinder+Jamming+due+to...

sean_patel 9 years ago | |

> about 10 minutes of work per week on my end.

... and on the guide.

> Sandpaper and a file are likely optional. They are only necessary if the 3D printed impeller isn't a perfect fit.

Do you get any "support" queries from people who buy the impeller and then try to fit it, and it's tight (by your own admission a deliberate design choice) and they try to email you or return the impeller? Not trolling, genuinely curious.

gottebp 9 years ago | | |

About once per month. I purposely set expectations low by saying it may take a little sanding. That lets me over-deliver since it's usually a perfect fit. Also, ShapeWays has a decent refund policy and customer service for stuff under their responsibility.

Also, anything that comes up that takes significant back and forth with a customer, I immediately add to the iFixit writeup. All the troubleshooting steps at the bottom were a result of questions that came in at the beginning. This was a lot of work up front, but it's thankfully just a trickle now.

grogenaut 9 years ago | |

Is the material used in the part safe to ingest?

gottebp 9 years ago | | |

I'm an amateur at this part, but I've reason to believe it's fine.

The material is a Nylon plastic. "Polyamide PA 2200" according to ShapeWays. This link[1] has details on the material when used with laser sintering and in regard to contact with food. The key quote is "[...]are in compliance with EU Plastics Directive 2002/72/EC for the use with all types of foods except high alcoholic foodstuffs[...]"

That said, there is a porosity issue with 3D printed parts and consequently dry coffee coats the impeller and sticks to the surface right away. It's a big problem if in contact with dairy, meat, liquids, etc. because it harbors bacteria. For this reason, ShapeWays does not claim to be food-grade. I don't think it matters for dry coffee though. Nevertheless, there's a writeup about this on the storefront so customers can make the call if they care about stale coffee on their impeller or not.

[1] https://www.sculpteo.com/static/0.30.0-49/documents/material...

ricardobeat 9 years ago | | |

Was thinking the same. Looks like the original plastic part is destined to be slowly ground and consumed by the user, the printed one will have the same fate.

Schwolop 9 years ago | |

This is awesome! I have that grinder, but haven't had this issue (yet...). My only issue is that the lowest grind setting isn't quite fine enough for some beans, but with your pictures I think I can actually see where to shove a tiny shim to make that work better too. I'd always intended to do that but hadn't ever gotten around to it.

cpach 9 years ago | |

Honestly, that’s one of the coolest side projects I’ve heard of this year. Kudos!

PascLeRasc 9 years ago | |

This is really cool and I'm sure many here would love a longer write up of your process doing this.

addonis1990 9 years ago | |

That's so cool! I really admire your creativity and the way you turned a problem into a passive income source

mrlatinos 9 years ago | |

Did you post this in /r/coffee? I think I remember seeing something similar.

gottebp 9 years ago | | |

Not me. I haven't done much to advertise besides iFixit and a post to an ebay forum.

shostack 9 years ago | |

What's the legality of that?

gottebp 9 years ago | | |

Hmm, it's my own custom design and not a copy of Breville's. The blade geometry is especially different. Is that the angle you were thinking of?

roflchoppa 9 years ago | |

have you attempted to upgrade to an alloy based blade?

Super cool side project.

gottebp 9 years ago | | |

Metal is too expensive still. Next step is porcelain. I made one prototype so far. It failed because the glazing process "puffed" the surface out of acceptable tolerance. I plan to inversely deform the mesh to compensate for this when I get around to another attempt.

jrheard 9 years ago |

Young hackers who have a surplus of income and have funds to spare that aren't being channeled toward debt / family / donations, heed me: save as much of your salary as you can, and put it in boring investments (index funds / etc), probably through vanguard.com (no affiliation, I just use them and have heard nothing but good things from people I trust). You can pretty easily set up your job's direct-deposit system so that a portion of your salary goes directly into your investments without you ever seeing it, it's a good set-it-and-forget-it system. It adds up over time!

kohanz 9 years ago |

This was pretty accidental, but to motivate myself to complete the arduous application process for my professional engineering license, I creates a WordPress blog documenting the process. Also because I thought I would learn something new (setting up WP blog) and this seemed very "shippable". I completed the application process over the course of a year and haven't written a blog post in over a year.

Thanks to a complete lack of material in this niche, the site (http://pengapplicant.ca) gets a decent amount of organic search traffic given the niche size (2k page views per month) and I make about $15/month in Adsense. Recently I was also contacted by someone who sells materials for the application and exam and have become an affiliate for them. It's only been one month, but i've already made one referral which netted me $100. So passive income on this after hosting costs is probably $220-ish and will be more in 2017 hopefully with more affiliate sales. Obviously very small potatoes, but I never set out to make any money for this and it looks like now it will at least cover my yearly professional dues ;)

To be honest, the best part is the messages I get from people saying how I helped them get their license. That's a much nicer feeling than the $.

caseysoftware 9 years ago |

Previously, as a developer evangelist with Twilio, I had to know the tech events and tech leaders in my local community. While I didn't figure out a repeatable approach then, in late 2015, it hit me.

I built a bot network that reads tech events - mostly meetups, some conferences and workshops - for a given city from a variety of sources and tweets them. I use machine learning to determine hashtags, time of day to tweet, and new data sources. When I launched Austin - https://twitter.com/ATXTechEvents - in September 2015, I got 900 followers the first month. I suspected it was a fluke so launched Dallas FW and Houston to test. It wasn't a fluke.

In 2016, I've launched 45 different cities in the US and the network has 100k followers collectively, has its own automated weekly mailing list, and is generating 1.4M+ impressions/month. Revenue is affiliate fees for conferences (we are a media partner for O'Reilly) and workshops and selling the ad blocks in the newsletter. Almost all of that is automated. The revenue is pretty minor right now but growing and I spend 1-2 hours on it a week.

The landing page is here: https://techeventsnetwork.com/ (only some of the cities) and the full list of cities is here: https://twitter.com/TechEventsNet/following

bootloop 9 years ago |

Unfortunately not 2016, but two years ago when the Samsung Gear Watch came out a friend of mine got it right away. We went out drinking the same day and when we came back at night we put together a watch face while still being drunk. We uploaded it, set the lowest possible price 1$, and... Nothing happened. Everywhere in the admin panel it showed 0. 0 downloads, not a single dime earned, even after a few days. We were devastated.

But than I found another tab in the utterly shitty admin panel and it hit me like a rock. The numbers on the dashboard were a monthly overview and in fact we earned already hundreds of dollars and downloads in just a few days. I went back to the computer, but together an even better watch face, set it to 1$ again and watched it selling like hotcakes.

However it tried out quite quickly after that. People started to copy stuff and giving it away for free and I never bought the watch myself, I just used the emulator to test my apps. So I took them out of the store at the end because dealing with taxes and sharing the income does not make it worth it if you get support requests like "how can I change the time on my watch", "what do I care, its your shitty watch and Samsung's shitty interface"... So yea. That's my best story about unexpected passive income. Selling stuff fast on a new platform seem to work!

Edit: Found some screens. First one: https://i.imgur.com/TIVsPKO.png Best selling one: https://i.imgur.com/9L8TetO.png

dorfsmay 9 years ago | |

You created an apps in a few hours while drunk, set the price to the lowest possible, and when you thought you had no sale after a few days, you were "devastated"?

bootloop 9 years ago | | |

Look. We were very emotional at the point. We thought the binary clock was a good design and the booze helped us to believe we were going to get very rich of it. ;-)

pimlottc 9 years ago | |

So roughly how much did you make overall? A few hundred, a few thousand?

bootloop 9 years ago | | |

A few thousand over the course of a few months. The first three months were working out really good. But than it dropped to a fifth of the previous month and it went downhill from there. Anyway. It was still worth it. What took most of my time was setting up the store pages. (Which I couldn't look up by myself because I didn't own the device so I could not access the store at all. I didn't know the ratings on my apps either. Or the ranking in the store.)

inovica 9 years ago |

I run a number of side projects and have done since the mid 1990's. I started in business when I was 21 and I'm now 47, so definitely considered 'old' to some of you on here! I've been o reader of HN since it came out, but rarely a contributor. A few comments from me and a link to some of what I've done and how they have done in 2016:

- Rich Dad, Poor Dad got me into the idea of 'passive' income. Nothing is truly passive of course, but it makes me think about what I do

- SourceGuardian. This is encryption software I set up in 2002 as I had a need myself and the nearest product was $6000 at the time. It has generated a great passive income since then. Enough to pay all my bills. 2016 was no different. I work with 2 other people on it, one of whom I've never met (he's in Russia) and it works well

- Competitor Monitor. This used to be a side-project 5 years ago, but it has grown significantly and in the past year we are up by 35% and we have grown our team. Strangely this has now become passive in the sense that I have created a structure and systemised the business (read The Emyth Revisited book) and that has allowed me to step out. I am not more of an investor than a day-to-day contributor

- UKscrap.com. This one died in 2016. The site is still there, but competition and my lack of interest killed it

As I said, nothing is truly passive, but you need to have a passion for whatever you do and I would try to create a 'passive index' for your ideas. How much time will they take to get off the ground, how much to run monthly, what is the product life cycle (if you can work that out!). From when I started there are a HUGE number of resources to help you also. Feel free to ask for help or advice, for what it's worth!

