Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what? - <AUTHOR> The last two threads by the same name got a lot of attention (and a lot of love from patio), but seeing how its been over a year since then it would be interesting to hear from new people (HN userbase is ever growing) and also get updates from some people who posted in the previous threads.
Previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4467603
Previous to Previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2567487 <comment><USER3> TL;DR: The top of our funnel is fine, and our app is making money, but it's not "easy money" and our trial to paying customer sign up needs some serious attention.

I run a HR app for SMEs called [http://www.staffsquared.com](http://www.staffsquared.com). We're making a comfortable 5 figures each month.

We're reinvesting this income back in the product either in the form of new functionality (paying programmers) or advertising (paying Google Adwords). We've increased our Adwords spend, invested in SEO (on page and off page) and a recent redesign saw a decrease in bounce rate and increase in trial sign up rates.

Our site visit to trial sign up rate for the last five months looks like this:

April: 13.02%

May: 12.37%

June: 13.76%

July: 15.61%

August: 16.46%

Our bounce rate for the last five months looks like this:

April: 39.54%

May: 40.06%

June: 37.21%

July: 32.8%

August: 31.17%

So both of those top end of the funnel stats are moving in the right direction.

Our free trial to paying customers is the area we're really focussing on at the moment as it's really not high enough. So we're re-targeting accounts that have expired to find out how we can serve them better and tell them about new features. We're also working hard on our onboarding stuff (the type of stuff you'll read patio11 talking about) including more intelligent automated e-mails based on the status of their account at a point in time.

Happy to answer any questions you good people might have where I can...

<comment><USER4> Apparently "SME" means "Small & Medium Enterprises".

<comment><USER5> Thanks for this clarification, as I'm used to SME meaning Subject Matter Experts (which also applies to the product).

BTW, the Staff Squared homepage is really impressive! My eyes are directed to all of the right places on the page to sign-up and learn more. I also like that clicking the Roadmap link on the footer leads directly to the Trello project page.

<comment><USER3> Thanks so much for the feedback, really nice to hear that people who haven't seen the site before think we're doing it right :)

For the record, if anybody thinks we've made a huge mistake on the site I'd love to hear about it!

<comment><USER6> Not a huge mistake at all but shouldn't the email address box say "No card details required" instead of "require" [http://bryan.cx/7OXv/K6kIrX0S](http://bryan.cx/7OXv/K6kIrX0S)

<comment><USER3> Yep, thank you. I'll get that fixed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Previous discussions:

Sep 3, 2012: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4467603](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4467603)

Sep 4, 2012: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4470293](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4470293)

Sep 24, 2011: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3029771](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3029771)

May 21, 2011: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2567487](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2567487)

Mar 9, 2011: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2300599](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2300599)

<comment><USER8> Thanks for sharing the past discussions. The more often we can talk about this, the better off the community can be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm making roughly $300/month from three iPhone apps. They're all quite simple and I'd estimate that I've put in less than a month's actual work building them; although as a disclaimer, this is my day job so I can put these together relatively quickly.

My fourth app was a larger time investment and gets quite a lot more downloads. It makes no income now, but I'll add In-App Purchases soon.

I'm freelancing for ~45 hours a month to fund this while backpacking all over the world. I should blog about it.

\---

Edit: I put up a LaunchRock page, if you would be interested in a blog about this stuff, leave me your details: [http://theoreticalblog.launchrock.com](http://theoreticalblog.launchrock.com)

<comment><USER10> Telling people that you should blog makes it actually less likely that you will actually do it. Read that on some psychology website once. ;)

<comment><USER11> Anyone recognize this phenomenon by name or have a link?

<comment><USER12> most people are familiar with this notion due to this post: [http://sivers.org/zipit](http://sivers.org/zipit)

tl;dr "Symbolic Self-Completion"

<comment><USER13> I've long noticed this in myself. Very neat to see it isn't just me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've usually read these threads without thinking about my own situation, but suddenly realized, I'm getting checks every month. It's not much, only $100-$250 per month, based on advertisements on my youtube channel, most coming from a 24 part series I made on locks & lockpicking a few years ago, but it's passive to the point that I literally forget about it.

Unfortunately I'm the sort who is very uncomfortable asking for money, or even advertising on my content (only about 50% of the videos I put out have ads at all, and many of the most popular do not), but at the same time I'd love to have the time & resources to produce more & better content in the future.

Not looking for advice, as my disposition away from revenue is much stronger than my wish to get money, and I've learned that lesson many times, just adding another voice to the thread.

<comment><USER15> I am a lot like you temperamentally and currently homeless, though the two things are not really directly related. I have thought a lot about it over the years. For me, part of it is that I was one of the smart kids in high school and got a lot of not subtle messages about how I owed the world benefit for my gifts and would be evil incarnate to try to, gasp, get rewarded for them. For me, I think gender also plays a role. I am female and a lot of my strengths have a social element which is routinely treated by other people like I owe them some free motherly love, I should be a total fucking martyr about it, and, to add insult to injury, making people feel good is not some sort of intelligent, valuable skill set or knowledge. It is treated like I am just cute and lovable like a tribble.

I have my own ideas on how to solve these issues for me. I sm not giving you advice here. Just saying it resonates, fwiw.

<comment><USER14> It's worth a lot, and while I am not female, and can't fully empathize, I would like to say that I at least sympathize and that I see and try to speak against what you are describing. Women in particular seem to be taught not to profit. In fact, I think on the other side of the equation it is part of what has been awkward for me. Many of my closest male friends see profit as part of their self-identity and it wasn't until your post here that it clicked for me that it may be related to gender identity.

So, like I said, worth a lot. And making people feel good, caring for people, it's the most valuable skill so far as I'm concerned. Glad there are other people who value it.

<comment><USER15> My situation is complicated. I am not making much money but I am "saving" millions kind of by not being sick. Long story. So can't really be too terribly unhappy about it. At some point, the dough will role in but I will know I am doing stuff I am okay with...etc...

((hugs)) & take care.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I didn't post on the last threads I think, but I have had some modest success with passive income, was making up to 700 euros a month 2 years ago, this is down to 130 euros a month now. Still not too bad considering I haven't really touched the site for almost 2 years. But my heart isn't in that kind of projects anymore. Passive income is a bit overrated in my experience.

Still nice to get a small check at the end of the month.

The site in question is [http://www.giftcertificatefactory.com](http://www.giftcertificatefactory.com), it provides printable gift certificate templates.

EDIT: I should add the money comes in from Adsense. I tried other monetization schemes as described there [http://www.sparklewise.com/my-first-passive- income-project-o...](http://www.sparklewise.com/my-first-passive-income- project-one-year-later/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice site. Has the income come down due to a reduction in traffic spend or just a loss in rankings due to reduction in freshness metric wrt SEO or any other reason?

<comment><USER16> My site got slapped by Google Penguin update, lost 90% of its traffic and never really recovered. It's going down steadily now for some time.

As for the Google penguin update drop in rankings, it might have been a stale content penalty, or a devaluation of spammy links - I wrote manually lots of articles for supposedly respectable article directories pointing back to the template website to go up in search engine rankings and it worked well for some time.

The idea was to extract myself of this process at some point since it was painful to write not very interesting articles. But didn't get around doing it, or outsourcing it.

<comment><USER17> _My site got slapped by Google Penguin update, lost 90% of its traffic and never really recovered._

It's funny how you don't really build websites anymore (did we ever?), you build sites for Google's search engine.

Even thought websites are conceptually different from writing a Photoshop plugin, in reality? Not so much. You're just as dependent on Google as you are Adobe, it's just hidden.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Bit late to the boat but:

Around $700/mo from a themeforest account.

And the more interesting story, about £4.5k/mo from a cleaning business that i bought.

I will at some point write the story up, but the TL:DR is: Spotted vastly under valued cleaning business with complete staff. Turnover of previous owner £190k a year. Profit of previous owner £18k. Yup, £18k.... Bought it for £13.5k.

Still in the early stages and still changing things but the previous owner was/is in massive debt, little free time to put into the business, did EVERYTHING on paper/fax/phone and had enormous monthly costs.

Theres a much longer story to this but i'll write it up in a few months when its a bit more proven.

<comment><USER19> Any tips on finding undervalued small businesses? How did you come across this one?

<comment><USER20> A day late and I'm not the OP, but a friend of mine did this by talking to a business broker. He found a small technology business that was operated by an old couple that needed to quit.

The couple had been making sensors for a niche industry forever and were still charging prices from 10 years earlier. His first order of business was to contact all the customers and tell them prices were going up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It might sound kind of obscene here on HN, but I'm making about 3500 euros per month, semi-passive from adult related site/community. It's subscription based and the content is user submitted (that's why it's semi-passive). Some moderation is necessary, as well basic user support, but overall - not so much hustle.

<comment><USER22> Which payment provider are you using? AFAIK most of them are very picky on the subject.

<comment><USER21> CCBill, SegPay and Achbill.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I am a data point for the worst-case example. I don't have a hot application or a popular website, and most of my money is earned the old-fashioned way.

My passive income from my investments in government bonds is enough to cover mortgage, basic living expenses for my family, and two family trips a year.

Source of money for investments:

\- savings from many years of working and diligently saving

\- some real estate investments

<comment><USER24> I'd like to put some math with this because this is the path I took too. 4 years ago I was offered a job with a startup and a job with a government contractor at the same time. The contractor was offering 15k/year more and I took that offer and saved all 15k of it every year (index fund investing). 4 years in, with reinvesting dividends, my passive income from the money is around 400/month. Very happy I made the choice I did.

<comment><USER23> Kudos on the great rate of return!

