NewsBlur - http://www.newsblur.com - a visual RSS feed reader with intelligence. I have a few hundred paying users and a few thousands free users. I develop it almost entirely on the train, which I'm on for almost an hour and a half everyday.

It's a ton of work and is profitable in the sense that the hundreds of dollars a month in server costs are just a bit more than covered by the premium users. But otherwise, it did help land me a number of great connections, both in NYC and SF, where I just moved.

I code in the open. NewsBlur is entirely on GitHub: http://github.com/samuelclay. The iPhone app I'm working on is also there, so some folks use it as a way to send me issues, others go so far as to add their own pet features. It's kind of neat to see a community spring up around the code itself.

Clean Up Your Mess (http://www.visualmess.com/) is just a mini visual design tutorial and not a product, but it was a side project and it's made a few hundred bucks from amazon ads. I did not intend to make money from it, so it was nice surprise that I did.

I only have 1 side project, which is a utility for Windows laptops (a battery meter). It does about $1500 to $2k per month in sales. I've been thinking about expanding it to have a Enterprise (B2B) product.

I'm trying to get another idea I have into a startup, but I haven't been able to get that off the ground.

Made a wireless stumbler for iOS in about two days that sold a bit over $100k total.

Admittedly, I spent probably another day in random debugging for version 3-ish of it (just went walkabout in Chicago with a debug build, logging AP details when it had bad behavior). And then ungodly amounts of time answering e-mails and on the phone with the iOS app review team, but that was long after the "weekend project" phase.

Hello World attached to a random number generator.

An instructional DVD I made on SEO for wedding photographers and their websites (http://photographyseo.com).

Recorded screen casts and mastered it in iDVD. Did a run of 1,000 at Discmakers for about $900. Sold out the initial run (@ $79 per disc) in under 2 years. Now we just one-off them or give them an option of viewing online.

Looking back (or if I do it again), I would probably do it as just an ebook or online videos to avoid shipping hassles.

Regardless, it's been a fairly easy ~$80k.

(BTW, if any HN folk want to see it for research purposes, let me know)

Gumroad - http://gumroad.com/ - right now I'm trying to turn it from a million dollar business (current valuation) to a billion dollar one. :)

I once did a fixed bid contract that was sized by someone else at $150K.

I completed the bulk of the work over three days. I spent about 40 hours on it total including the production roll out.

I most likely could not pull that off again because I had very specific domain knowledge. I knew the software I was modifying and I knew exactly what to do over all of the various systems.

Hampton Catlin (creator of Haml and Sass) was working with us at Unspace when he went home for the weekend and came back having written iWik.

He made $60k or so before ultimately selling it to WikiPedia and becoming their director of mobile development.

Not too shabby!

I made a very simple iOS gym log app for my own needs and decided to sell it in the App Store. I think I've generated almost $5k in revenue. So, not a 'business', but it certainly paid for my developer account! :)

My most profitable side project is actually my newest - http://bugmuncher.com - it's been live about a week and I'm already quite profitable. Admittedly it's a very low overhead project (costs around $30 / month to run), but so far it's looking good.

I think the reason it's doing better than anything else I've launched is because its my first one that isn't entirely ad supported. My advice to anyone looking to launch a side project is try to go for something people will pay a monthly fee for as opposed ad revenue.

I made a juror selection app for the iPad that generates about $1K / month

http://www.front9technologies.com/ijuror.html

I started working at what was supposed to be a contract job to fix some computers for a guys business (at the time it was literally just a place that made copies) back in 2007.

I was still in college but me stopping in and telling the guy how much some of these customers having boxes of paper copied could benefit by having them scanned and organized led to me having my own company and employees as a sophomore in College which did just that.

I eventually built a host of sharepoint plugins which sold for a nice exit while I was still in school. I still havent finished school yet, but man did I have some fun with the money lol

I've made about $100 in ad revenue over the lifetime of this game:

http://crookedgames.com/game.php?name=space_grabber

Almost covered hosting costs!

http://www.contemporaryartdaily.com and http://www.contemporaryartvenues.com earn about $2,000 per month, and indirectly generate lots of web design business.

