Ideas to make money as solo dev | Hacker News Reader

Ideas to make money as solo dev

30 pointsrafbgarcia32 comments

Hey ya! What struggles do y'all face that could be solved by a product that could be maintained by a solo dev?

Not trying to make huge amounts of money, just want to build something that actually helps people, and could eventually give some money in return.

I've been thinking about a unified API for file uploads for companies to easily integrate with S3, Azure blob, etc. using a single API. They could use multiple providers, migrate from one cloud to another, resumable uploads, maybe get insights about savings if they migrate to other providers, etc.

I felt the need for something like that while developing a serverless product since functions have memory limitations and can't upload big files.

What do y'all think, could that be useful?

I appreciate any other insights or ideas. Thank you!

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I think more solo developers should build chrome extensions.

Why? Because as a full-time developer wanting to do a side-project, you need to build what you can in a short time frame, with minimal maintenance, and without worrying about hosting costs.

And you actually want users and minimal marketing.

These are the smallest true solo dev projects you can build I think.

I’ve built 10 in the last year (mostly for fun) monetised one, and have a flagship extension I’ve just released that I expect to do well [0]

Ask me anything about chrome extension development!

Though that being said, API-only is also a good gig.

[0] - https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/design-copilot/hgal...

Thanks for sharing!

Speaking about chrome extensions reminded me of this nice project I saw recently, in case you find useful!

Can you link it here?

Sorry I'm dumb: https://github.com/PlasmoHQ/plasmo

That’s cool, I’ve never used plasmo! I rolled my own build step with React/Vite and TypeScript

I think I’m going to build a light competitor as a learning exercise

Wanna grab a virtual coffee? I have built some chrome extensions as well since recently. It’s fun! It would be fun to spar about extensions.

My email is in my profile.

Hey there id love to! I’ll send you an email today :) thanks for reaching out!

I'm someone with a weakness for design (luckily, my other half is the opposite). I was so excited to try gpt-4-turbo and others in their vision mode to try and get design feedback.

Some was ok. But I soon realised, the key feed back, was about the content or amount of content/actions in relation to the rest of the app.

I have tried feeding in multiple steps as images. This hasn't really helped (maybe it's too complicated)

The overall journey of the user seems to be the most important part. If they slow down at one stage, it reduces their enthusiasm.. and a great later design only feels good

Is there any way your tool in the future could do that? More to the point, and very much an anti-thesis of your starting with an extension here, the use case I see is connecting this with screen recorders of users to analyze, which would be the opposite of an extension. But much more useful for me. I have thousands of sessions a day; tens of errors. I can't watch them all (and stay sane - I suppose I could watch moments before users purchase, but that's weird).

Any thoughts?

The way I get around these issues is atomic design feedback, so my tool allows you to select a rectangle area, and when I use my tool I basically select a component sized area and get feedback component-by-component

A second question - must be your biggest newest fan sorry - how do you know which extensions will get approved?

I built 4 and applied with 3. 2 got rejected and at the time (3-6 years back) the rules and reasons were not very clear. One was rejected for "doing multiple things" which I understand is in the rules, but those things were e.g. to translate/save transcript for highlighted text, in my opinion, pretty related. The other rejection made sense when I reread the rules.

Have you had 10/10 accepted?

That’s okay I love discussing extensions!

Most extensions get approved, I’ve had some quite complex extensions be approved as long as you can define their “single purpose”. I’ve even had YouTube ad blockers/Google ad-blockers approved. Honestly from what you’ve shared I’d expect your extension to be easily approved.

Extensions that request permissions they don’t need won’t get approved.

Lately though, extensions that modify the default search experience won’t get approved

So far I’m 10 for 10 in terms of acceptance, but one extension I made that had auth did not get approved initially as the auth library was calling remote code/doing remote code execution which isn’t allowed anymore. I ended up just removing the auth lol.

If you ever have an idea feel free to message me if you want to understand if it would be accepted or not, and how to plan. Free of course! My “business” email is hello “at” papillon software “dot” dev

Thank you for your response! That is valuable, I will note that down. Ah this might be it. I was doing auth and imported react too (following a tutorial on firebase + react in extensions) about 4 years ago (~2020 winter). How do you manage to keep track of credits or make money if your extensions don't have auth then, though? Send users to results pages which are on your site?

