Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2026 – Show and tell

unified101

The world is changed - given the low cost of reverse engineering and implementation, it would be product suicide to openly call out a money making product. I don't expect too many actual >500$ moneymaking projects to be listed. Would love to be proven wrong.

jacob_rezi

https://socialmediascheduler.ai/ Just crossed $1.45K/mo!

chasd00

My work came up with a bonus structure around a certain set of industry certifications. I looked at all the certifications available and worked out a strategy to max the bonus each year. It comes out to about $2.5k/month. So my side hustle is studying and taking tests. Over the last 5 years or so of taking tests + investing I’ve built a nice chunk of change set aside to help pay for college for my two boys (age 14 and 16).

agotterer

A friend and I host a monthly dinner club for people interested in exploring ethnic cuisine on Long Island. We work with one restaurant each month to create an 8-12+ course all inclusive price fixe menu. The food is usually served family style (the ambitious ones individually plate everything) and is authentic to the region we are hosting. We typically host the dinners on a Tues and Wed when the restaurants in our region aren’t too busy and could use business. We started this in 2023 with 13 of our friends as guests. Since then the group has grown to over 1,200 members and well beyond our circle of friends. August was our 52 second restaurant. In 2025 we served 1,099 guests and generated $126k in revenue. https://www.deadchefssociety.com/

RivieraKid

I'm making about $260 monthly playing play money poker, adjusted for price level it's like $400 in the US. I sell the virtual chips I make to other people. My side project is automating this and scaling 2x.

stavros

I had an idea in 2008 to make a website that emailed your friends when you die. I built https://www.deadmansswitch.net/ in a weekend, and it's been making money since. Around $1k/mo now.

epaga

Two weeks ago, I released the tactical map-based WW2 submarine sim Silent Shark (which I got feedback on from HN for beta test a few months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48180924 ) and it's gone extremely well for a side project - I've had over 100 Steam reviews, 99% of them are positive, and I have sold a few thousand copies so far. I began working on this game just 6 months ago and have only worked on it in my spare time in evenings and on weekends, instead of playing computer games. I made the early decision to use Codex for 100% of the coding, that has been a phenomenal experience. The only Image Gen AI I've used has been to clean up 2 old and weathered historical maps I found, to make them readable. Still have over 25,000 Steam wishlists and growing. I'm super thankful and having a blast. https://store.steampowered.com/app/4705650/Silent_Shark/

soheilpro

https://volt.fm It started as a side project in 2001, but now it’s my main business. Here's my own profile if anyone's interested: https://volt.fm/soheilpro

nikshepsvn

nokeep.ai - private, uncensored AI -- launched it cause most folks who want privacy or less censorship attempt to run models locally but that obviously doesn't work unless you invest in hardware / want speed etc.

eric_khun

Building a multiplayer game platform. Built a multiplayer pong game to dog feed the platform, and it got viral. Decided to make presales for it and got a little over $700 sales so far . if you want to give it a try, play it here https://antics.gg/p/side-out-94df7d presale here if anyone interested! https://antics.gg/sideout-presale

mesmertech

Pretty basic ones, I got into AI images cause of that viral AI avatars thing that levelsio made 2-3 years back and have just been iterating on that idea(even though I think if I went into the AI text side of things, I'd have been much bigger at this point): https://admakeai.com - Recently got this to 800 MRR , kinda trying to make it the main thing since the LTV on it is the highest. So if I could just figure out ads, this has the highest potential https://aieasypic.com - First project that I made that made money from subs vs making money from ads, whole reason I continued to indiehack. Its kinda dying but core users still bring in 3-4k/mo , altho actual MRR is 1k/mo https://bestphoto.ai - Made this after I got frustrated from the bad decisions I made on above, basically a tech rewrite + clone + simplification of aieasypic. Currently makes the most but at a lower margin than aieasypic. Not gonna say exact numbers, but lets say 5k+/mo

helloakariq

I run Akariq [0] which sells travel eSIMs in 190+ countries and regions in the world. It does not require an app or account. Customers like it for ease of use. Many HN users have bought eSIMs including countries like China, Japan, Australia and USA. I have overall received positive feedback. Recently, I have a few Digital Nomads in Europe switching over from Nomad to me due to very good pricing [1]. A lot of customers have also come over from Airalo due to customer service. For example, recently major eSIM providers had a huge incident and left customers stranded for Internet. Akariq had backup resources and replacement eSIMs during those upstream telecom providers issues. I even wrote an Incident Report here [2]. Customer satisfaction remains my highest priority these days. [0] https://akariq.com/en/ [1] https://akariq.com/en/esim/region/europe-31-areas/ [2] https://akariq.com/en/blog/akariq-backup-esim-service-interr...

BrunoBernardino

https://uruky.com has over 250 monthly active accounts (that's over €1k / month revenue). No subscription, no AI products/features. Just ad-free private search that you can tweak to your liking. There's a FAQ for most questions you'll have.

sim04ful

https://explorer.withfudge.com It's well on the way to make $600+/month now, almost doubling since last month. I've realised given the ease at which software can be ideated and maintained, i would rather focus on having a more dataset-intensive moat. It's a database of website section screenshots I've been hand collecting with others for almost 2 years now (it's crowdsourced via a seperate chrome extension), each section has styling metadata linked - typography usage (leading, weights, tracking, sizes,etc), font details (foundry, designer), colors and alot more. What really helped was my positioning, instead of trying to compete with established players (mobbin, landbook, refero), decided to focus on the MCP integration; the giving LLMs design taste angle.

bwb

I'm building Book DNA to help people get book recommendations from humans (mostly authors and experts so far in our early days). -> https://bookdna.com/ We started with the website, and now we are building a full app: a private, personal way to track your reading and get personalized recommendations based on your tastes. -> https://building.bookdna.com/ We are aiming for a soft launch in a few months :) If you want to be an early user and give us feedback, sign up here, and I'll get you going with the early version. We are adding imports from Goodreads now, and user folders to organize books how your brain works. -> https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeOdeqpZCS95FMRy_tE...

welanes

I've been running https://simplescraper.io for a number of years, so not exactly a side project but it started out that way. If time allowed, I'd focus on the AI photo and video generation. Have seen friends hit $500 relatively quickly by targeting niches. Sounds like a played out category, but if you look closer it's a bit of a potemkin village - many incumbents are not that good or haven't kept up with the latest models. Each year it gets more crowded out there, but almost always room for better.

JKCalhoun

Well, $500 isn't what it was in 2020 (the first thread). Those making $645/month…

colesantiago

Why can't most of these be OSS? Why does everything have to be a side project that needs to make money?

rrmdp

A meta directory of niche job boards https://jobboardsearch.com launched around 4 years ago, crossed $100k in LTR. Building it in public on X: @rrmdp

cyberge99

It was a side hustle, but a layoff has made it my new job: https://username.md Launched and happy to answer any questions.