I wrote a WordPress plugin in about 4 hours to run a website listing web hosting company reviews. Simple affiliate stuff. The plugin was generic, it would add star ratings to WordPress comments and display average ratings for the post and such. I used the plugin to run my own site, then also built it a little site to sell to anyone else that wanted it. In 18 months it sold over $200,000 in licenses before I sold rights to the plugin to another individual for $90,000.

Ok, so as far as non-client work goes:

The first iPhone app I ever made was a very simple Shopify app for seeing your orders and checking inventory. I dropped the ball on keeping it up to date because of client work and Shopify ended up buying a competitor to make into the official (free) app, but at its peak it made about $2000/month and up until I pulled it from the App Store a few weeks ago it was making around $300/month.

Boxcar (http://boxcar.io) started out as a weekend project. The prototype (v1) was literally built in a weekend.

Now we have a great team, have raised a seed round and are killing it in general!

My current hobby is writing simple cardgames in javascript. Currently I have Hearts - http://www.hearts-cardgame.com , Idiot/Shithead http://www.shithead-cardgame.com and Crazy Eights http://crazyeights-cardgame.com .

Am getting my first payout from Google Adsense this month, about 120 $. Which isn't much, but they're pure client side games, require no maintenance or anything so I'll just keep getting a small check every month :)

After a football-related post on my personal blog got a surprising amount of search traffic, I threw up a quick Blogger blog with similar posts for a few football teams. The traffic rolled in. I threw on some more and eventually added baseball which was a much bigger source of traffic. Right now baseball season is earning me about $10 a week. I think I've spent less than 30 hours on it total. Not a great return on my time so far but it just keeps cranking away and Google keeps paying me. I've certainly spent more time on projects that have earned zero.

Hacker Newsletter - http://www.hackernewsletter.com

Sold about $1000 worth of advertising so far and have had more than that in donations. Lots of ideas to do more.

I've made $40 in pro subscriptions (2) and about $50 in ad revenue from http://www.twistertracker.com While the money isn't yet covering hosting costs I've learned a ton and managed to gain 1500+ free users and 1200+ twitter followers at @twister_tracker.

It's a pretty seasonal site so I'm hoping to grow it more next spring with additional features and a better pricing model.

Back in 2005 I decided to implement a tag-based source code snippets repository over a weekend. Mostly as a way to keep my hand in with Rails. So I did. It went fine and built up over a couple of years to serious traffic but only about $800/mo in Adsense. I sold it to Dzone for low/mid 5 figures and they still run it (but they have proper big name advertisers).

Birejji - http://birejji.com Was earning $100/day with adsense as a normal chat site (with 2M+ impressions per Month), but adsense banned the site due to "fraudulent clicks" (I've always had a consistent CTR so no idea what happened there). Since then it's turned into a Paid to Chat site.

For a game hackathon I built an engine/CMS for creating phone-based choose your own adventure stories (http://uchoos.com). It's not actually a commercial product yet but I won $250 from twilio, so it's technically profitable.

http://goodmorningcmc.com I sold ad space at the top of the email to students for $5 per day, to about 500 students. Made about $250. I had other motivations than money but it was still nice to earn some back.

Cupcake Wrapper Creator. Stats over the first five months:

26,358 Pageviews

4,837 Unique Visitors

235 Trial Users

20 Paying Customers

$283 in Receipts

Over 4000 Designs Created

Over 7,000 PDFs Downloaded

getmetricmail.com creates simple Google Analytics reports and sends them to you as a PDF. Currently 3000 free users. A handfull pays, so it makes about $100 per month. A good example of Freemium gone wrong.