I tell everybody around me it's surprisingly easy to become financially independent. By saving s% of my income investing with a rate of return is i%, then the worst case is that I should be able to completely replace my income in i%/s% years. I was saving 30% (actually more) and investing at around 5%, which resulted in complete income replacement in around 10 years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> ~$1000 a month. Designed, edited and published a book of Warren Buffett's letters to shareholders (see [http://amzn.com/1595910778](http://amzn.com/1595910778)). An opportunity I stumbled into. But I suppose "get publication rights from Warren Buffett" isn't a repeatable business model :)

<comment><USER26> Not repeatable in that specific case, but have you thought about doing the same thing for other high-profile figures (either in finance or elsewhere)? You might be able to leverage your experience and success to get them to agree to a similar sort of thing...

<comment><USER25> I have thought of this but haven't really pursued anything yet. I also have permission from Buffett to publish his early partnership/hedge fund letters from the '60s, so will probably be doing that in the next year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I've made about $3k a month in semi-passive income from my codecanyon portfolio in 2013. I call it semi-passive income because I have to spend some time on support each day, but it usually doesn't take more than 30 minutes.

EDIT: My portfolio [http://codecanyon.net/user/23andwalnut/portfolio](http://codecanyon.net/user/23andwalnut/portfolio)

<comment><USER28> I sell on codecanyon as well though only make around $300 a month right now. I have almost the same number of items as you do yet can't seem to get the visibility. Do you have any tips you can share?

Also, completely agree about the semi-passive! Lots of questions to deal with daily.

<comment><USER27> In my experience quality sells. Quality code. Quality feature set. And most importantly, quality design. I think a lot of items on codecanyon neglect the design aspect and therefore don't sell as much as they could.

Also, I've been somewhat lucky in that almost all of my items have been featured. This probably has something to due with how much time I spend on design - at least 40% of my total development time is design. Feel free to email me with a link to your portfolio if you want some specific pointers...

<comment><USER28> You're probably right about the design side of things, mine is definitely lacking I just have zero ability in that area.

I've send you an emails, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I make $300-$500 per month with an online design tool for printable cupcake wrappers. I don't do any advertising. I get 80-100 uniques per day. I have very few quality inbound links. I do rank high for a few keyword combos, but their monthly traffic isn't that big.

I spent quite a bit of time early on writing the website, and lost some hair recently trying unsuccessfully to upgrade the OSS libraries, but for the most part it runs itself, at least when GoDaddy's $60/month VPS isn't flaking out. The only other expenses are the domain, e-junkie, and payment processing fees.

[http://www.makecupcakewrappers.com](http://www.makecupcakewrappers.com)

<comment><USER30> A whole new world just opened for me.

<comment><USER31> Imagine all the cupcakes you could buy with the profits!!!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Last year I made a decent DJ application for Android. I probably invested a few thousand hours into it & the framework I built it on that could compile to Android, Blackberry Playbook, and HP Touchpad. I grossed just under $10k between sales on the three platforms, and advertising on Android. That works out to a few dollars per hour, last year.

This year, I don't have time to work on it further but between advertising and sales I'm still making ~400-600 USD/month. For 0 hours investment. I love the long tail.

<comment><USER33> :) It's not 0 hours investment, just 0 hours investment _this year_. All of that work last year was investment that's now paying off, bit by bit.

Your hourly rate from last year will look slightly better now if you add in this year's earnings...though it's still a rough game to play. Good luck!

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I feel a little bit ashamed to post this but whatever. I used to write bots for a popular online game that would harvest materials and sell stuff in the games auction house. At first I only wanted to automate some tedious, boring tasks in the game, but over time I got really good at it to the point where I wouldnt have to touch my guy for days. Anyway, there where lots of bots on my servers and we would all undercut each other to a point where our materials where worth almost nothing. Around this time the company released an API where you could pull auction house data for your server. I wrote some scripts that would pull the data, store them in redis and crunch some numbers that I would later feed to my bots, to gain some advantage. Basically, I was able to withhold my stock when the price reached a certain threshold and buyout all of my competitions stock at super low prices. By that time I had already "scaled up" and ran several instances on various servers, all full automated by some python scripts. I wrote a web socket based web interface that allowed me to see my bots log messages in real time from work. I set up alerts when game masters messaged so I was able to answer them to prove that I was not a bot, all remotely. It was so much fun. At the end of each month I would sell the in-game currency to some chinese companies, the last few months I made between 300-500 € / month, double that amount around christmas. One day, the bann hammer (rightfully so!) hit me hard and I lost all my accounts. It still was a fun experience that introduced me to several new technologies.

</comment><comment><USER35> I'm not sure if my project counts; 'cause it's running at a loss?

[http://dressed.so](http://dressed.so)

I made it because it seemed like /r/malefashionadvice needed somewhere to host their fits with a little extra functionality. Every now and then I build a feature or two but mostly it just ticks over.

For revenue I make a little via adsense but mostly try and focus on the affiliate products, for example on this page [http://drsd.so/15YxDWv](http://drsd.so/15YxDWv) the 'shop this look' links earn me affiliate revenue.

<comment><USER36> Neat, I've seen your site on /r/malefashionadvice.

Since your site is focused on men, you should try and filter out women's products in your shop section.

Example for a search on "sperry" topsiders: [http://dressed.so/shop?q=sperry](http://dressed.so/shop?q=sperry)

I'm guessing that mixing in women's products will hurt your conversion rate for affiliate products. If your affiliate network can't filter like that, you may want to check out [http://prosperent.com/](http://prosperent.com/) or [http://www.cj.com](http://www.cj.com)

<comment><USER35> Yeah I've been quite slack about optimising the search stuff. It should just default to 'male' and have a radio to change.

Thanks for the links; just yesterday I put 'investigate alternate affiliates' on the top of my list.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> $2500/mo from AdSense on [http://coverphotofinder.com/](http://coverphotofinder.com/)

Zero-maintenance, which is nice.

<comment><USER38> You know, what I would love to know is how you attracted the initial audience. This stuff is always so easy to make, but my past attempts never really got enough traffic boost. I'm wondering how you got over the 'plateau' (which in my experience seems to be ~1000 visitors a day.

<comment><USER39> This site forces you to login via facebook and then sell all your friends by forcing you to allow it to spam to all connections, thus promoting itself.

Dirty "viral" tactic.

<comment><USER40> seems Google, Facebook, Yahoo etc. have been using this practice for decades.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I make between 5-10k a month on my apps and book. (It depends on the season. Summer and Christmas are best.)

[http://buildanappbusiness.com/](http://buildanappbusiness.com/)

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/30-south- llc/id331245760](https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/30-south-llc/id331245760)

<comment><USER42> Derek, you're missing out on an extra ~7%!

Sign up for Amazon's affiliate program and use your own affiliate links on your links to amazon.

\</comment></comment><comment>-

Also, as commented below - I posted the first of these recurring income threads almost two years ago - I'm now compiling some stats, data and insights [1] for myself so that I can learn how to boost my numbers closer to yours :)

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6432851](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6432851)

<comment><USER41> That's actually a good call. I'm already an affiliate from another blog I have. I've been meaning to change those links and I hadn't gotten around to it. Thanks for the reminder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> $0.1/month from ads in a free iPhone app.

<comment><USER44> I think this represents the majority of HN user's attempts at monetization.

<comment><USER45> The other long tail!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Few years ago I wrote a solution manual to one of my text books (half of it was part of the assignments). I sell it on Amazon for $30 for pdf download. Been making around $200/month.

<comment><USER47> How much time did you put into this upfront? Seems like the most "passive" item in the entire thread so far. Can I ask what book this is for? whats the lifespan of a solutions manual like this? Have you been selling it for several years or does it obsolete itself in sync with the aggressive textbook versioning schedules?

<comment><USER46> I guess I am lucky that the text book still gets prescribe in some universities. I also think there is no other version of the text (I need to check that) I do not maintain it at all. And like I said, I solved most of the questions as part of the assignments and later worked out the left over ones, packaged it into a pdf.

<comment><USER48> When my professors found out that there was a solution manual floating about, they changed the textbook. Apparently all of the student's answers started looking the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I generate around $2,500/mo. I operate a company which mines poker data and have a couple of partners, plus some large server / tech / support costs. No- one is full time on the business any more as after Black Friday there isn't a lot of $ in poker: [http://hhsmithy.com/](http://hhsmithy.com/)

<comment><USER50> This is fascinating. It took me a while to discover the purpose of subscribing to this data, and I finally found it at [https://www.hhsmithy.com/tour](https://www.hhsmithy.com/tour)

"Finding the best tables to play on is impossible without up to date statistics and data on the player pool and consistently playing pots against opponents with no reads or statistics is a sure fire way to lose your bank roll fast."

How do you harvest this data? Do you use player bots?

Also, you have a typo on that page: "Your on the cut off with AJo and a player under the gun has opened". Should be "You're".

<comment><USER49> The data is used with 3rd party tools that scan tables, find the best seats, display statistics etc. The most popular tool is holdem manager ([http://www.holdemmanager.com/](http://www.holdemmanager.com/)). After buying data off our site you can import hundreds of millions of hands and have detailed info on almost every player on a poker site (how often they raise, fold, call etc etc). If you also scan tables and sit with the "fish" (recreational players) then you will win a lot more. One day I'll write a blog post about what online poker is really like (game theory, tools, and statistics).

On the tech side its some fully reversed clients that we just have linux command line clients which connect to sites, and other sites its a ton of Windows XP VM's which open tables and observe. At the heart of it all we have some command servers which handle distributing the table load, parsing and aggregating all the data etc. Each day we "mine" over 10 gbs of data zipped and at peak times can be watching over 10,000 poker tables. It's pretty nuts that it somehow all works.

And yeah, lots of typos :-O

<comment><USER51> It's crazy to me that online poker companies make this information available. Shouldn't tables be private or something to stop this?

