I don't expect too many actual >500$ moneymaking projects to be listed. Would love to be proven wrong.
My side project isn't software and doesn't make $500/mo, but I still just don't talk about it.
It helps that it's cheap, I guess, but it also operates in a market small enough that anything with less than minimal time commitment will lose money. That's why there are tens of former competitors who have all shut down now.
The cost of engineering and implementation has always been low. Passive income has always been a subtle lie. The money has always been in providing a well-supported service.
No customer has ever cared about implementation details beyond what is outlined in the contracts they have with you and the nth-order effects of the contracts they are under with their own clients.
Advertising is the opposite of suicide, but since we have so much negativity on HN in the past few years this is no longer the best place to do that. Every potential customer here is vastly outnumbered by people who belong on reddit.
With Opus and fable and sol at dozens of dollars for a month, i don't know how you can straight-faced say that. But you do you.
Paying for an LLM is always more expensive. If you're attempting to create a startup without knowing how to write code, you've always been fucked and still are. Every time you avoid getting your hands dirty, you incur cost. How can you already incur cost from just the code? Really bad start.