EDIT: I actually met my SourceGuardian partner once in Prague for 2 days. Forgot that when I wrote the above!

wvlia5 9 years ago | |

Hi! I would like to know the language and LOC of both SourceGuardian and Competitor Monitor, to see the what's the complexity of code people are selling. Thanks

inovica 9 years ago | | |

Both are relatively complex now and I don't have a precise answer for 'lines of code' for you. Competitor Monitor has evolved for 5-6 years and has various subsystems including image matching, crawling, proxy management and much more. Both started out as MVP's and have evolved. Competitor Monitor is built in Python and Go predominantly, however that shouldn't mean anything. The language, platform and complexity of someone elses product should not be any guide for you on your own. Looks also like you created a throw-away account purely to write the request

durkie 9 years ago |

i own a decent amount of tesla stock and 2016 was a great year for lending it out.

since tesla is such a controversial company, lots of people want to own the stock (expecting it to go up) and lots of people want to short sell it (expecting it go down).

if you're a stock holder, certain places (like interactive brokers) will let you lend your stock holdings to people that want to sell it short. you earn a premium on this loan, but its basically risk-free since the brokerage bears the counter-party risk.

because short interest is so high, there was a substantial portion of 2016 where there weren't enough shares available to satisfy short sellers' demand. TSLA became classified as "hard to borrow" and borrowing premiums would be anywhere from 8% to 100+% depending on the day/demand. this is money short sellers pay on top of the cost to purchase the shares (and one more thing to bear on top of the risk of short-selling, but that's another story).

the premium is paid daily, and the brokerage usually takes a chunk of it (often half), so if you had $100k of tesla stock and the premium was 50%, you'd earn (100,000 * 50% * (1/2) / 365) = $68.50 for each day that someone borrowed your shares. the rate fluctuated daily, but this still netted me several thousand dollars of truly passive income, since i was planning to hold the stock either way. this is also a huge income stream for institutional shareholders that are sitting on millions of shares.

austenallred 9 years ago |

I co-wrote a book on user acquisition and co-created an accompanying video course to climb out of debt left over from a failed startup.

Made $104,000 in revenue since June (turns out the user acquisition stuff actually works), about 87k of which is profit, so we'll say ~$11,000/month part-time. It still makes me a solid $2,000/month now with zero work, and hopefully more once the book is officially published. (It's done and delivered to backers, but won't be on bookshelves and Amazon until after it's typeset.)

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-ultimate-growth-hacki...

I know the marketing will be over-the-top for HN. Just know it sells because the content is really, really good.

limedaring 9 years ago |

I wrote Hello Web App and Hello Web App: Intermediate Concepts (http://hellowebapp.com, they're learn-to-build-a-web-app books using Django) and self-published both in 2015.

Just checked and this year I've made about $13,000 in profit. It's mostly passive — this year I started using a fulfillment company so the majority of my work is sending them orders (and answering questions about the book.)

Hoping to continue the trend next year by launching a book on teaching design for engineers (http://hellowebdesignbook.com).

e12e 9 years ago | |

I'd be curious to hear a rough estimate on how much work went into those books, and the site? I'm assuming "13k in profit" means sans expenses for proof reading, hosting etc - but not counting the actual work writing everything?

I also find it satisfying to see that it's apparently quite possible to make (some) money on such projects - keep up the good work! :-)

limedaring 9 years ago | | |

So the year they were wrote (first book came out May 2015, second book in Dec 2015), I made $15k profit. Mainly because I did two Kickstarters for the books + the launch campaigns. Of course, 2015 (and a bit of 2014) was when I was spending time writing/designing/editing/publishing the books, so "profit" would be lower if you include my time.

This year, other than answering questions on my book's discussion forum as well as running a couple workshops for PyCon and DjangoCon, has been largely writing-free so it would truly be 13k in profit. :)

IAmEveryone 9 years ago |

210,000 Euro, divided between me and a friend.

We started a small online shop about 10 years ago, and it's mostly automated. About 5 minutes/day + one week / year of work.

Before that, I had spent a few years (trying to) run rather big software projects (for me – I was 18 or 19). They had cost me so many sleepless nights that I swore to never again take on customers paying me more than 100 Euro each. Now, if anybody complains, or gets on my nerves, they get their money back and are never heard from again.

My friends joke I'm the living example for an unconditional basic income. They haven't decided on the outcome yet, though.

raphinou 9 years ago | |

Could you share more details? Was it hard to get it right? Did you need luck to get it to that level? Is it a niche?

blockchan 9 years ago | |

I assume you don't sell physical products, then? Is it something you created by yourself?

siscia 9 years ago | |

WHat you sell?

ommunist 9 years ago | |

mescaline?

rachelandrew 9 years ago |

I put my CSS Layout knowledge into an online course at:

https://thecssworkshop.com/

Interestingly it has been very popular with teams (so selling a set of licenses so a whole team of developers can use the material). I also teach the same material in person (either in-house or in open workshops) so I'm keeping the two in sync. I made some notes about that process on my blog: https://rachelandrew.co.uk/archives/2016/06/03/creating-an-e...

I intend to do a bit more marketing of both the in-person and online training in the new year.

As an independent (not working for a browser vendor) invited expert to the CSS Working Group, training and offering this course is really how I can fund doing that.

philippnagel 9 years ago | |

Would you be willing to sell the code powering the website itself?

rachelandrew 9 years ago | | |

It's built using my other product Perch Runway, using our Shop add-on :) took me about half a day to put together as Shop deals with membership stuff by default.

https://grabaperch.com https://shop.perchcms.com

timbowhite 9 years ago |

TLD List - https://tld-list.com

It's a price comparison website for top-level domains. Gross on average is $600/month through affiliate sales and data download subscriptions. Requires maybe 10-20 hours of work per month for maintenance and new features.

The most difficult part is tracking registrar affiliate earnings, and then actually getting paid by the registrar. Many require you to manually request a payout once you've reached the minimum payout threshold, others simply ignore your payout requests.

archon810 9 years ago | |

I don't know if I'd call 20 hours passive income.

tscs37 9 years ago | |

I love you. This is what I needed in my life.

elcapitan 9 years ago |

Being a developer in a large corporation.

kodisha 9 years ago | |

Gotta appreciate sarcasm in this answer, take a [+]

le-mark 9 years ago | | |

Note it's not necessarily sarcasm. Personally, I've been working as a developer for years (15+), and I 'quit' a couple of years ago.

What do I mean by 'quit'? I've been working in large corporation bouncing from team to team. I only write code if I absolutely have to. So in practice I end up actually "working" a few days a month. I don't do shit at work. I just deliver something every so often, and with my experience, I can do as much as a typical dev in 1/10 the time. And I can do the hard stuff some developers just can't. An example of this was writing a parser for third party lua config files. The team fought a half assed implement for months, I came in and re-did it in a week.

Agile has been a god send for me. I just complete a couple of tickets a week, enough to have something to report in the stand up. So far as management is concerned I'm golden.

ThomPete 9 years ago |

My side project http://www.ghostnoteapp.com is still growing.