<comment><USER49> Yeah, a few sites have made it so you can't observe tables but most sites allow it. You'd have to ask them why but I assume that casual players like to observe before depositing and they don't want to scare away the casual players (who are the life blood for a poker site).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> $2000/month from free Android apps.

I just copied existing apps on android like Logo Quiz, 4 pics 1 word etc. that were number 1 in the play store. Just took 24h to rebuild this apps, since they're quite simple. Did that around 10 times.

Admob makes $500/month, Airpush $1,500/month.

However, Google just shut down Airpush push notifications, so the latter is now gone. ha.

<comment><USER53> I hate to play Devil's advocate (please prove me wrong) but you have almost a million app downloads (more successful than most) and high school kids at Taco Bell make more than you. And that's before taxes. What will you owe the IRS if you're in the US? What are you paying in hosting? Is this really the "mobile revolution" glorified day after day in the news? So $500/month after Google pulled the rug from under you? Only "24 hours" but what about tech support, compatibility issues, the market research, artwork, learning to package the apps, complying with Google's rules, setting up your development environment? How many days does "24 hours" add up to, start to finish? But forget the money, at the end of the day this sounds like unrewarding work: ripping off other people's ideas. Which makes me wonder, you're obviously clever enough to get a million downloads, why such an uncreative approach? I'm just trying to understand the app market everyone is raving about. How many times have we all heard "the future is mobile, the future is mobile." Is making these apps (games?) really that enjoyable? I'm curious because I'm thinking of making an Android app. When I read stories like this, makes me think twice. What you're doing sounds really smart from a marketing perspective because 1. you're making games which are by far the most popular apps and 2. you're replicating the most popular games. So you _should_ be killing it, making 100x more than all the other app developers who didn't sell out, the developers building interesting, original, useful apps. Yet, you're not. Am I over-analyzing this? Or is the "apps market" totally overrated?

<comment><USER54> These ideas were not original to start with; 4 pics 1 word (which is, imho, incredibly boring) somehow got a lot of attention, downloads and money but was never original. Then 100s of devs copied it in some way or another. All these 'games' look / work the same. I made one for a client and the 24 hours sounds plausible including artwork but excluding the actual levels. That would take around another day. Making a few $100 / month constant for a few days work is ok in my book, although it's not the work I would want to do; like you say, it's uncreative and actually boring.

However; for these kind of games there is no 'support'; people like it or don't like it, but you don't get support requests; people who experience issues with the software just uninstall it. It's not worth actually fixing it for a few outliers with crap white label phones. So you don't actually have any work with these things and that beats Taco Bell.

I think the reason he is not killing it is the nature of these games; they _are_ very easy to make so there are 1000s of clones in the Play Store, people usually cheat (look up the answers) and those who like them have more than 10 installed on their phone. So the ad exposure is very short lived. Installs are not a very good metric; play time is; you're not going to keep apps like this active for a long time.

If you make an app which gives value to people or games with fresh content every week , you will make a lot more money. But that's not automatic; it's a job :)

<comment><USER53> Seems to me someone with this much skill/ability could easily make $100k/year ($100 x 1000 successful app months) plus pension/benefits just working for the government. 10x easier work with 10x the pay and more stability. And "mobile apps" is supposedly the promising, high-tech growth segment of the economy everyone is harping on. What's wrong with this picture?

<comment><USER54> Well it depends on what apps; these are not brilliant examples of app and app economy. There are people making that kind of money you are talking about with games like this (4 pics 1 song is top free in the Appstore for instance at the moment and that is known to make quite a bit of cash), but the things you don't see 'in the Appstore' are apps which save companies money, for instance, by optimizing their internal HR or support workflow. Or for instance an app helping chronically ill elderly managing their meds so the on call nurses and doctors have a significant % less workload thus saving money and lives.

These apps will not be in the store, but they are making or saving companies millions. These kind of apps are already critical to a lot of enterprises and are a real opportunity for developers to make your $100k/year and much more.

The promising factor _can_ be in games, but then rather games people stay engaged with (Minecraft, Plague, Plants vs Zombies; not saying if they are good or bad; saying they are liked for years in a row because they are better gameplay and polish wise). Next to that the aforementioned apps either to save or make money; mobile, unlike laptops/desktops, brings apps to everyone, all the time and there is a _lot_ of money to be made in all market segments because of that difference. Both for devs as well as companies hiring these devs.

Oh and, this is definitely a matter of taste, but I rather make $2k/month from home than $10k/month in some gov job in an office. Where I live, you are allowed to work from home in some of those jobs, but they do expect you to be in the office at least 2 days/week and that is definitely something I wouldn't do very unless there is really no other way out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I generate about $900/month of semi-passive income from [http://algorithmic.ly](http://algorithmic.ly), but the initial setup cost is high. In the future I want it to be the goto-company for adding generalized algorithms to apps, products and services (provided as a service), but while I validate the market there's a huge initial setup cost (about 10 hrs), spent on data modeling, cluster deployment and secure key generation.

<comment><USER56> Closing out of your site crashes my browser; just a heads up. Windows 8, Chrome Version 29.0.1547.76 m.

<comment><USER55> Hmm, can't replicate under the same conditions. Do you have any chrome extensions installed that the site might be interacting badly with?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> It's good to be back!

I guess it was around 864 days ago that I posted the original one of these threads!

My current stats:

$~500/mo from a few supplement related websites, and some fitness stuff. Last worked on these back in April. Total work/month is roughly 30 minutes.

My current project:

Doing the research so that I can boost this to around $5000/mo :)

I figure this is as good a time as any to announce that I'm actually putting together a little recurring project of my own - and it's pretty meta.

It's pure stats and useful information on who generates recurring income, how much work they had to do to get there, what they learned/should've done/shouldn't have done. I'm researching this purely for myself, because I want to get to more recurring income faster (because recurring income is so, so, so freeing) - but a few friends asked me to package it up so I'm doing so!

Check it out [1]. Also I figure I should post it to HN, so I'll update this comment when I do so :)

Thanks guys - and really glad to see this thread live on longer than when I first posted it almost three years ago!

[1]: [http://recurringincome.meteor.com/](http://recurringincome.meteor.com/)

Edit 1:

On HN. [2]

[2]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6432851](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6432851)

</comment><comment><USER57> Improvely reached $10,000/mo RR recently, less than a year from launch ([https://www.improvely.com](https://www.improvely.com)).

I also run W3Counter (freemium) and a couple smaller services and paid plugins for Shopify stores.

<comment><USER58> Well done... those numbers are impressive to reach. How many other people do you work with or are you solo?

<comment><USER57> It's just me, working from home or wherever I feel like bringing a laptop for the day.

<comment><USER59> This is meant in the best possible way: I hate you. My hate is constructed entirely of jealousy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> The Ruby on Rails Tutorial ([http://railstutorial.org/](http://railstutorial.org/)), conceived as a _4-Hour Workweek_ –style product business, makes low five figures per month, requiring just about the proverbial four hours of work per week (mostly minor book updates and customer service emails). New editions are a lot of work (e.g., ~2 months full-time to redo the screencasts), but the new sales cycle typically yields a mid-five-figure income spike the month of the launch.

I'm currently working on a project designed to help make Rails Tutorial–type stories more common among hackers. Stay tuned...

<comment><USER61> Super interested in what you're building, huge fan (but not a customer) of your tutorial and story. If you could offer a SquareSpace type of solution for selling screencasts including international billing, account management, it would be killer! Where do I sign up for the mail list? :)

<comment><USER60> Glad to hear it. :-) I'm working on a publishing platform that makes it easy to produce and sell Rails Tutorial–style products. If you'd like to get involved, just send me an email (address in profile) and I'll add you to the notification list for the private beta.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Meta note: please don't be shy to share links to what it is that's generating your income. I hate reading things like "I have this simple app that's making me $X/month" and not be able to see the context. Who knows, maybe I'll find it useful and pay for it too.

</comment><comment><USER63> It seems the big winner is Apple and Google. They passively collect 30% on the apps we spend months making.

<comment><USER64> Nothing about what Apple and Google provide for developers/App Store is "passive".

<comment><USER53> I disagree. Nobody at Google would have a job if it wasn't for Adsense/Adwords, which hasn't changed since the Goto.com days. It's a fancy click counter script paying everyone's salary. Search = content to sell clicks. You could fire 99% of everyone at Google and they wouldn't lose one penny of profit.

<comment><USER64> So the App store infrastructure, support, etc just built itself automatically? The entire eco-system would not have been possible without them making it.

I've been an App developer for 4 years now and have no qualms with apple taking the 'passive' 30%

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Interesting point against recurring revenue for some products: We increased overall sales by charging a fixed price for permanent access vs. recurring billing. The lifetime value of the customer turned out to be less in the recurring model. It took us about 2 years to discover this. Just something to keep an eye on.

<comment><USER66> Very interesting. I've gotten a decent number of requests for a la carte purchases on my site, so I'm strongly considering doing it. (It's a big change, though, which is why I've held off.) Can you say more? I'm particularly interested in how you set your prices, whether you kept the recurring model alongside the permanent model, and how you saw customer behavior change. Thanks!

<comment><USER65> I'm reluctant to give harder details since I am in what could be a "passive income" niche, but I will try. We originally set our monthly prices in line with comparably similar produces - about $20/mo, with discounts to purchase 6 & 12 months in advances. The final fixed cost (lifetime access) account ended up costing less than a 12 month discounted subscription.

The feedback was that a) some people bought precisely because they didn't have a recurring bill hitting their account, even a small one. b) some people found the fixed price too expensive to buy and were disappointed they couldn't buy it. c) The ones that did buy the fixed price were happy with their purchases. Overall, however, we ended up with fewer total buyers each paying above the average lifetime value of the monthly buyers.