I made a few JavaScript scripts that I'm selling on CodeCanyon and the last month I made around $200. I'm thinking of expanding the business, but this time in ThemeForest building WordPress Themes.

http://www.jpictag.com/ A Jquery plugin for image tagging. It had some cool steady sales for over a year, which gather a reasonable money.

I started Stormpulse purely as a fun hobby project in late 2004. Incorporated in 2007. Can't share revenue numbers, but this year we should be profitable with a team of 5.

Domainr -- http://domai.nr/ -- a search engine we built for finding available domain names.

~80% of its revenue is registrar commissions from successful referrals (domain name purchases, hosting, ssl certs, etc.), and the other 20% is from ads (from adpacks.com).

We launched it in 2008, and both traffic and revenue have been growing slowly but steadily ever since. These days it's covering our respective apt rents (in the Bay Area) each month.

iScrob - http://iscrob.com - a Last.fm scrobbler for iOS. It's free with ads, or $5 with no ads. I released it almost exactly 1 year ago, and it's averaged about $20/day in revenue since then.

It's unique because there's some trickery involved getting around the strict iOS backgrounding requirements, and most of my competitors haven't done a great job with it.

My android games, hands down.

This: http://zvrba.net/software/cspim.html I didn't get any money for it, but I got a publication on a peer-reviewed conference: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=5438...

I started DNSimple (https://dnsimple.com/) a year ago and it's doing pretty well. It's a side project but I put a lot into it, so it's really like a second job. I currently put all of the money back into it rather than paying myself, so profitable might be pushing it.

Apart from contract work, there's currently only one. It's called Snippets (http://www.snippets.eu). It replaces the caps lock key with note taking functionality. Although I wouldn't call it profitable, still trying to figure out how to get traction.

I made a silly Mac vs. PC parody video with South Park characters for a college class final project that went viral and made me a few thousand dollars through various ad deals: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Id_kGL3M5Cg

I am building a learning system to feed me only content that is relevant to me. I blogged here. http://saranyan.com/post/7946363708/consuming-content-the-ri...

Tiki-Toki (http://www.tiki-toki.com). Web-based software to create interactive timelines. Launched four months ago. 10,000 sign-ups. About $500 a month in subscription revenue from premium accounts.

Great stuff here. Thank you for the inspiration to keep going. As an aside, my only side project that has made me any $ is a blog from which I've earned $0.24. Not enough to withdraw from, but better than nothing.

I did some stuff one afternoon about 4-5 years ago and it continues to pay my mortgage ever since. It's the goose that lays the golden egg and under no circumstances do I mess with it.

With some student colleagues we build http://sharedesk.at during last semester. Its a file sharing tool build on node.js , was fun :)

I've got a site collating interior design photos for inspiration. Makes about US$2k+/mo fairly passively from ads. I would spend maybe 10 minutes on it every six or so months.

I made http://wacchen.com in a couple of weeks. I have rewritten it a couple times since. I eventually sold it for 7k.

Just a simple office picture blog for me that earns $200-500 month: - http://officedesigngallery.com

A print magazine that publishes existing online articles.

Selling videogame cheat source code to interested cheating websites: a few thousand. Was surprised to find such a robust market for that stuff.

http://likehub.com/

No revenue because my AdSense account was banned a few years back. :(

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my 30 minutes project http://hackertyper.net !

pen.io

I made an iOS application for reading comics in literally 6 hours. I released it back in May and it's currently earning me ~$1000 a month via ads. Impressions are still increasing by ~25K each day, so profits are likely to increase in the coming months.

My current company, which operates a number of ecommerce sites, started out as a side project. It's profitable, but it is no longer a side project, so it does not exactly count.

I've made $40 in pro subscriptions (2) and about $50 in ad revenue from http://www.twistertracker.com While the money isn't yet covering hosting costs I've learned a ton and managed to gain 1500+ free users and 1200+ twitter followers at @twister_tracker.

It's a pretty seasonal site so I'm hoping to grow it more next spring with additional features and a better pricing model.

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