It's a tricky product because the way the app work is not for everyone, at the same time when people use it they normally share it with their friends. So I get good organic traffic. The biggest issue is to explain whats unique about this productivity tool, but seeing the video normally do the job.

It's not able to pay for me not working yet as I live in NY so there are obvious reasons for that being hard.

But it does provide me with a healthy chunk of money. And through feedback from customers I have found a new product in the same area and that will be a SaaS product.

refrigerator 9 years ago |

My brother and I have built a couple of test prep sites for UK medical school entrance exams: https://www.bmat.ninja, https://www.ukcat.ninja . BMAT Ninja made about $25k this year (up from $16k last year) and UKCAT about $10k.

Didn't do any work on marketing really so it is pretty much passive, but I think with a bit of work they could both do a lot better. It's a very seasonal market - we only get customers for about 3 months per year (the 3 months leading up to the exams), so thinking of branching out into other exams that occur during other times of the year so the income is a bit more steady.

harperlee 9 years ago | |

How did you get the question bank? Did you pay students for questions? If so, how did the costs balance the profits?

refrigerator 9 years ago | | |

We paid freelancers from around the world (via www.upwork.com) to write the questions based on some guidelines we made (it's not really hard to write questions of this level so anyone can do it with a bit of guidance) and then paid medical students to write the solutions. Probably spent about $7k on this stuff back when it started, so it did require a bit of upfront cost.

abutler 9 years ago | |

Looks good! What did you use to build this?

refrigerator 9 years ago | | |

Thanks :) Nothing special really - Laravel on the backend, Bootstrap on the frontend. And React for the interactive question bank interface (probably not necessary but I wanted to learn it...)

biznerd 9 years ago | |

great site! if you didnt do any marketing, how did your customers find you?

dejv 9 years ago |

I do have portfolio of small web apps: tools for learning music notes, non-latin alphabets, language flash cards and so forth.

They are making some nice money each year, but the trend is quite clear: given same traffic I am making about 50% less each year. Ad revenue is way down (more adblock users, less money per click, CTR is down), but paid premium plans are balancing it a bit.

These projects are still my biggest passive income stream, but they are going to die in few years. Other than that I am owning agriculture land (that I am renting), rental property and portfolio of p2p loans.

Those traditional assets are much more expensive to acquire, but then the yield is much predictable and stable. Still, the tech projects are my best source of income considering the amount of money/time required to create it.

Havoc 9 years ago | |

How are the p2p loans doing?

dejv 9 years ago | | |

They are doing good. My strategy is to invest very conservatively and for relatively short time. I am making about 7% pa.

formula_ninguna 9 years ago | |

that's because of "programming is fun, it's easy, let's do more programming, let's teach everyone how to do programming, yyyaaahhhh"

tomschlick 9 years ago |

ZoneWatcher - Side project of mine to monitor your/your clients' DNS services and alert when a change to a zone has been made. It serves as a revision history & alerting system which has been helpful when a client fucks with their DNS and expects you to put Humpty Dumpty back together quickly.

I launched it a few months ago and have a few smaller subscribers with a handful of larger subscribers.

https://zonewatcher.com

chipperyman573 9 years ago | |

I really like the theme you used! What's it called?

tomschlick 9 years ago | | |

The marketing portion uses Pivot: https://themeforest.net/item/pivot-multipurpose-html-with-pa...

yeahdef 9 years ago |

http://dollarfuckyou.com/ I've made about 300$ :/

slig 9 years ago | |

FYI, the linked "dollardialup dot com" at the bottom is expired.

many_bells_down 9 years ago | |

Really interesting idea! Have you encountered any legal issues?

yeahdef 9 years ago | | |

no, I spoke with a lawyer friend who seemed to think I have all my bases covered.

vishbar 9 years ago | |

It looks like your SFW link is broken

yeahdef 9 years ago | | |

ah - you're right - i haven't looked at this thing in a while. G-rated version never made any money, I think I'll let it go out to pasture.

gbersac 9 years ago | |

Made me laugh loud ! The idea is awesome !

rijoja 9 years ago | |

Awesome idea, please make it available in the EU.

SuperPaintMan 9 years ago | |

I love this. Make an App and hook into IAP

yeahdef 9 years ago | | |

Thinking of the non-app-future, my plan is to use it as a learning case for a PWA https://developers.google.com/web/progressive-web-apps/

beefhash 9 years ago | |

> G-rated Version: $DU

The link there is dead.

Tharkun 9 years ago |

My passive income has mostly dried up this year. Years ago I built an automated webshop deployment system for a bloke who makes hundreds of small websites a year, and dozens of webshops a year. The deal was that I'd build it for free, but I'd get a fee per shop he deployed. This worked out pretty well for a couple of years, but now he's swimming in money and is retiring, and my passive income source has dried up.

Of course, because of my laziness, I took the passiveness too far and it's now all but impossible to reuse it for another potential client.

It was fun while it lasted.

kriro 9 years ago | |

You could take over for the guy if you want to turn it into active income. Since he's retiring and made some good money off the cooperation with you he probably wouldn't mind setting you up with some clients and sharing some of his methods. Can't hurt to ask (if you want to go that route)

cesarb 9 years ago |

Here in Brazil we have it easy. The most boring funds (the ones which track the interbank rate - CDI) easily return around 12% per year (depending on the administration fee; the smaller the administration fee, the higher the return). With the inflation around 6% per year, this gives around 6% returns before tax. If you stay with the fund for at least two years (and it's of the correct kind), the tax rate is 15% over the gains, so you have an after-tax return of around 5% per year above inflation. And that's for a fund which basically never gives negative returns.

You can go further and buy government bonds directly, through the Tesouro Direto system. Those indexed by the SELIC rate (which is sort of related to the CDI) are currently around 13.5% per year, before administration fees and taxes (in fact, the boring funds I mentioned above mostly invest in these SELIC-indexed government bonds).

This will change when (and if) rates get lower, but so far, investing in these funds or bonds is the simplest (and one of the best) way to have passive income.

vladdanilov 9 years ago |

Optimage – a visually lossless image optimization tool

http://getoptimage.com

Released this week. Came unnoticed on HN but somehow got featured on PH. 1200+ downloads of free version and a few sales.

Not sure if that'll change. In that case, the best of 2016 will be one of the plugins for Sketch https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12319286.

antr 9 years ago |

In early 2016 I purchased commercial real estate, got a 25 year fixed rate mortgage, and leased it. This requires very little of my time every month, and the post-tax yield is above 5%. I couldn't be happier.

I'm now considering doing this again in 2017. Hopefully interest rates will remain as low as they have been in order to lock-in an attractive mortgage.

Murkin 9 years ago |

A self published book on "Redux". Still in progress but already sold for 3,160$ in revenue between me and a friend.

Hope to have it really pickup once done and turn profitable

https://leanpub.com/redux-book

billconan 9 years ago | |

why did you choose this leanpub platform?

I like the fact it can publish unfinished book. but I'm worried that it is not as big as amazon?

Murkin 9 years ago | | |

Its a great place to build and edit the book. The pre-release is a good market validation bonus.

Once its done we will publish on Amazon as well (no exclusivity at leanpub)

yonibot 9 years ago | |

Nice to hear :)

PascLeRasc 9 years ago |

Adding an optional buy button to my Chrome Extension has made me $0.59 so far, so technically that's my best.

My friend has made about $650 off of his AMD investment so far though and is thinking of moving all of it into Micron.

tomcam 9 years ago | |

Stop with the bragging. You're killing us here!

robius 9 years ago |

I used to do index funds. Then I went looking for an active portfolio manager. After a few years I found one, he was good, but 6mo in he switched jobs and left for another career.

The next guy wasn't good and eventually didn't want to actively manage the account. I kept looking until this year when I found fractalgo, which is used by large institutional investors to trade through science without emotion and second-guessing.

Downside is you needed to be a qualified investor.

I called up the owner curious about how the fractal tech worked and found out he was setting up a service for everyone, not just the big guys.

After some research I moved my IRAs left over from previous 401Ks to a custodian that can do directed investments + broker and let the automated system go.