When we offered BOTH subscription AND fixed price access for individual units for a period of time, people tended to buy the lowest cost subscription instead of the lowest cost unit. They shopped on price. They were not as happy with their purchases in either case, though more so for the cheapest subscription.

In the end, it was counterintuitive to what is commonly considered "good business" to have recurring revenue from customers. We still think there's a place for monthly recurring billing somewhere, but we don't have the catalog or products to support a mix. It would be great to provide Level 1 at a fixed price and Level 2 at a lower monthly fee because we know they are the "stick with it" customers and so will likely have a better lifetime value.

Sorry to be vague here. The numbers vary over the years, but started about $2500/mo and grew to about 10k/mo over about 6 years. It is for a learning endeavor that people SHOULD commit a year+ to learning, but tend to quit for very human reasons. We think people who make commitments are happier because a) that cool TED talk about irrevocable choices that everyone talks about and b) Committing to putting in the time on our product DOES result in a new skill set, so it has tangible personal improvement if it is used as directed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> Around $40-50 from admob and amazon affiliate links. It pays for my netflix. I originally set myself a goal "just to see" of buying myself one pint of ale from a pub over the course of a year for app sales/ads - not exactly ambitious but I thought i'd end up at best shifting a few cents a month.

I had already an app on android with ~3000 active installs for doing simple shopping look ups. I changed it to throw in some affiliate codes and fixed a crash and updated it approximately 18 months ago now and haven't made a single update.

It's next to nothing but it encouraged me to look more into at least trying things out for myself - I would never have thought (and still can't) it would be any more than a personal exercise. If I look at it as "free netflix for 2 years" then it's a real thing to me and "means something".

</comment><comment><USER68> I wrote a guide to integrating Stripe payments into Rails applications that expands greatly upon the 10-minute quick-starts[1]. It launched a little over a month ago and has generated more than $10k. I'm expecting that to drop quite a bit going forward but I'm still hoping for ~$500 in monthly revenue.

[1]: [https://www.petekeen.net/mastering-modern- payments](https://www.petekeen.net/mastering-modern-payments)

<comment><USER69> How do / did you market it? As it seems as if you're only hosting it on your personal website? How do people find it?

<comment><USER68> I set up a mailing list right at the beginning (there's a signup link _way_ at the bottom of the landing page, need to make that more prominent) that generated quite a bit of interest. My website by itself generates a decent amount of traffic as well. It's also been featured in a few podcasts and email newsletters which generate traffic and sales.

<comment><USER69> Thanks for the info! Did you ever consider also selling it via a couple of ebook sites?

<comment><USER68> I've been considering selling on other sites (maybe Amazon) and/or doing some limited affiliate deals, but I haven't put any serious work into it yet. What sites were you thinking of?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> Making $4000 + / Month profit . Running a consulting firm. I have two direct employees and few pass-through 's . Revenue is much bigger a number at $100,000 + /Month . Effort is very less to maintain this profit as only spend few hours /month to run payroll , invoicing clients and make timely payment out to the vendors.

 __pass-through : Consultants not employed by my company but work for my clients.

<comment><USER71> You only take 4% profit margin? Seems very low.

<comment><USER72> This rate is not an atypical profit margin for partners (owners) of a consulting firm. Keep in mind that if the parent poster is really only spending a few hours a week then his hourly rate is fantastic. In many consulting firms the partners are also active employees, and so receive salary as well as a portion of the profits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> I make ~$400 per month off of [https://itunes.apple.com/app/the-wiki-game-a- wikipedia/id459...](https://itunes.apple.com/app/the-wiki-game-a- wikipedia/id459318432) (and counterpart: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wiki-game-hd-wikipedia- game/...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wiki-game-hd-wikipedia- game/id616897548)).

I started 'The Wiki Game' by building this web game: [http://thewikigame.com](http://thewikigame.com) \- but all revenue comes from the iOS apps, not the site. Been meaning to potentially monetize the site some day. It gets ~30,000 players per month, with time-on-site ~9mins.

<comment><USER74> Nice artwork and presentation. Looks a lot better than most of the one (wo)man show apps I've seen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> I gross just under $10K per month from [http://www.letscodejavascript.com](http://www.letscodejavascript.com), a subscription-based JavaScript screencast for professional developers [1]. It's a full-time job: I put out two new episodes every week, plus a "special" every month that takes quite a bit more effort. That leaves me with about half my time for developing the business. I'm bootstrapping this, so it's just me. I don't plan to hire any employees until there's more money coming in. (I also make a few hundred a month from royalties on my book [2], which is truly passive.)

I've talked about Let's Code JavaScript on HN before; check out the previous thread [3] for some details about how I started and market the site.

Since simonswords82 was so generous with details about his business, I'll do the same. About 2% of the visitors to the site sign up for the free trial. That seems poor, although I don't have a lot of insight as to what the number "should" be. I do require a credit card in order to sign up for the trial. The trial automatically converts to a subscription after seven days.

About 70% of trial subscribers convert to a paid subscription. This seems pretty good to me, although I'd of course be happier if it was higher. Once they've subscribed, I lose about 25% of subscribers in the first month, and then the number drops asymptotically down to about 5% (of the initial total) per month. I'm reasonably happy with this as well. It's poor by the standards of a SaaS, where a churn rate of 1-2% is doable, but I think it's pretty good for a content site.

My most recent push was an inbound marketing campaign: I took one of my monthly specials and turned it into a dedicated site on object-oriented JavaScript [4]. That was very successful; it nearly doubled traffic in the first month (from 2,800 uniques in the previous month to 5,400) and looks like it will permanently add about 1,500 uniques per month. Trial rates went down slightly as a result, but overall subscriptions went up.

The biggest challenge for me is having lots of things I'd like to pursue, but not enough time to do them all. The Object Playground inbound marketing campaign was successful, but a lot of work. I recently released another special that might make a good inbound campaign (on large-scale JavaScript fundamentals: modularity and automated cross-browser unit testing), but I'm not sure it's worth the time it would take to create a marketing site for it on the scale of Object Playground.

For now I'm focusing on A/B testing various ideas for improving conversion. It takes less effort and potentially has longer-term impact. So far, I've improved the subscribe page [5] by adding testimonials and a better design. Next, I'll probably provide more opportunities for people to preview the series without signing up, as well as more obvious calls to action on the video pages. I also have some other plans in the works that I can't talk about yet. :-)

[1] My screencast is _Let 's Code: Test-Driven JavaScript_, a series for professional JavaScript developers. It's available at [http://www.letscodejavascript.com](http://www.letscodejavascript.com). I'd love to hear your feedback.

[2] My book is _The Art of Agile Development_. It's been out for over five years now, so it's nice to still be getting royalties from it.

[3] I talked about my experiences launching and marketing the screencast here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6038226](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6038226)

[4] My recent inbound marketing campaign was Object Playground, a tutorial and visualizer for object-oriented JavaScript: [http://www.objectplayground.com](http://www.objectplayground.com).

[5] The Let's Code JavaScript subscribe page is at [http://www.letscodejavascript.com/v3/subscribe](http://www.letscodejavascript.com/v3/subscribe).

<comment><USER75> I really like what you are doing, but after seeing what happened to RailsCasts I am a worried what will happen to this business model once it hits 400+ episodes. Hopefully your "other plans" have this part worked out?

<comment><USER66> I assume the screencast has a limited shelf life, so yes, my "other plans" are about that. Although at this point, I think the problem is more about organizing the content so it's not overwhelming. I'm not worried about running out of material or burning out, at least not for a while.

What happened to RailsCasts?

<comment><USER75> [http://railscasts.com/announcements/11](http://railscasts.com/announcements/11) [http://railscasts.com/announcements/12](http://railscasts.com/announcements/12)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> I make around $5 to $10 a day from my site [http://tunes.io](http://tunes.io) I haven't put any effort into marketing it or trying to monetize it other than adsense. Maybe I should be trying harder!

<comment><USER50> I was about to post, "How do you make money on this?" And then I remembered that I use AdBlock. D'oh! I paused it and refreshed a couple times.

<comment><USER76> Yeah I use adblock too - even on my own site ;) I was thinking maybe I would make a tunes.io android app and sell it for a buck just to see what happens.

<comment><USER77> I'll tell you what will happen. I would pay for it! tunes.io is great!

<comment><USER76> Thanks! Tell your friends ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> I make about $500/month from my iOS apps. Considering how much time I put into them I can't say it's really been worth it yet but I plan to at least upgrade them for iOS 7. They did open the door for some unsolicited contracting work though.

[http://www.plastaq.com](http://www.plastaq.com)

</comment><comment><USER78> Between $1450 and $1650 a month from ads on Android apps. One app does about $1100 a month, another does $325 and the rest collectively maybe $150.

<comment><USER76> Do you think ads are a better way to make money than charging for the app?

<comment><USER5> I am also wondering about this. I have an app selling at $0.99 and make a couple hundred per month in sales. It's hard for me to project how much ad revenue I could make, especially since I don't know how many additional people would use it if it were free.

<comment><USER79> Is your app for Android or iOS?

<comment><USER5> Both iOS and Android.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I mine about .0015 BTC a day, a figure that has been declining consistently and rapidly.

<comment><USER80> Time to pony up the cash for your very own ASIC!

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> Been earning a couple hundred per year with a time-tracking/report-generating site for therapists-in-training. I think one of the big downfalls of the concept was that I chose too small of a niche to serve (marriage and family therapists in training in the US). The most tangible benefit from building the service was the coding knowledge gained which serves my freelance work very well. [http://www.therapyhourstracker.com/](http://www.therapyhourstracker.com/)

<comment><USER82> You should consider expanding this to include other types of therapy workers. I know from doing tech work amongst mental health professionals that most are required to log x amount of hours doing y before they can obtain licensing as a z. Since you have the platform and domain knowledge you should be able to add features to widen your target demographic.