I haven’t run into a case where I need to track credits, but if I had to track a subscription status there are a few ways to do auth - but it is harder in extensions

I usually get users to bring their own api keys etc

I've heard people voice the opinion that browser extensions are uniquely difficult to actually monetize. Moreso than SAAS/mobile apps, etc. because users are accustomed to extensions being simple and free with the exception of a very select few (Grammarly)

Thoughts?

Yes they can be tough to monetise, but I also think they are an underserved niche.

Think about it - most extensions are crap, they look crap, and they are buggy. So if you can build something halfway decent you’re already in the top 10% of extension developers

Do you have a good way to modify contenteditable divs from the extension? I'm working on one and we're having a hell of a time trying to come up with One Way to do input updates but everyone's contenteditables behave slightly differently.

Like I just want to be able to ask

* what is the content of this input field

* what is the selected text in the field

* please replace the content of the field with this new content

but the API there is really rough and there's tons of edge cases. Is there some library you use?

Hmm this isn’t something I’ve dealt with before, what kind of sites are you targeting? Wordpress sites? I ask because you mention “div” but are talking about input fields

You would probably use a content script and set world to “MAIN” and search for the contenteditable attribute on first guess

I’m targeting any input fields. So like, standard input boxes like HN, but also weird input fields like a google doc or notion page.

That or integrations/apps for SaaS app stores and marketplaces. Think Salesforce apps, Shopify apps, etc

Could you share some ideas or pointers on how to monetize an extension?

Also, probably a dumb question but what stops other developers to reverse engineer your extension and release a clone?

I’m yet to monetise an extension (I will soon) so still figuring that out.

In terms of reverse engineer/clones you can get them DMCA’d if they straight up copy your code.

If your extension is complex you can use cloud functions/server-less functions to handle some parts of your extension

I have been looking into building chrome extensions lately.

I have a question and my question is how do you make money out of this and how do you market your extension

You build a web service that makes money and offer a browser extension that hooks into that service.

As far as I can tell, there’s not a good way to monetize a browser extension directly.

Find a niche. Something small where you're not competing with larger companies. Like you said, you don't need to make much money as an individual so there are lots of areas that companies won't touch.

I personally steer away from developer oriented products. Developers are hard to market to and there is often lots of competition of other solo devs.

As far as I know, currently, independent developers are developing the most tool products.

Tool products have relatively simple functions, focusing on solving a problem, and the cost of building them will be lower.

For example, calendar software, color picker, sharing card, extracting HTML plug-ins, etc.

These may be websites, apps and Chrome plug-ins, most of which do not require high-cost servers and paid third-party services.

AI is very popular now. For example, I will focus on some applications in this field, and I hope to get some opportunities in this regard.

Back to your personal topic, there are many people who use similar ideas to solve similar problems. There are many manufacturers of the same type of function, and there are many interfaces. Then someone connects and implements these interfaces and provides a unified interface to the outside world. Then provide API services for others to use, so as to make profits.

Therefore, this path is definitely feasible. But you have to consider how big the market is, and the most difficult thing is, after you make it, how to get more and more people to use your product through promotion, marketing and other means.

If you want to make money as a solo dev, the best risk-adjusted way is to find a job or do contracting. You'll build something that actually helps people (== they will pay for your time).

I highly recommend checking out this podcast with Peter Levels : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFtjKbXKqbg With the rise of AI and automation tools, solo developers now have more 'brain' and 'production power' at their disposal, allowing them to tackle more complex projects without needing a big team.

It might give you some insights into how to approach your project and how to leverage AI tools to enhance your development process. Definitely worth a listen!

It's hard to say whether that would work without knowing the landscape of market in that area, like if there's a need and if there are competitors. It sounds like what you're suggestion could be a full blown app with accounts that link to AWS? Or would it be a tool lib you pay to download?

I'm trying to look for ideas that won't require marketing or anything other than just making the software. It seems something like a donation based business model or a small fee perpetual license, and it would be for end users, but so far it seems those are extremely rare.

There are some services out there like https://uploadcare.com/ and https://www.filestack.com/ but they offer lots of stuff and are not cheap.

My idea is to have an APIaaS and offer simpler ways to integrate with one or multiple providers. Files could be saved to the customers' accounts.

Features could include transformations, compression, conversion, spend management and insights, etc.

Not sure if that sounds appealing to others but I would have used such a service on my previous serverless project if there was such a service with reasonable pricing.

hm you would need to use tools like google trends and some keyword research to find something people are already looking for naturally but isnt really there. That may work.

A website for a small local business is the simplest thing that might work.

No API.

No S3, Azure blub, etc.

No Serverless.

Just HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

Good luck.

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