Couldn't be happier. No humans required once set up, and it keeps growing like a weed while I sleep.

Do your own research for what works for you and seek it out. You will find it, eventually.

https://fractalgo.com

Since doing so well, they just opened a fund using the same technology.

https://fractalternative.com

deskamess 9 years ago | |

They seem to be taking just an email. Are they actually on boarding customers today? What is the minimum investment?

n-exploit 9 years ago | |

What type of returns are you seeing? How has it performed in down periods? What's your beta?

robius 9 years ago | | |

The owner sent me his returns from 2007 and it's a steady upward slope, even through down times.

I just started last month, and I'm up overall, although the Trump event took some back. The system takes these draw downs into account.

If I told you I made $11K last month it's mostly meaningless since the size of the account and markets you choose are important.

So I don't have enough data for you, but the data that was shared with me was better than anything else I've tried. And I've done day trading too. This is much simpler and passive once set up.

Feel free to reach out if you want, see profile info.

frou_dh 9 years ago |

2 (count 'em) dollars a month. For letting two people who don't want to run an instance of my OSS program themselves tap into my personal instance.

foota 9 years ago | |

One. Two. I counted them.

futuravenir 9 years ago | | |

I followed your lead and also counted them...But just in my head.

Shrugs 9 years ago |

I made http://fivestar.io/ a year or two ago; it's a better Amazon search.

It shines when you search for something that you want the best version of, without caring about the details; i.e., let the masses determine the quality for you. It weights results based on ratings, review volume, and some other stuff, segmenting the results by price range.

Helps me answer the question "I want the best phone mount for my bike, but I don't want to spend more than $20" without fiddling with Amazon's search parameters and then scanning the page.

Makes ~$100/month off of affiliate links.

raybb 9 years ago | |

Isn't it against Amazon's terms to use the affiliate API to make a search engine?

tomcam 9 years ago | | |

Note parent's username

xioxox 9 years ago | |

Interesting. Have you thought about an option for non-US amazon, e.g. .uk / .de?

Shrugs 9 years ago | | |

I have, but the API differs in availability/completeness across regions and writing the code to handle each region probably isn't worth the time. The Product Advertising API is also _terrible_ and not fun to work with, so I'm minimizing the amount of time I spend working with it and reading their docs.

gabemart 9 years ago | |

What volume of traffic / searches do you get?

Shrugs 9 years ago | | |

1000 uniques/month on average, not including when I post the site on hacker news. The clickthrough/conversion rate is pretty solid. 35% of users buy something after clicking through to Amazon, which makes sense cause it's a pretty strong signal of intent.

joemanaco 9 years ago |

I'm making between $3'000 and $10'000 Dollars with native apps/games and html5 games. I made much much more a few years ago but app store revenue is decreasing each month and all my latest apps made me nearly nothing. (My portfolio: http://intermediaware.com).

cableshaft 9 years ago | |

I used to make native apps/games and some web games, and I was wanting to start making small games again, but I keep hearing how revenue has dropped precipitously for them and it makes me worried.

As someone who's experiencing the drop in revenue firsthand, what are you thinking of doing to address that? Shift platforms to PC/Steam? Change the designs of future games to reflect current trends, etc.?

I was considering I might just make games using a simple cross-platform tool like Love2D, keep the designs of the games small but addictive, single player only, no levels but can be played endlessly to failure (i.e. Tetris or 2048), either make them free with a simple consumable or a dollar, and distribute them on PC, Mac, iOS, and Android.

I don't expect to make a ton of money for most of them but I hope I'll get lucky with one of them and it becomes a hit. I have about 3 past web games to port and update that could work.

Does this seem feasible? What would you do differently?

joemanaco 9 years ago | | |

I think you should have a good concept/idea how to reach your audience without to rely on the app stores.

When I started that wasn't required. You just released your game and users are coming in for free. So I decided to do lots of small apps - but in the long run it would have been wiser to do apps that engage the users for a long time and constantly update with new content to keep those users engaged.

For myself I'm currently moving to bigger projects and also release for consoles and PC/Steam. But it's very risky for a small developer - because if you develop serveral months or years and the game flops you're basically out of business.

lj3 9 years ago | |

Do you advertise or do any marketing, or are you dependent only on app store searches and word of mouth?

joemanaco 9 years ago | | |

I've done press releases here and there but never put money in advertising or stuff like that.

buf 9 years ago |

https://www.castingcall.club Social network for amateur voice actors. I wrote about it here: https://medium.com/@buf/accidentally-built-a-successful-soci... Brings in about $2k/mo.

p2p lending is hit or miss for me: 3-10%

Index funds pull in the rest.

I've also moved temporarily to a very cheap COL country so that I can focus on some more side projects to pull in extra sources of income before I return to the work force.

wfunction 9 years ago | |

Question: how do index funds (or any kind of stock, really... in fact this question isn't really about index funds) "pull in the rest"? Do you actually manage to sell them when they're high and buy when they're low again? Or do you get stocks with dividends and just make money using the dividends? Obviously merely possessing stock of high value is kind of moot if it doesn't turn into cash somehow, so I'm curious how people usually do this. (I don't know much/anything about finance.)

buf 9 years ago | | |

To answer your other question (hn has a child-reply limit I think), it makes money on the dividends, which are reinvested back into the portfolio.

buf 9 years ago | | |

Sorry for the confusion. It's just a set it and forget it robo investment for now. I go in and adjust every quarter.

wallace_f 9 years ago | |

Can you tell me more about moving to a cheaper COl country, pros and cons, and which countries look most appealing to you?

buf 9 years ago | | |

I chose Sofia, Bulgaria. I pay about $500/mo for all my expenses. It's true that I could find that in the US as well, but I'd be hard-pressed to find something that isn't deeply rural.

In Sofia, I'm in the capital. There's lifestyle necessities like grocery stores, fast internet, etc. Plus I won't need a car because of the excellent metro. If I want to catch an American movie or a show, there are malls/theatres. It really has just about everything I need.

It also helps that my wife is Bulgarian.

andersthue 9 years ago |

Still my 5 year old watermarking tool making around 3-5k$ a month.

My only new product this year was a 6 weeks video course [1] in productivity, it makes around $5000 every time I fill a class.

1. http://timeblock.com TimeBlock course

omegote 9 years ago | |

What's that watermarking tool of yours?

nthState 9 years ago | | |

Maybe it's: https://www.watermark-image.com/download.aspx

jastr 9 years ago |

TheSimplePostcard.com, makes me ~$220/month. Text it a photo and it sends a postcard. It took me a few long weekends to build using Django and Twilio.

karolisram 9 years ago | |

Sweet project, like it a lot :) perhaps do the same for Europe?

jastr 9 years ago | | |

I need to find a postcard printer in Europe.

donohoe 9 years ago | |

Cool. How do you process payments via text? I assume you send them a link to a page to complete transaction?

jastr 9 years ago | | |

Exactly. I looked in to charging via their phone bill but couldn't find an API.

wonderwonder 9 years ago | |

very creative, I like it

alkonaut 9 years ago |

Money in the bank, made me well over $100 over the whole year.

adjusts monocle

abledon 9 years ago | |

slow clap

scolvin 9 years ago |

Helpmanual.io is my first attempt at passive income. Launched 6 weeks ago and traffic is building nicely. There's still a fair bit to do but the delight of sites like this is you can make improvements when you want. Shame that ad income is less than it used to be but we'll see how it gets on.

https://helpmanual.io

jonaf 9 years ago | |

One idea where you can distinguish you're in addition to being just better: add commentary/disqus and have some sort of system that aggregated and ranks comments (like stack overflow answers) on each man page. I find that man pages always have all the info I need, except it's often buried or there are surprises, but others' knowledge/experience can really save you from common pitfalls not in the man pages. Just having s crowd-sourced highlighter function of sorts would give you a unique offering among the competing options. You could also augment the see also section. And for marketing, you could have a blog and write about the top BSD tools based on activity, searches, etc, or up-and-comers. You could feature community commentary (like how to best use a tool) and build in some kind of point/reward system.

I have more ideas but I'll stop there. Good luck with your project!

soft_dev_person 9 years ago | |

That's nifty and cute. How do you go about promoting and building traffic for this kind of site?