<comment><USER81> Thanks, that's a great idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> In the UK I started and ran a site listing tech events: [https://opentechcalendar.co.uk/index.php](https://opentechcalendar.co.uk/index.php) It's just had it's first birthday and is doing well.

This was done in a "maybe-a-bit-to-lean" fashion. There was a previous facility run by a local meetup that suddenly stopped, so I knew there was demand before I started. The first version was a MediaWiki site with a hacked open source calendar plugin that took 4 days from buying the domain to public launch. This was then later replaced with custom software.

This now picks up a small amount from direct sponsorship (as in, I directly approach ppl and don't use something like Google AdWords).

It took a bit to write, but I've realised the specific niche functionality could serve others and I'm currently working on turning this into a platform for any area. It's early days for that, but it works and it's up at [http://ican.hasacalendar.co.uk/](http://ican.hasacalendar.co.uk/)

(I also have some recurring income supporting a freelance contract I did which now takes a couple of days per month but I don't think that's what most ppl here are interested in.)

</comment><comment><USER62> I net roughly $230/month from a rental property I own. I have a realtor I trust manage it for a "first month + 5% of rent" fee. The property is located in a market where rent is much higher than the mortgage (about 150%), so I end up making a profit while building equity into a house at a low interest rate. Not exciting, but it is a viable model and management fees seem very reasonable for the amount of work the realtor does.

<comment><USER19> Make sure you're accounting for vacant months, and for maintenance.

<comment><USER62> I am. So far, just as pure passive income it has been a loss (not by much, but still). I do like the idea of building equity into the house though. It is cheap enough that I can continue carrying it even during the vacant months and I do believe the prices in that market will stay stead or rise somewhat slowly over the years. In the wosrst case, it can be a nice retirement home.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> I make anywhere from $300 to $800/month on [http://pizzacodes.com](http://pizzacodes.com). About 3 or 4 months ago I switched domain names to make it more memorable, and I dropped out of search results for everything but my site name. Traffic has increased pretty substantially from other sources over the past few months, so I'm back just over $600/month again.

<comment><USER59> Hmm. Lovely concept, but when I put my address in, it says there are no results - mainly because it thinks my UK address is just between Tuvalu & Tokelau in the South Pacific (so technically, the results were correct - <USER2> John's are unlikely to deliver there).

<comment><USER84> Unfortunately it's US only right now. It appears to default to 'just between Tuvalu & Tokelau in the South Pacific' if no results are found - I'll fix that.

Thanks for the feedback.

<comment><USER85> On the East-to-West axis, it's probably defaulting there because it's the International Date Line. No idea how it's picking that spot on the North-to- South axis though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER86> A better question I'd like to read is "Good ideas for recurring income".

<comment><USER87> And the only sensible answer you would ever receive should be "anything that people want to pay repeatedly for" :)

My point being. I don't think anyone would give you a specific idea for recurring income cause then they would go ahead and do it themselves.

I might be wrong but I doubt it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER88> I make around $2000/month from two Mac apps (database tools). Revenue is falling as multiple competitors cloned my profitable app, so I have to do more client work again :(

<comment><USER89> Is there any way you find to guard against competitors cloning your app? Do you have any recourse?

<comment><USER88> There's pretty much nothing I can do. One competitor even made an icon almost identical to mine. I contacted Apple, but all they did was forward my complaint to the competitor. The competitor first sent me a threatening email, but then they changed their icon.

I think the best way to guard against competitors is to improve your product. The first one and a half years I was always far ahead of my competition. Since about a year I haven't had time for any significant new features, so my competitors have catched up. Some competing apps now have more features, some are a lot cheaper... Unfortunately the next logical steps for improving my app are so much work that I don't know if they would pay off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER90> [http://thehorcrux.com/](http://thehorcrux.com/) currently making $400-$500. Fluctuates a bit. I haven't done much marketing (apart from a Show HN)

I'm not even sure how people are finding it. My analytics software says 85% come from "Direct Traffic" which is weird.

<comment><USER91> Direct Traffic is either just what it says, or traffic from '[https://'](https://') (SSL) sites. Your site is just [http://](http://) (no SSL) and thus can't get the referral information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER92> My Linux server tutorial course site [http://GREP101.com](http://GREP101.com) brings in $700 on a good month and $100 on a bad one. Simply a reflection of the fact that I don't have the necessary things in place to drive consistant traffic to the site - when traffic comes then I get good conversion and a full course, but if not, not.

I keep it going mainly because the feedback is very encouraging, (people really do get a buzz out of learning this stuff!). It requires only a small bit of work each week to keep ticking over, but honestly it doesn't make enough to justify that if money was the only issue.

<comment><USER93> Seems like you have an extra dot in your link. Should it be: [http://grep101.com](http://grep101.com)?

<comment><USER92> Yup, fixed now. Thanks - maybe I need a coffee.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER94> $800 a month for support of a few scripts i written 3 years ago. Drop in the bucket but still keeps me very motivated doing any work for that customer (and this is the only work at all that i still do myself, not my employees).

</comment><comment><USER95> Nil.

<comment><USER96> likewise. :-(

<comment><USER97> Can I ask why? Is this intentional because you're busy doing other stuff, or because your efforts have yet to be successful?

<comment><USER96> working full time job, don't really have any great idea. fear of failure and over thinking leads to paralysis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER98> Since this thread didn't specify that the recurring income has to come solely from technology, I make $400-$1k/mo DJing. Technically it's work because it's not passive, but it is recurring and it is a hobby that requires little to no work - I have a LOT of fun doing it and it pays well by the hour. I'm only posting this because I think it's important to also point out that you can turn hobbies into passive, recurring income and that is a surefire way to getting the most out of your passive income.

</comment><comment><USER99> I pull in anywhere from $400-$600 in adsense off my blog, it's not exactly passive because I have to contribute content to it. But I originally only put AS on there to cover hosting costs (and other servers for dev, etc) but now it's starting to get closer to "income".

I'm still putting it into things like Raspberry Pis, Arduinos, Parallellas etc for stuff to write about on the blog. I use that money to try out other services as well, it's nowhere near what I'd call a "business" at this point.

<comment><USER100> That sounds really cool you should provide me (us) link.

For niche blogs that do well like yours;

What year did you start? How was growth? Posting frequency?

Thanks for any insights. I'm really curious because I'm slowly starting to realize I can maybe earn some beer money by being an active part of the community for a hobby of mine. Your case is a perfect example, as you do adsense, have a similar niche (newish tech) and seem like you started our of fun/love of your hobby. Cheers

<comment><USER101> Might be this one?

[http://www.jeremymorgan.com/](http://www.jeremymorgan.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER102> Created [http://www.canadaprepaidcreditcard.com](http://www.canadaprepaidcreditcard.com) in June last year. Traffic has grown steadily to 3000+ unique / month. A large Canadian daily newspaper included link to site in a story on prepaid credit cards which spiked traffic for a week. Otherwise traffic is almost all organic search. Adsense revenue grew steadily and is up to $120+ / month. I have one affiliate ($35 per sign-up) that has paid once. Have to look into this some more.

Created [http://www.australiaprepaidcreditcard.com](http://www.australiaprepaidcreditcard.com), [http://www.usprepaidcreditcard.com](http://www.usprepaidcreditcard.com) and [http://www.ukprepaidcreditcard.co.uk](http://www.ukprepaidcreditcard.co.uk) sites recently. So far only UK site is following steady growth pattern. Apparently no one is interested in Australian cards and US has trillions of similar sites so mine is drowned in search.

I did Canada site card research myself. But didn't have time for Australia, UK and US site research. So I created 3 Fiverr jobs with template Excel workbook asking person to search internet and fill with as many cards as they could find. I got 4 people per card so between them I got good detail though had to clean it up and fill in the blanks.

Sites requires minimal ongoing maintenance. Actually I have had customers and several card companies contact me to make corrections and updates.

</comment><comment><USER103> I have 2 companies in the professional photography space: [http://bigfolio.com](http://bigfolio.com) and [http://aphotofolio.com](http://aphotofolio.com). The first serves wedding and portrait photogs and the second high-end editorial, commercial, fashion. We provide website designs and a custom CMS for managing galleries. We get a setup fee (though that is going away soon) and monthly hosting. They aren't exactly equal but each is making in the low six figures per month.

On the wedding side we also have [http://nextproof.com](http://nextproof.com) which is sort of a "shopify for wedding photos". It makes around $30k/month in subscription + transaction fees.

On the commercial photo side, we have [http://editdrop.com](http://editdrop.com) which is a feedback/collaboration tool for photographers and their clients. It makes about $2k/month at the moment since we haven't done much marketing yet.

Overall, I'm bearish on the professional photo space so we are actively looking into other verticals and doing a lot of customer dev/research.

My wife and I also run [http://cheergram.com](http://cheergram.com) in our spare time. Right now we are making a few hundred bucks a month in sales but we did almost $3k in Instagram Christmas cards last year between thanksgiving and Christmas. I'm hoping we can top that this holiday season.

<comment><USER104> That's very impressive - both in terms of revenues, and product development! Are you doing all the design and development work yourself?

<comment><USER103> We have employees and stuff

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER105> About $100/month on [http://www.climbingweather.com](http://www.climbingweather.com)

It was ad-free for years, finally put some ads up last year and now it's covering my expenses. Haven't done much development in a couple years, but working on an updated Android app. A bit skeptical that I'll make much money from it, debating pay-app vs ads vs free-free. Now trying to pick up some real advertisers (currently adsense).

<comment><USER106> Why would someone use this instead of Weather Underground, Weather.com, WeatherSpark, Forecast.io, etc.? It doesn't seem very specific to climbing and there doesn't seem to be much room for growth since Mountain Project is already the go-to site for route and community information.

<comment><USER105> I think the main benefit of ClimbingWeather.com is ability to quickly find climbing areas. Looking for the forecast for Indian Creek, Joshua Tree, the Gunks, Cathedral Spires? You don't need to find the nearest town or hope the forecast is right (maybe you'll find it is 10 degrees difference due to elevation). Agreed that the growth potential might be somewhat limited, but there is still a small and solid audience that likes the format.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER107> Every year around Halloween I make $400-600 via adsense with [http://trickortreattimes.com/](http://trickortreattimes.com/) which lists trick or treat times for cities/towns. It felt like a good service to provide as you really have to hunt for the data. First year I did the aggregating myself, last year I added user submission which made it much more passive.

It's time for me to update it for another year!

<comment><USER108> I make about $200-$300 per evening during Halloween. I go around to websites that list trick or treat times, I am short, dress like a ghost and collect candy for free than re-resell to convenience stores.

</comment></comment><comment><USER109> My wife just posted an eBook - Startup Financing, Equity & Tax, which might be of interest to some folks here. Link: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/startup-financing-equity- ta...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/startup-financing-equity- tax/id701661334?mt=11)

There is no sale data yet, but would be happy to share in the next thread.

Also, if anyone has any pointers on how to market an eBook, would love to hear.

<comment><USER110> It seems you already found one vector of marketing... dropping links on niche related forums ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER111> This is one of the greatest motivations for young and budding entrepreneurs. Even more so than aspiring speeches or conference talks.

I'd like to thank everyone that posted links and revealed your numbers. People usually don't do that because it invites competition but it's amazing to see how nice and inviting the HN community is. I'm also AMAZED at the familiar faces. I've seen and bought a lot of code from some of you guys without realizing many of you visit HN.

Here's my crap:

[http://dayonepp.com](http://dayonepp.com) \- Maybe $100/month (down season) then I think $500/month (up season) NOT passive. Lots of work. I handle fulfillment.

[http://affordabl.es](http://affordabl.es) \- $0, just launched

[http://residentevilradio.com](http://residentevilradio.com) \- $0, (ran Amazon affiliate links)

[http://timeforzen.com](http://timeforzen.com) \- $0, needs redesign, will monetize later this year.

BTW, where's [http://CandyJapan.com](http://CandyJapan.com) guy? Last I heard he told us his project was successful at around $3,500/month in revenue.

<comment><USER112> This may be off topic but I'd love to where you registered your domain affordabl.es. Last I tried registering a .es tld, I got some "Syria residents/biz" restrictions.

<comment><USER111> lol NameCheap: [http://www.namecheap.com/?aff=56383](http://www.namecheap.com/?aff=56383)

They're great. I'm switching over to them from 1and1. I own about 65 domains.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER113> I make about $300/mo with [https://broker.mapthatpad.com](https://broker.mapthatpad.com). Not even close to what I originally was intending (and the amount of time I've spent building it) but to be honest, I have not been doing a whole lot in terms of marketing and selling it at the moment.

I hope to do more selling/marketing in the future and get this monthly number higher.

<comment><USER114> What is your revenue model? How are you able to reach out to users and make them pay for it? What are the marketing tactics you have in mind?

That is decent revenue btw! Good luck!

<comment><USER113> Its a monthly recurring model. I actually partnered with a small company in NY that sells a tangential product to the same market. They do the marketing within the NYC market for me.

I can try to sell this more actively to other markets, SF being next since I live here, but with a full-time job and a baby, its hard! In terms of marketing, I think I could manage a small AdWords budget to run but it would initially be more just me cold calling and setting up demos - starting with smaller shops with a shorter sales cycle first.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER115> There are some interesting lessons with my pay-what-you-want approach, although I haven't quite nailed it down.

I run a DC-based service called Linktank [[http://dc.linktank.com](http://dc.linktank.com)] that offers limited access to registered users and full access to PWYW subscribers: [http://dc.linktank.com/subscribe](http://dc.linktank.com/subscribe)

After launching my subscription service this past August, I have about a 6% conversion from freemium registrants, although that has been picking up steadily this month and will continue to rise in October.

Users have an option to pay $3, $5, $7, $9. Most users choose $3 but slightly less than that choose $7. On average, I am getting about $5.25 per user.

I'm generating about $1,400 from subscriptions alone but that number is increasing by a hundred or so every week.

I started this service as an email roundup. That list has now grown to about 23K subscribers and I'm now monetizing with subscriptions, advertising, and job postings.

What do you think of my approach? Where am I leaving money on the table? What are some missing opportunities?

</comment><comment><USER116> \- I'm doing between l$20k and l$30k per month on commissions on vendor systems that rent out shoutcast servers to musicians and DJs in Secondlife. _oups_ thats only us$80-$120, but its game money, that I can drop into tipjars, if I like music, or use it pay graphic designers.

\- I'm doing Linux maintenance for a dozen servers (Debian, Linux Container, Nagios, Make+M4 as management - hey puppet, chef and cfenginer are for quiche eaters) for Euro600/year each, basically for doing backup, apt-get, and having a nagios screen open.

\- I have sold the 3rd w3dig.com installation, with an Euro1000 anual maintenance contract recently. This will hopefully become my next 'big' software.

\- I still have 22 XML::Edifact customers, who pay Euro1000 twice a year for maintenance update, when the next UN/EDIFACT standard is published. A semi- passive income that requires a week work twice a year, and payed my lifestyle, free software experiments, slack, and procrastination for a 3rd of my life so far. Not bad for a software I published under GPL 15 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER117> I do a bit of freelance design work each month, but I've been working on a few products for designers to generate recurring income and solve some annoyances I have in my workflow and tools.

The first ( [http://www.mockuprocket.com](http://www.mockuprocket.com) ) is close to finished and will be a desktop app to help quickly create design mockup presentations and upload them to your server. There are some services that do a similar thing but I've always preferred to keep client work on my server...especially for designs that need to kept under wraps until release. The app will also handle different layouts and let you customize the templates for each client so you can setup branding and so forth.

I'm a designer and front-end developer so it is my first serious attempt at building and creating something more involved and it's been a fun learning experience. Hopefully some other designers will find it useful and I can make a few bucks on it.

My wife is a self-published fiction author ([http://www.amazon.com/Stephanie- Void/e/B0035Z08GI](http://www.amazon.com/Stephanie-Void/e/B0035Z08GI) & [http://www.stephanievoid.com](http://www.stephanievoid.com) ) mostly young adult fantasy/scifi. Visibility is the hardest thing when going independent because the Kindle/iTunes book stores are very hard to get found in. I actually think there is some sort of opportunity for a startup offering some kind of better book shopping experience with a bit of Netflix's recommendation engine or something.

She hasn't gotten enough visibility yet among her young adult audience to really take off but has been making enough each month that it is worth it. She keeps writing more books though so it should slowly increase over the years.

</comment><comment><USER118> i make around 1300 USD a month from this android app i made two years ago. i have to update it every time a new version of android is released, and i spend maybe 5 minutes a day on email support.

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.benhirashi...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.benhirashima.unlockwithwifi)

<comment><USER119> The app looks pretty cool. Could you please share some of your thoughts on how you settled on the price?

I am about to launch an App and this app would later have a web backend to go along. I am not sure whether to launch the app for free and have some kind of subscription on the website or make the app paid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER120> I gross approximately 75k a month in RR, split between my business partner and I. 60k from IPhone apps and 15k from Android apps.

<comment><USER121> That sounds great! Can you expand on that? For instance, did you develop the apps, how many apps, what niche? Were you first-to-market?

<comment><USER120> I don't want to reveal the apps that I make, but I can answer your questions. I did develop the apps. There are 4 main apps that bring in all of the revenue. The apps are gaming and entertainment categories. None of the apps were first to market, but most of them did provide a much better experience than what was available at the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER122> About €1000 from a subscription based web analytics niche thing and another €2500 from my wife as she works for the government.

</comment><comment><USER123> Small stakes, but completely passive. About ~$500/mo from Adsense on what are essentially niche long-tail SEO targeted yellow-page-like regional sites for very specific verticals. Not a lot of money, but I haven't touched them since 2007 (when they were averaging closer to $800/mo). Initial investment was mostly time doing research, implementing, and SEO stuff. Also experimenting: abandoning failed sites or improving ones with potential. Now the successful ones are completely passive sources of income and the only expenses are hosting and domain renewal.

Right now I'm working on a more substantial side-project that will provide an actual service that hopefully people will actually want to use and subscribe to for their businesses. It will require more maintenance and time and monetary investment, but in the long run should be much more satisfying and potentially bring in more income.

</comment><comment><USER124> I have a simple IP lookup site ([http://showip.net](http://showip.net)) that I created many years ago. I created it because I needed it (but mainly too learn at that point ;) Since then it has gotten better and better indexing on Google until it reached a steady level at around 100.000 - 130.000 visitors / month.

The ads has been fluctuating quite a bit, but overall it has been going steadily up. Currently I earn somewhere between $250 - $500 / month.

I haven't done much but a bit of tweaking now and then since the initial version, though I have had plenty of plans... I have changed the GEO IP location DB a couple of times, but the only major change was a rewrite from PHP/MySQL to Node.js and a GEO IP database directly in NginX.

</comment><comment><USER125> I make roughly £60 a month from [http://www.phonecompare.co.uk](http://www.phonecompare.co.uk)

It's written in PHP/MySQL using Symfony 2 and hosted on a UK based VPS.

It's only been online for a short period and I'm working on it all of the time to increase what it's making so we'll see how it goes. At the moment it's pretty bare and doesn't have a huge amount of value so it's not doing very well in the search engines, but I'll keep plugging away and give it a reasonable chance to see what its potential is like.

I'd like to add a comparison feature which will allow people to compare the specs of the handsets against each other which will hopefully give it a bit more of an edge.