OJFord 9 years ago | | |

> How do you go about promoting and building traffic for this kind of site?

Well, parent posted it here and got you interested!

erikb 9 years ago | |

It seems to be a searchable man page index. What does it offer that google+terminal don't offer?

scolvin 9 years ago | | |

Man pages in the terminal are pretty annoying as you can't (easily) search them.

By "Google" I presume you mean online indexes of man pages E.g. This site.

The other man pages sites are ugly, old and incomplete, despite that done of them rank pretty high on Alexa. I built this site to end up smarter, more modern, easier to use and more complete. Still a work in progress atm.

OJFord 9 years ago | | |

> What does it offer that google+terminal don't offer?

Hyperlinks and the "referenced by" section are pretty neat.

77yy77yy 9 years ago |

Domain sales, over US$ 2M/yr that could have been mid 7 figures easily but still holding onto those other gems. With all the new extensions valuable .com domains is where it is. Brokers managing sales. Also not sure if falls into passive or not, sold a business few years ago and did the financing, still getting paid monthly for few more years.

gremlinsinc 9 years ago | |

I have a decent 5 letter one, zvive.com (zuhvive like survive w/ a z) I'm still trying to figure out a startup to launch on it, but i think it could be a good brandable one.. I wanted to do an online survival store, etc... Do you think I could get some money for it on the market?

branchless 9 years ago | |

Twenty first century rentiers!

pilom 9 years ago |

I work remotely and moved into an RV to travel around North America with my wife. Started blogging about travel and working on the road at http://therecklesschoice.com and using Amazon affiliate links whenever appropriate that pull in about $50/month.

brianwawok 9 years ago | |

This seems not passive. If you blog 5 hours a month and make $50, you made $10 an hour.

sdfjkl 9 years ago | | |

It is if you like to blog anyways.

xchaotic 9 years ago | | |

True, but no income is truly passive. I think you also have to consider the savings of not having to own a house (or being able to rent out an existing one) so it's as good as any other 'passive' strategy posted here.

thewhitetulip 9 years ago |

After being encouraged by folks on HN

I published my tutorial on writing webapps with Go without a framework,

http://github.com/thewhitetulip/web-dev-golang-anti-textbook

There isn't much income because I want the book to be free, I'm writing another tutorial migrating the same app taught in the book to use VueJS library.

tomcam 9 years ago | |

Why not publish (at a typical ebook price) on Amazon also? Be a fun experiment to have both paid and free versions--not too many opportunities to collect that kind of data. Or maybe make the vue version available only on Amazon while leaving the older version as is.

thewhitetulip 9 years ago | | |

It is an interesting proposition, but I do not know why, I feel to give out my book for free, the reason for this might be from the fact that I learned programming on my own reading free books, the great books came with a hefty price tag, hence I don't feel it morally right to publish my book/tutorial at a hefty $$.

Said tutorial/book since people have told me that if it isn't present in actual stores it can't be called a book :)

Also, my first book/tutorial is available via leanpub.com, so users can pay if they want, so far hardly 10 have paid, but gitbooks.com where the online version is hosted does get around 200 page views daily + 800 downloads monthly. Leanpub currently has 550+ readers.

bert2002 9 years ago |

The best was a physical project - www.spypatch.com. A sticker for the camera on your laptop. I dont do any advertisement, but it sells through Amazon and the website. ~2k/y.

soft_dev_person 9 years ago | |

Clever.

Friendly correction: peace of mind, not piece of mind =)

vital101 9 years ago |

Many years ago when I was still a PHP + Wordpress developer, I discovered that getting updates to private plugins and themes was a huge pain.

Fast-forward a few years and I finally built out https://kernl.us as a learning project (Mongo, Node.js, Angular). It's mostly passive income now, pulling in ~$450 per month.

snadal 9 years ago |

Some years ago, I did some referral promotion for a webhosting company with nice results, around 70k.

Later, company rules changed and I stopped actively promoting it, but second level referrals still are generating 5-10k year with doing absolutely nothing of work.

joelrunyon 9 years ago |

I've been running https://UltimatePaleoGuide.com for a number of years now. This last year we launched https://PaleoMealPlans.com and it's been a great product / service so far in addition to the rest of our offerings.

sepharoth 9 years ago |

Made a med school entrance exam prep platform with my brother last year (www.bmat.ninja) - $12k profit last year, $27k this year.

Once the website was setup, maintenance workload was pretty minimal (the occasional BugSnag report), so I guess that counts as passive.

panorama 9 years ago |

I wrote an ebook that helps Junior Developers get jobs - it's primarily targeted at bootcamp grads: https://kokev.in/hired-fast

In the past 8-10 months, it made about $5k+ through sales as well as partnerships with a couple online bootcamps. Not too shabby as I spent almost no time marketing it. Plus it was fun to write since I'm passionate about the topic and I've received some awesome feedback (of the "you actually changed my life"-sort). That was more than worth the hundreds of hours I spent writing it, the small bit of money aside.

herbst 9 years ago |

I have a website with ads on it. Or actually a few, but one that mostly pays for my life right now.

tinbucket 9 years ago | |

I'd be really interested in learning from you about what you did with this site and the less successful ones.

herbst 9 years ago | | |

What i did? Well when i have a idea that i think somebody else could like too i throw it into a website, then throw it out there and see what people think. Sometimes i get valuable feedback and can improve, sometimes it is good as it is.

The only "secret" other than user generated content (what makes it actually passive) for me is to never stop trying. I have like 50 in use domains right now, many which i did not extend because they did not pay for themself after a year.

metaprinter 9 years ago | |

I have one website with ads on it, been running it for like 6 years, generates a whopping $200 yr...

herbst 9 years ago | | |

My main site makes between $1000 and $1500/month.

Most of my other sites are more on $50 - $200/year too :/

erikb 9 years ago | |

How much does your life cost a year?

herbst 9 years ago | | |

Well since i quit my job in switzerland and moved around the globe to work on my own stuff (I dont only do stupid content sites) about $1000/month + Some plane tickets here and there.

hellofunk 9 years ago | |

What kind of site is it?

herbst 9 years ago | | |

Gaming related. Its just content actually, but also user generated content (what is what makes it passive)

jsaxton86 9 years ago |

It seems like the vast majority of employment contracts prohibit side projects like this, or at the very least, require explicit company approval. I'm interested in hearing strategies on how to best pursue side projects without violating one's employment contract.

fapjacks 9 years ago | |

One way is to be a California employee, where the labor law explicitly protects your side projects as long as you aren't using your employer's resources and isn't related to your day job. If you decide to take something Big Time and make a startup around one of your ideas, California also conveniently ignores non-compete agreements. These two things are why Silicon Valley exists in California and nowhere else.

martin_a 9 years ago | |

In Germany tax laws might help you a little bit with this.

If you build something with the main interest of making money out of it, the state (and most probably your employer) will treat it as a business and want you to run a business for that or will likely forbid to do it. But if you build something because you need it for yourself and are running it more like a hobby but make profits from it, there´s something called "Liebhaberei". This special status mainly has tax implications (you can´t get refunds on losses from your Liebhaberei because it´s not qualified as a business, tax-wise...) but I´ve had friends which got their side projects "approved" by their employers because they did not look like real businesses and were run on this Liebhaberei status.

So if you like miniature railways and build a niche site around it, which will give you beer money (or a bit more), the tax people most probably won´t have any problems with that. You should avoid doing things that look like you are running a business (having a shop, selling stuff), but most of them probably won´t even notice affiliate links or understand what that does.

This can also help you with your employer. "Boss, I have this site about my miniature railways and now it´s making 50 bucks a month, is that a problem?"

Or you go the right way. Be honest and say that you´d like to do something for fun but there could be money involved and you just wanted to make sure that´s okay for everybody. I found employers to be unexpectedly tolerant when you´re honest.

hacknat 9 years ago | |

I'm in a state that is notorious for enforcing non-competes (in fact our enlightened legislature tried to make them even stiffer), but even my contract says my non-compete is only enforceable where a clear conflict of interest exists.

neals 9 years ago |

I build a small CMS / CRM + app as a freelancer, for a client. This was 6 years ago. I build it for almost nothing, because it's a really simple thing that took a week or two.