</comment><comment><USER126> Whenever I hear an evangelist (and I label everyone dealing in absolutes like 'is X worth it?' without at least asking 'what?' and 'for whom?' evangelist), my gut reaction is to dismiss everything without even reading it.

I work in an unconventional setting, where my code runs for a potetially long time and where failure means trying again. This has led me to use a lot of assert statements, both in a pre-/postcondition/invariant checking and in a more general assumption checking style. I still use unit tests, but only to exercise portions of the code quickly - the tests are often devoid of assertions.

I find that this style gives me the best test coverage + internal code documentation for the time invested.

</comment><comment><USER127> Making around $5000/mo between [http://popsurvey.com](http://popsurvey.com) and [http://temper.io](http://temper.io) (recently launched).

But that's rising a bit more rapidly now: [http://joshpigford.com/kill-the- free-how-to-increase-revenue...](http://joshpigford.com/kill-the-free-how-to- increase-revenue-by-40-percent)

Slow, but steady, growth. Definitely a prime example of the "Long, Slow, SaaS Ramp of Death." [http://businessofsoftware.org/2012/10/gail-goodman-the- long-...](http://businessofsoftware.org/2012/10/gail-goodman-the-long-slow- saas-ramp-of-death/)

</comment><comment><USER128> I WAS taking around £1000 PM through an online printing service which i sold off about 3 years back as i hadnt got time to put the effort into it that it involved. I am now looking at re-launching that as the new owner disolved it and let the domain lapse (www.a2prints.co.uk) (i didnt sell the IP) As you'll see the site is very dated now so im in the middle of a compete rebuild, hope to launch again in a few weeks. Currently adwords is basically paying for itself, but the bounce rate is understandably very high due to the very dated nature of the site.

Should turn around £7k pm after relaunch with a realistic initial estimate of 10 1-print jobs per day.

</comment><comment><USER129> I'm at around $12000/month REVENUE from my side business doing online machining. Unfortunately, it's neither as passive as I'd like it to be, and much of the money goes back out as expenses.

</comment><comment><USER130> For me, it's around $200 from Affiliate Marketing. My blog ([http://ankitkumar.in](http://ankitkumar.in)) has couple of articles with affiliate links in them.

</comment><comment><USER131> $500-$1000 per month from my blog [0], Railyo [1] and from another website [2] from Adsense, Direct Fees and Affiliate programs. I spend 2-6 hours a month.

[0] [http://blog.sudobits.com](http://blog.sudobits.com) \- I blog about free and open source softwares, tools, news and so.

[1] [http://railyo.com](http://railyo.com) \- Job board for Rails freelancers.

[2] [http://assembleyourpc.net](http://assembleyourpc.net) \- A simple tool for building pc online.

</comment><comment><USER132> $15/m with amazon affiliate links in a niche blog: [http://www.archimodels.info](http://www.archimodels.info) (7.5k visits month). Unfortunately I didn't start the blog thinking about monetizing it. It's a very bad market (architectural students and teachers). Hopefully I can get $30 for 5h work every month (10min x 30days). It's just a hobby that allowed me to learn about web development (that's not my work field).

</comment><comment><USER133> 4 figure each month, Breeze ([http://breeze.pm](http://breeze.pm)), it's a project management app (Basecamp and Trello mashup).

<comment> marco-fiset The thing with saying "4 figures" is that it can be anywhere between 1000 and 9999, and that is a way too big range to even give us an idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER134> [https://www.uncover.com](https://www.uncover.com) has been up and running for about four months now. We're bootstrapped and doing a bit over $5,000/month in recurring revenue. I wrote a three-month recap on our progress last month: [http://spencerfry.com/what-i-ve-learned-since-releasing- unco...](http://spencerfry.com/what-i-ve-learned-since-releasing-uncover)

</comment><comment><USER135> A small single-page info-site I made in a day or two some time ago started picking up traffic and now makes around $500/month from adsense ads. Quite nice for the work put into it, but of course if you take into account all my sites and apps that made nothing it's not much for the total effort. But now that it's getting traffic I have some ideas for building it out into a larger site, but I haven't found the time yet.

<comment><USER136> What is the site?

</comment></comment><comment><USER137> 21, drop-out, profit ~ $7k a month, working part-time, and no partner. Up from $31/month last December. Comes from sale of plugins. Not recurring, but stable.

<comment><USER27> Sounds great. What kind of plugins? Where do you sell them?

<comment><USER137> ;) [http://codecanyon.net/user/nCrafts](http://codecanyon.net/user/nCrafts)

<comment><USER28> Really like your plugins on CC. I sell on there too but don't get close your number of sales. Do you have any tips or advice on how to increase visibility?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER138> ~$130 from ads on YouTube videos ([http://www.youtube.com/user/YTBYlover](http://www.youtube.com/user/YTBYlover))

<comment><USER100> Hey really cool videos thanks for sharing the link.

I've been extremely interested in starting a youtube channel and ones that are currently similar are somewhat similar to your youtube stats.

An example:

5,000 subscribers

1,000,000 views

Joined 2011

So my question is how did you monetize your channel? I have a few more months to go before I can get good equipment for recording and editing so I'm unfamiliar with youtube's monetization for niche channels. Thanks.

<comment><USER138> Somewhere in the YouTube settings there is a Google Adsense sign up procedure. It is a bit of a trick but if you can figure it out then your set for life!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER139> I make about $30 a month running a small coupon code website focused on cell phones. Again it's almost nothing but the upshot is if the site takes off in any way, it can bring in some ok money on the site. A lot of it can be outsourced once you get the system down, but there is a good amount of manual labor. Site: [http://www.newphonepromocodes.com](http://www.newphonepromocodes.com)

<comment><USER140> would you mind sharing the source of these coupon codes. I am trying to come up something like this other niche area. But struck in getting the sources for these kinds of codes/deals. Thanks in advance.

<comment><USER139> No prob - a most of them are from the advertisers/brands themselves through the big affiliate networks. Almost all of them are on Commission Junction. The few left over are on Linkshare and even less on the others like Impact Radius, etc. Google shut down their affiliate network a few months ago and almost all of the brands went to Commission Junction and Linkshare.

For coupon codes you can't find from the retailers themselves, you can take a look at competitor websites.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER141> Making about $800/month from 2 Android apps. Not much but it keeps me alive.

Trying to release some games and see if I can increase that amount in the next few months...

</comment><comment><USER40> $200-500/mo from ecommerce selling digital goods I create. [http://mapsalesdirect.com](http://mapsalesdirect.com)

</comment><comment><USER61> This thread is full of HN gold! Thanks everyone for sharing.

I make about $450 dlls per month offering cheap cpanel hosting @ [http://www.simplehosting.co](http://www.simplehosting.co). Interestingly most of my clients are in emerging markets, such as Latin America, Indonesia, and Vietnam. It's not totally passive as I have to do support and other admin stuff, but it's not bad.

Cheers!

</comment><comment><USER142> Run a consulting firm. Make about $250,000 per month.

<comment><USER143> I'm really interested in this. I work full time right now but am thinking about opening a consulting firm. Could you please share details of how you started and took the first few steps? I don't plan to quit day time work to concentrate fully on consulting work (at least not initially)

</comment></comment><comment><USER144> $1k-$3k/m (depending on season) mostly passive income from my design online niche sign related websites. I've done a lot in design online software so I made my own and farm out the production side. I've automated most of it and it provides a nice steady income when I'm between clients. I also license the same platform to clients when it fits their needs.

<comment><USER29> I'm curious what exactly you mean by "design online"? I wonder if it's similar to what I do. Shoot me an email; I'd love to chat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER145> I make about $15.00 per month with a free Android app [1], although it has 900,000+ downloads and 500,000+ active installations. Seems I have to rethink my monetization strategy ;) [1] [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.marcow.bir...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.marcow.birthdaylist)

</comment><comment><USER146> I have $200-$300 in (mostly) eBay and (less so) Amazon affiliate income from a message board and news site I run, both about a band.

</comment><comment><USER147> I just crossed 500$/mo with [https://www.wisecashhq.com](https://www.wisecashhq.com) (cash flow forecasting for freelancers and small businesses, launched officially 2.5 months ago).

This is far away from passive income since I'm actively working on it (I'm bootstrapping it + consulting/freelancing the other days).

</comment><comment><USER148> I make enough to buy a Frappuccino from day to day, mostly from a reaction gifs application on the App Store : [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/my- reaction-when/id632831985...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/my-reaction- when/id632831985?mt=8)

By the way, all in-app purchases are free today and tomorrow...

<comment><USER149> How long did it take you to make this app?

<comment><USER148> It took me maybe 3 weeks (3 to 5 hours a day) but I experimented many solutions (APIs, sharing, Vine...). I used RubyMotion and I had prior experience with the iOS environment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER150> I'm making $200/mo on average from one iPhone app. It took me a month to build it a year ago and sales have remained stable, except for one $800 month when I got featured in a popular newsletter. I'm currently polishing up an iPad version and will experiment with increasing the price when it goes Universal.

</comment><comment><USER151> I've been making ~$400/mo for the past 6 years from [http://askjud.com](http://askjud.com). Its a simple trick you can play on your friends.

Info about how to use it [http://www.wikihow.com/Use-Ask- Jud](http://www.wikihow.com/Use-Ask-Jud)

</comment><comment><USER152> $4 - $5k monthly from PHP apps for webmasters and premium Wordpress plugins (the latter works better recently). This is far from passive though as it requires constant updating and support.

We have a bunch of content sites but they barely bring $200 - $300 from adsense and affiliate (used to be 10x a while ago).

</comment><comment><USER153> I make under $1,000 per month with a Salesforce.com application: [https://appexchange.salesforce.com/listingDetail?listingId=a...](https://appexchange.salesforce.com/listingDetail?listingId=a0N3000000B3eYIEAZ)

I'm working on a few more to try and supplement this.

</comment><comment><USER154> I make $0/month now, but I'm working on a book ("Your First Web App", [http://www.alexpcoleman.com/your-first-web- app/](http://www.alexpcoleman.com/your-first-web-app/)) and another SaaS app now to hopefully change that soon.

</comment><comment><USER155> I currently make betweet $3k and 4k a month from [http://stuartkhall.com/posts/an-app-store- experiment](http://stuartkhall.com/posts/an-app-store-experiment) and [http://appbot.co](http://appbot.co)

</comment><comment><USER156> I make around £400 per month on tutorial videos for music production applications. It used to be more like £1000, but I've neglected the site in favour of pursuing programming (so I can make my own music applications, instead of talking about other peoples').

</comment><comment><USER81> I made a few cents selling google ads next to a version of the bubblebreaker game I built. Seems to be hard to make money on games... [http://games.jeffslutz.com/bubblebreaker/](http://games.jeffslutz.com/bubblebreaker/)

</comment><comment><USER157> Around $5K/mo for few android apps, being 60/40 between paid and inapp + paid versus ads.

</comment><comment><USER158> $2.50/month from [https://wsend.net](https://wsend.net) I'm working on growing it and developing add ons that use it as a backend. No day to day work, 1 hour of server maintenance a month approx.

</comment><comment><USER159> I run a Facebook fan page for a TV show, and use Teespring ([http://www.teespring.com](http://www.teespring.com)) to monetize the page.

Every few months I do a sale, which nets around $4,000 USD.

<comment><USER160> Isn't that illegal, making money off someone elses product? How many subs do you have?

<comment><USER159> Hopefully not. :-) I have 345,000.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER161> I make 1-2k/month from WindowTabs (windowtabs.com), I've been neglecting it, I think I could make a good bit more if I put some time into it. It's hard to say no to the consulting work...

<comment><USER162> Actually, that's an awesome app :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER163> Me and my business partner make about $500/month from a simple iPhone app. ([http://varkar.knappra.se/index_en.htm](http://varkar.knappra.se/index_en.htm))

</comment><comment><USER164> I get about $100/month from:

      * Lending out my cameras/lenses
      * The cut that CameraLends takes off other transactions
      * Affiliate marketing

for my side project CameraLends.com

</comment><comment><USER165> Around 0-300 USD from stuff I've developed for jailbroken iOS devices.

Note that that's a couple of months after release, and most of the revenue comes during the first two to three days.

</comment><comment><USER166> Nothing, 0 ;( But after seeing so many success stories here, I hope one day to overcome that internal brake inside me that prevents from trying.

<comment><USER167> Ditto! You can do it, just smart small, try it out and start with something that has almost no impact on your life if you fail. In fact, I like the saying "fail, and fail often" \- it means you learn a lot!

</comment></comment><comment><USER168> About $400 per month from websites ( ads) and iPhone apps. Used to be 2k per month but has dropped low because of lack of time for attention.

</comment><comment><USER169> Couple hundred dollars from running ads on [http://standartgost.ru](http://standartgost.ru)

<comment><USER170> What's it about (cannot read cyrillic)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER171> Around $1000 per month for an iOS app I wrote in 2008 and have made some updates to. It used make around $2k a month.

</comment><comment><USER172> low 4 figures from real estate

<comment><USER173> Buying/selling? Renting? How long did it take to get into it, and what did you do previously if different?

<comment><USER172> Buy and hold. I had been patient and bought after the market crashed. I bought it in another state and put 25% down on a 4-plex. Rent pays my mortgage and I have money in my account every month. I would have tried to earn more money in order to purchase more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER174> About 400EUR monthly from running game servers on open-source game.

<comment><USER175> How do game servers make money? Advertisements in the game?

<comment><USER174> It's free-to-play with paid additions, 'premium accounts', etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER176> I earn 1,500 - 2,000 a month off of niche websites. Nothing fancy.

<comment><USER143> would like to find out more

<comment><USER177> [http://benhebert.com/profitable-niche-site-two- months/](http://benhebert.com/profitable-niche-site-two-months/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER178> in the millions/year and growing. managed hosting and cloud hosting.

the hard part is keeping the profits as we learn to scale the business.</comment>


Don't Convert SRGB U8 to Linear U8 - <AUTHOR> https://blog.demofox.org/2018/03/10/dont-convert-srgb-u8-to-linear-u8/ <comment><USER2> If you want to interpolate between colors, anything-RGB is wrong, even for the best value of "anything". You want the LAB space, or something along those lines.

If we interpolate between one RGB color to another color of equal intensity, the intensity along the interpolation will not be constant.

<comment> mark-r The gradient from pure red to pure green in linear RGB space isn't bad at all. The problem comes when you interpolate between endpoints of different intensities.

LAB isn't perfect either. Depending on your endpoints it can transition through colors that are hardly related.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The author mentions that one should always convert to f32 for storage or computation on linear values, but why not just use u16 or i16? You'd get both the benefits of having an integer format and a smaller data type at that, while still having the expanded space to prevent precision loss (depending on what you want to do, you may have to be a touch careful, of course).

<comment><USER4> Component values outside the (normalized) range [0,1] are necessary to represent certain colors as sRGB (and most other color spaces). So if you're color-space aware, at least i16 is warranted. f32 just means you have to worry less about overflow, quantization effects, etc., that crop up with various image manipulations. Plus, on GPUs, 32-bit floating point math is generally at least as fast as integer math. So it comes only at a loss of space.

<comment><USER5> On GPUs, fp16 is quite a bit more power-efficient (and bandwidth-efficient) than fp32.

<comment><USER6> Aren't there problems with FP16 support being far from universal, and many GPUs having far less FP16 throughput than FP32? In some situations FP16 is definitely a better choice, but I don't think it can be given as a blanket recommendation.

<comment><USER5> I work exclusively on embedded GPUs these days, so I was surprised to read this. It's easy to repurpose FP32 hardware to at least support FP16 without reduced performance. However, seems that Nvidia has intentionally reduced FP16 performance on some consumer products for market segmentation reasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Excuse me for my ignorance on the subject, but I thought gamma died with CRTs and all RGB values on images are intensity representations on a linear scale. Am I wrong? Is sRGB used for publishing or something?

<comment><USER8> Physically, gamma died with the CRT, but every LCD recreates it for compatibility.

<comment><USER9> LCDs still have their own inherent "gamma" curve which is actually a sigmoid shape. They just emulate CRT gamma for backwards compatibility and hide their own low level details in the process.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Or just use the standard BCn or DXT formats. The compression in these as texture formats is way smarter (for example, additional bits are used to encode green which our eyes are more sensitive to). These are "lossy" formats but when you go from PNG or something to a u8 format, you get artifacts for sure.

<comment><USER11> Please don't use those DXTn formats; they're still legally toxic due to patents.

<comment><USER12> Not since last October. [https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=S3TC- For...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=S3TC-For-Mesa- Finally)</comment></comment></comment>


Everything's Amazing and Nobody's Happy - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk

<comment><USER2> Interesting to see this surface again.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=918637>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=474588>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1674480>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=495561>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=494066>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1003875></comment>


Airbnb: The DNC's billion dollar startup - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2012/09/06/technology/airbnb-dnc-startup/

<comment><USER2> I think big events is actually one of the places it's less of a revolution: Airbnb makes it easier, but people have always rented out spare rooms for big events as hotels fill up or get too expensive. When there's a huge demand around a specific time/location there are ways to make that work pre-Airbnb, ranging from Craigslist to event-specific forums. That has happened for many years at the Olympics, for example. I've never gone to an Olympics myself, but many of the people I know who've gone have rented out apartments or rooms from random individuals, usually finding them on Olympic-related forums (it can be even better if you can find someone with similar sports interests to you as a host, e.g. on a forum dedicated to Olympic swimming).

I see Airbnb as more revolutionary for just normal travel, where previously the discovery/matching problem for that scattered demand and supply was insurmountably high.

</comment><comment><USER3> I never fully understood how such a concept hasn't drawn more criticism than it has. Airbnb have been around for a while now and it's evident they're doing exceptionally well, even joining the prestigious $1b club (but seriously, what startup these days isn't be valued at one billion?). The real question is how long can they sustain this growth for before the lawsuits start flying around and something bad happens?

Look what's happening to Uber, they're facing heavy attention from taxi lobbyists not too happy with someone else muscling in on their territory. It's going to be the same for Airbnb as they gain more notoriety, motels and hotels are going to start lobbying their local politicians to get some draconian legislation that will make what Airbnb is doing even more unlawful than it potential is.

I love Airbnb, it's a great idea and it deserves every ounce of its success, but the troubles have yet to come for Airbnb. Lets hope they're saving that yearly revenue because they're going to need it when the lawyers come knocking.

<comment><USER4> I see the trouble that AirBNB and Uber have caused as a sure sign that they are onto something

as consumers it is in our interest for these companies to win their respective fights against old bureaucracies

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Damn i feel so stupid, so stupid, so stupid. Sure, everybody in the modern world knows what DNC means.

</comment><comment><USER6> Seriously. Even now, it sounds like a "too many issues, will not work" concept.</comment>


See peoples' feelings and worries in real time - <AUTHOR> http://feeloutloud.com Just made this quick little site and pushed it out this afternoon - people can add their thoughts and feelings up to 250 characters, and then they are pushed instantly to other users in real time! Tell me what you think, all comments are appreciated in this product which has literally only just been released! <comment><USER2> Hey Tim, good idea. We did something along the same lines at Spottiness.com. Yours is more specific to instant feelings while ours is more about anonymous communication. Good job and good luck!

</comment><comment><USER3> Had some fun in there until someone took over with the spamming. So.. summer project?</comment>