I agreed to automated billing with him and he pays per user. I also build API's so he can hire other developers to do stuff with the data and add features.

I myself haven't touched the code for years, but the growth of the database means an extra monthly $1250-ish comes in. Which is nice.

t0mislav 9 years ago |

25$/month in Adsense. Not much, but it's passive and it grows. Everything started as a fun small project. http://random.country/

thenaterhood 9 years ago | |

I'm really curious to know how you promote and get traffic to a site like that. I've seen a couple and I've been working on my own, but I've never known how they get discovered.

t0mislav 9 years ago | | |

I didn't promote too much, I just put link in signature on two forums I occasionally visit and forget about it for a few months. Later, people somehow find it. Over the time there were few twitter posts about it, few share on 4chan and similar pages. Then your rank on Google gets better, and so on.

berdario 9 years ago | |

Parsing of the capital name doesn't handle Switzerland properly

t0mislav 9 years ago | | |

Ok, will check, thanks!

assafmo 9 years ago | |

Cool!

discreditable 9 years ago |

I wrote a guide on how to get around my local ISP's requirement to use their crappy modem/router combo and recommended a verified-working router with an Amazon affiliate link. Since Jan 1. I've pulled in $160. Very nice since I host at nearlyfreespeech.net and the site has cost less than $1 in hosting this year, and $10 for the domain.

BorisMelnik 9 years ago |

Started a hosting company: its very small and only offers shared hosting right now, but it is almost making money. I never wanted to get into hosting, but so many of my clients were using Godaddy etc I just had to get them away from that chaos.

Note: I'm also looking for a partner in this if anyone has any experience let me know.

arrmn 9 years ago | |

How did you start did you buy the servers or are you just using one of the cloud providers and "whitelabel" them?

tomcam 9 years ago | |

Try webhostingtalk.com to find partners or advice.

2throwaway2000 9 years ago |

I make $1,400/mo from Google AdSense. I made a Wordpress website for people who want to find information about other people. I don't do anything on the site anymore besides perform Wordpress updates. It's basically changed my whole life and I am very fortunate/lucky. Throwaway account.

jmzwar 9 years ago | |

Congratulations - that is great to hear.

Is the traffic mainly from google?

2throwaway2000 9 years ago | | |

85% Google

georgiecasey 9 years ago | |

what kind of traffic and CPMs you getting? i assume most of the traffic from organic search?

2throwaway2000 9 years ago | | |

About 10k visits/mo

jdcarluccio 9 years ago | |

What's the website?

jventura 9 years ago |

I did an Android app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.flatangle....) earning me some 80€ since August. Hope next year will be better!

loloferrari 9 years ago |

Been trying to do this for years, never really succeeded.

In 2016 i've relaunched https://www.interssl.com/en/ but when i'm being honest there are just too many support incidents. So i just can't call it passive income anymore - even if that was the initial idea.

The margin of sales without support basically just covers the cost for the orders that require heavy support. Remaining income is basically blown for advertising and maintaining the site.

My conclusions:

a) think twice about potential time killers - even if the core business model per se is passive, it might turn out to be time intensive ...

b) i'd rather not go into reselling something anymore but rather sell my own product, gives me more financial headroom.

my 2 cents.

Romajashi 9 years ago | |

letsencrypt is free, wosign is free; maybe there's something else which is free; they don't require a lof of effort to install them. who are your customers then who pay for what they can get for free?

armenarmen 9 years ago |

I built catelus.com a couple weeks ago and I've done $130 in revenue.

It's a domain name idea generator. You feed it a keyword and it translates it into 30+ languages and shows you .com's that are not being used. Trying now to get more eyeballs across it. Fun though!

anchpop 9 years ago | |

Your domain lookup doesn't seem to work, unless I'm misunderstanding something. Searching "smart" brings up elegant.com which is certainly taken.

Edit: are you doing a lookup of the raw version instead of the cleaned one?

armenarmen 9 years ago | | |

I'm doing the look up on the raw version yeah. I'm working in weeding out false positives now.

Squated domains that aren't pointing to anthe thing are right now registering as available.

Moving to an actual Whois lookup has to get better results. Thanks for taking a look! And I appreciate the feedback

averageweather 9 years ago |

http://www.averageweather.io

Only have made like $20 off Adsense, but I've got a lot more work to try and get this tool into passive mode:

* working on selecting a date range

* style up the site a bit more

* maybe have users so you can save searches etc

I get very valuable data that the travel industry would probably consider great leads, but I'm just figuring out what to do with it all.

Edit - and fill out these graphs: http://www.averageweather.io/monthly/boston/ma/12/

libria 9 years ago | |

Nice. Some wants:

* If I type Manhattan, NY, automatically show me a map w/ overlay of weather in Manhattan and surrounding areas. Maybe default to today, but also forward cursor to calendar.

* Or maybe automatically show bar chart of Manhattan for 1 week starting today. If they select a day automatically show +-3 days.

* or allow a date range to be selected or even just Month of December

* you need exposure, I've never heard of this before

edit: Oh ok, you've already done some of these, good.

1 more: move the C/F selector to upper right and make it a sticky value per visitor

averageweather 9 years ago | | |

Thank you. Any tips on exposure?

saddestcatever 9 years ago | |

Is there more data that I'm not seeing? I just see high & low. This information is available on literally every travel guide.

Also, "Bangkok Thailand" asks me to pick a town/city.

What is the question the user actually wants to know? Should I pack a raincoat? Should I pack a dress coat for nights? Do I need an umbrella, or just a coat with a hood, etc...

mrfusion 9 years ago | |

Can I see the date range chart with sunny/cloudy/rainy?

Could I compare multiple areas in one chart?

Unrelated. How could I search for the least hot areas of Florida? Or find really windy areas of Florida?

jboogie77 9 years ago | |

how many visits do you get daily/monthly to get 20$?

odbol_ 9 years ago |

I made about $10 from app sales of my Android Wear watchfaces https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.odbol.foun... and https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.odbol.oxwo...

$10... For the whole year. App sales aren't the golden goose everyone things they are.

errozero 9 years ago |

I released the new version of my Acid Machine synth + drum machine web-app just under a month ago. It has made about £200 in the last month.

The web-based version is like a demo, it's free to use but saving and importing is disabled. I'm selling a downloadable desktop app version which has the restrictions removed.

I'm thinking of making it completely free and maybe selling ad-space on there instead.

http://www.errozero.co.uk/acid-machine

georgiecasey 9 years ago |

an android app that pulls in about €500 a month. i coded it years ago and literally have not thought about it this year until now. it used to bring in about €700-€800 a month but i finally got some competition after a few years. i've noticed the app game is tightening up

djadmin 9 years ago | |

and what is the app about? Any link to share?

treistab2 9 years ago |

My friend and I made an online course for User Experience Design, and sold it on Udemy. So far we have about $40,000 in enrollment revenue, which yields about $20,000 in profit that we split. We are looking into doing more courses, but aren't sure yet what to teach. If anyone wants to collaborate on a project, we have a full studio and all of the equipment.

Here is a link to the course: https://www.udemy.com/user-experience-design-the-accelerated...

In addition to that project, I also launched an online store for design patent artwork. To do this, I downloaded images of patents from the US Patent Office Database, paid a virtual assistant $1/hour to clean them and standardize the proportions, then using a Photoshop Action applied in Batch, I generated all of the images. After getting all of the images, I built an online store and integrated with printing and fulfillment service using Woocommerce and a Restful API - so when orders are placed, it triggers the artwork to be printed, and shipped, automatically. I now make about $300/month from that project and spend about 10 minutes/week managing it.

Here is a link to that website: www.PatentArtStore.com

Anyone have any suggestions for my next project?

jklepatch 9 years ago | |

Very creative I love it. Your store might need to be a bit polished though. For example, on mobile: - Shop now button too small. Should be bigger and more visible ("call to action") - One item per line on shop page, otherwise really hard to see the pic

Wish u good luck for ur project!

pfooti 9 years ago |

I wrote a blog post about three years ago about doing single-sign-on stuff between salesforce and google by writing a google appengine app that acted as a SAML IDp. At the time, salesforce didn't speak OAUTH and google didn't natively speak SAML, so you had to do it on your own. I put it on an old blog I had laying around and turned on google adsense.

To date, I've made $6.31 from that blog post alone. Someday, I'll get over $100, so adsense will pay out.

icebraining 9 years ago | |

I wonder how much you could have made by SaaS-ing it.

weichsel 9 years ago |

I added an animated GIF exporter to my lossless screen recorder Claquette (macOS, https://www.peakstep.com/claquette). The project got some traction when Apple featured me in the Mac App Store this August. It also entered the Product Hunt front page and finished in the top 3 on launch day. Revenue is nothing spectacular, but it's a nice additional income.

AtticusTheGreat 9 years ago |

I just recently launched a statuspage aggregator at https://statusbeacon.io which has been pretty cool to work on.

I've also got an online multiplayer boggle game that has made me low 3 digits per month since about 2008, http://serpentinegame.com, mostly ad revenue but also paid memberships.

rovr138 9 years ago | |

Looked at statusbeacon.io. Is there a place to see all the providers you monitor without having to sign up?

AtticusTheGreat 9 years ago | | |

I just put up a list here: https://statusbeacon.io/service-list

AtticusTheGreat 9 years ago | | |

Hey, currently no I don't have that list in a public place. So far I have 43 services integrated, and most of those are fairly big ones like Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, etc. I was thinking about making the list available on the landing page though, so maybe I'll do that. Anything in particular you're looking for?

boudra 9 years ago |

Launched this small tool 5 weeks ago: http://sqlify.io Made a few dollars with AdSense.

raybb 9 years ago | |

Just so you know, your site doesn't work too well on mobile (an ad makes the page too wide and displaces text).

djaychela 9 years ago |

I've written a book on using Cubase with a general grounding in music, recording and music technology [1]. Income has been very patchy, and never what I'd hoped for at any point. Best month has been around £450, but that's only happened a couple of times (I don't know why, either, unfortunately), usually it's more like £40. Made about £2000 in total, so definitely not something to retire on. Unsure as to whether it's the market for the book, the quality of the book (I hope not and don't think so given the positive feedback I have had from those who have bought it), or a total lack of marketing that's at fault. Not entirely passive as I've had to update it for each revision of the software that has come along, which takes around a week's full time work.

[1]http://www.lulu.com/shop/darren-jones/the-complete-guide-to-...

onlyfortoday2 9 years ago | |

Unsure as to whether it's the market for the book, the quality of the book (I hope not and don't think so given the positive feedback I have had from those who have bought it), or a !total lack of marketing! that's at fault.

i dont think your unsure you know :)

pmorici 9 years ago |

I design & build adapters for old server power supplies that make it super easy to reuse them as general purpose 12 volt power supplies.

kaa2102 9 years ago |

Web and email hosting. Designed sites in 2015, hosted on Google Cloud and continued to take in monthly web and email hosting income in 2016.

wonderwonder 9 years ago |

Built an saas document management & review site for a very large company 3 years ago. I have a monthly maintenance contract with them and receive about $3,500 per month. After expenses (insurance & hosting) and my partners split I net $1,300 per month. Over the last 2 years, I have invested an average of about 2 hours a month, most months I do no work at all.

brandables 9 years ago |

https://brandfountain.com

I sold a domain I had intended to develop this year to a FB founder for $12,000 and another for $7,500. After researching I found there are few places to buy really good startup domains so I made brandfountain to passively fund my startup(s)!

bbernoulli 9 years ago | |

maybe you could partner with that AI generated logos guy (was posted within the last couple weeks, can't remember the name, sorry)

edit: i'm remembering it as logojoy

soft_dev_person 9 years ago |

I made some silly fan designs on CafePress many years ago. Haven't really touched it since then, but it still generates $50 per year. Provisions have been going down. though.

That being said, it's mostly 2 designs out of ~35 that sells anything at all.

I'm sure there's some potential in there, but it's kind of hit and miss.

kidproquo 9 years ago |

Tasktopus, is a lightweight, task manager for the desktop (Mac OS X, Windows and Linux). Tasks are managed on a Kanban-style board with Backlog, Doing, Done and Archived columns.

Built with Qt. 14-day trial on Gumroad[0]. Also available on Mac App Store[1].

MAS version has made me 40$/month. Gumroad version is better (lets you try it and lets you use same license key on all 3 platforms). However, I have sold only one license on Gumroad! I guess the MAS has better discoverability.

[0] https://gumroad.com/l/ADWm/tasktopus [1] https://itunes.apple.com/in/app/tasktopus/id1039688985

grecy 9 years ago |

I wrote my first e-book [1] about how to save money to work less and live your dreams. I'm really happy for a first attempt, and it has inspired me to write more.

[1] http://amzn.to/2hcfuB7 - Work Less to Live Your Dreams

toymachine 9 years ago | |

Wow, that's awesome. How are you promoting/marketing it? How do people find out about it? And how are you getting reviews?

Have been thinking about this for awhile and haven't settled on the right topic yet!

grecy 9 years ago | | |

Thanks! Marketing has mostly been on my website[1] and social[2]. I'm getting reviews from people interested in what I'm doing, sites that cover Overland Travel, 4x4, etc. (I'm driving around Africa for the next 2 years)

[1] theroadchoseme.com

[2] @theroadchoseme on FB/Instagram/YouTube

Nilzor 9 years ago |

This is my portfolio :

http://www.nilsenlabs.com

None of them have made a lot of money, but one is still generating a small amount. Guess which. Hint: Income is not proportional with the shinyness of the technology stack

daveguy 9 years ago | |

Flags and capital quiz, 10k downloads. Little competition. I would say gogtasks for user need, but there's a lot of competition in that space.

cmadan 9 years ago | |

GogTasks? It seems to solve a real problem.

OJFord 9 years ago | | |

I'd go with GetOut Ølbarometer - I think you're underestimating the European desire for cheap beer!

xchaotic 9 years ago |

I have a rental property, it's not much, barely breaking even on mortgage payments, but the hope is I will have the principal as an asset when the mortgage is paid off and any payments coming in will be pure bonus.

brulard 9 years ago |

In 2012 I created devices mockups and was selling it since on graphicriver. https://graphicriver.net/item/devices-responsive-web-mockups... . It was sold more than 3400 times already, and made about $800/month in the first few months. Now the income is somewhere around $25/mo but it's been 4 years since. The funny thing is, that I have never seen these devices close-up in real life before creating these mockups :)

nemoniac 9 years ago |

So does Bitcoin not count as passive income?

xni 9 years ago |

Bought Oclus Rift, played with it a lot, then created a site where you can take them for rent. Got #1 position in Google for "rent oculus". Outcome: about 4k this year. Now stopped it.

vyoming 9 years ago |

I have launched https://drilldb.com couple of months ago, got few paying users and growing each month.

shellerik 9 years ago |

$50k from investment earnings (index funds, mostly 401k - I'm in my 40s).

$20k from a website I built a couple years ago (searchable product catalog with Amazon affiliate links).

shostack 9 years ago | |

Was that dividends or just unrealized gains in the fund price?

wordpressdev 9 years ago |

Maintaining a few websites, ranging from a gift ideas website based on (and earning from) Amazon, to some content sites, latest being www.americaundertrump.com

codecamper 9 years ago |

I want to be able to invest in solar projects. These projects often have internal rates of return of 10%+.

However, this involves 20 or 30 year contracts to buy power from you after you have made the initial investment to purchase /rent land and install the panels.

Wish there were a way to securitize those deals & allow us to trade them like bonds.

durkie 9 years ago | |

Solar City used to (and night still) offer solar bonds that were exactly this. The future of these is a bit uncertain after their Tesla merger though. It sounds like they might be changing strategies

burkemw3 9 years ago | |

Look at solar yield cos, the well structured ones just own the revenue stream

codecamper 9 years ago | | |

trouble with the solar yield cos is they have these "sponsors" But those guys are just PV manufacturers who are looking to boost their margins by installing PV and then charging their yieldco top dollar for those projects. It's an obvious conflict of interest.

I've got some PEGI, which is mostly wind power that has less of this conflict of interest.

However, I'd much prefer to simply invest directly in a solar project via a notes (lending club) sort of mechanism. Allow me to sell the notes on an aftermarket if I suddenly need money for another reason.

cannin 9 years ago |

Passive investing in commission-free index exchange traded funds (ETFs) along with a lazy portfolio explorer (http://portfolios.lunean.com/) to analyze ETF portfolios (e.g. backtesting, portfolio comparisons, and ETF correlations).

hrez 9 years ago | |

You have a mess in fund names. I.e. "VTI 60% Total Bond Market ETF" etc.

halcyondaze 9 years ago |

~$2k/mo from an informational hobby-related website I run and monetize with affiliate sales. Growing, too!

tomcam 9 years ago | |

Are you able to keep it enjoyable? Invariably when I ask people who run hobby-based stores selling things like toy trains, comic books, or stamps, they tell me it's no longer fun to them.

halcyondaze 9 years ago | | |

Yes, I am expanding offline as well because I want to explore it as much as possible. Still fun for me, and what isn't I try to outsource to others.

DictumMortuum 9 years ago |

I am the person behind http://dictummortuum.blogspot.com

I reach the adsense threshold about once every year, so it's ~70 euro/year. Sad, but I don't spend a lot of time maintaining it.

sdfjkl 9 years ago |

Amazon referrals. I made £40 or so.

ronnier 9 years ago |

$2,550 in rental home income on a house that will be paid off in 3 months.

tomcam 9 years ago | |

What a great feeling!

alecmgo 9 years ago |

http://www.siliconvalleyguide.org is a geeky tour guide to Silicon Valley. It makes about $10/month in ads.

tomcam 9 years ago | |

Fun! Good idea. Duly bookmarked.

37463892 9 years ago |

I make about $80 a month from (http://redreport.org/), mainly from organic search traffic.

RhodesianHunter 9 years ago | |

It would probably be more if the ads didn't actually cover the content.

joshuak 9 years ago |

"Investment" is not income, passive or otherwise.

Income is step one. Investment of that income is step two.

A "salary" is income that is bound to time worked.

"Passive income" is income that is not bound to time worked.

The key difference between passive income vs investing, is what is being invested. With passive income like salary _time_ is the investment, not money. That's why it's income.

All the comments discussing saving and investment strategies are rather missing the point of the question.

srigi 9 years ago |

Running ransomware network. For $6000 investment you can get $80000/month rent coming to you.

jccalhoun 9 years ago |

i made like $125 in amazon gift cards between swagbucks and bing(now microsoft) rewards points.

wlievens 9 years ago |

Stock appreciation and dividends.

buckhx 9 years ago |

$AMD + $ARRY

alimbada 9 years ago | |

I'm relatively new to investing and started a year ago. $AMD was one of the companies I chose to invest in last December. I'm up 100+% (in GBP) on my AMD investment right now and planning to hold for another year. If Zen and Vega deliver (and I think they will) I'm confident I'll see 200% a gain in the next 6 months, possibly even close to 300%.

fratlas 9 years ago |

Trump game! Not huge amount, but for the small amount of the effort it was great.

Romajashi 9 years ago | |

What is Trump game?

funnyfacts365 9 years ago | | |

A game with Donald Trump as the character, most likely.

koyao 9 years ago |

Sold a condo in California and bought two investment properties in Texas.

vuchkov 9 years ago |

2K, domain & hosting services. | thx, god!

jdmoreira 9 years ago |

I'm very curious to know how much both 64bites.com and buildyourownlisp.com made this year. Maybe the authors would like to comment? :)

woodyb23 9 years ago |

Bitcoin has been my most profitable.

addonis1990 9 years ago | |

Can you elaborate please ? I am considering investing a some time in bitcoin and blockchain next year and I would really appreciate your insights. What tools/services/websites did you use ? Did you learn that on your own ? what resources did you use ?

j_s 9 years ago | | |

Pretty sure Bitcoin works best for the people who got in early.

anon4this1: I bought 5800 bitcoins mostly for around $5 back in 2011ish [...] I'm up 15,400% in 5 years

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13093895

andreshb 9 years ago |

Airbnb listings in NYC, BOG, MDE - make enough to live almost anywhere I want.

myroon5 9 years ago |

Using Lendingrobot - an automated p2p lending service

codecamper 9 years ago | |

I used lending robot. I used the middle of their risky / safe bet slider, tending toward the conservative side.

I'm going to end up LOSING MONEY as many of LC's loans are going delinquent.

Joy.

myroon5 9 years ago | | |

This is sad to hear. How many loans do you have in your portfolio?

siong1987 9 years ago | |

isn't that funded?

elproxy 9 years ago | | |

I assume GP meant interests generated from lending on that platform.

refulgentis 9 years ago | | |

Yeah, grandparent is spam: https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/07/lending-robot-makes-lendin...

myroon5 9 years ago | | |

Yes I believe it is.

jeremyt 9 years ago |

Bitcoin

tove 9 years ago |

My passive income is quite standard. Three apartments in a new block. I bought all of them four years ago when the construction was still unfinished. This got me a good price. I knew that the area would be under continuous development, therefore it won't be hard to find renters. I was right. Best part is that I didn't even have to furnish them. I managed to rent them all unfurnished.

Dowwie 9 years ago | |

In what country are you located? Furniture is more of a short term rental requirement, unless you've included essential appliances with your categorization.

tove 9 years ago | | |

Germany (Frankfurt). I didn't provide the appliances, except for fridge and electric oven+stove (because I managed to get a discount on buying three sets of these appliances through a friend). Sorry, also the kitchens were furnished by me. The rentals were made long term.

ninjaroar 9 years ago | | |

That is true in the US, even in NYC. However, furnished apartments are the norm in London, for long rentals.

sean_patel 9 years ago | |

> My passive income is quite standard. Three apartments in a new block. I bought all of them four years ago when the construction was still unfinished.

Trust fund baby?

You make it sound easy. How much cash did you have to front for the down payment total? I know that for Investment properties, Lenders require a minimum of 25% - 35% cash down (so they can hedge their risks against you dumping a badly performing investment property.)

The barriers to entry in Real Estate investing (as rental properties) is almost always the HUGE down payment.

ommunist 9 years ago |

rent from real estate

branchless 9 years ago |

Passive income. So great that financiers gave people a nice name for extorsion. Some ideas on here are creating value and selling it over time. No problem with that.

Too many are rentier activity, costing everyone more in the long run. Appropriating wealth rather than creating it.

Hacker news seems to embrace this culture. Surely the antithesis of the early days of computing and the origin of hacker culture.

dgacmu 9 years ago | |

What a strange attitude.

I'm very grateful that my landlord chooses to own an apartment and rent it to me on a short-term basis. I needed housing for four months, I already own a house (which is being remodeled), and I certainly didn't want to try to buy a second house for five months.

For that rental, I'm happy to let my landlord earn a profit, in exchange for taking on the risk of owning and maintaining the property.

eevilspock 9 years ago | | |

Not strange at all. Many well-respected people have this point of view, from Nobel laureate economists to free-market libertarians.

The problem is that most of the profit he "earns" is from the ownership of land, not from maintaining the property.

See my other comment for more, or this now on the HN front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13153047

estomagordo 9 years ago |

2016 isn't over. Ask in 3 weeks time.

shadykiller 9 years ago |

I don't need to invest anywhere. My company invests for me in 401k and by the time i retire i will get $401,000 as the name suggests :)

dbg31415 9 years ago |

Surprised nobody has mentioned getting married yet. Dual incomes is probably the easiest path to wealth. Just don't ever get divorced...

mf2hd 9 years ago | |

It's too risky, not worth it :)

saddestcatever 9 years ago | |

Being married is not exactly a passive activity :P

branchless 9 years ago | |

Heaven 17: I'm your money.

Buy this

Sign here

Order now our emotional life

I'm offering you the post of wife

Plus the overnight treasury

It'll work for you if it works for me

---

It's a great song and a very good album:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0-x3GbFxgE

eevilspock 9 years ago |

This post is what's wrong with Capitalism. Rent seeking. The Matthew Effect. Making money by making money.