Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2015?

[ca98am79]

previous posts:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4639271

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6661536

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7094402

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8107588

[DizzyDoo]

I released a small computer puzzle game based on finite state automata called The Cat Machine[0] back in August, which still steadily sells copies, accompanied with bigger spikes when a Steam sale comes around. From what I hear, the 'long tail' after release goes on for some years, which I believe since back in 2009/2010 I wrote a number of Flash games and I still get a monthly Paypal of about $5 from them. Steam is a bit healthier than the Flash marketplace nowadays.

[0] http://store.steampowered.com/app/386900

[apdinin]

During my day job I run a full-time startup, but, as a weekend hack a couple years ago, I built an automated email sales tool called Autopest (https://autopest.com). I've never done any promotion for it, but it keeps growing on its own organically via word-of-mouth.

About a year and a half ago I mentioned Autopest in an HN thread titled "Ask HN: How to start earning $500/month in passive income in next 12-18 months?" Since then, it keeps getting featured in Reddit and Quora lists for "best growth hacking tools" and "best sales hacks," and I've also seen it popup on sites like Inc.com and LifeHacker.

I guess Autopest isn't technically passive in the sense that every few months I code a new feature or two based on user feedback, but I also go months without touching it, and more people just keep signing up.

P.S. Here's the original HN thread... some good links to other passive income projects as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8246255

[tedmiston]

Hope not to make this become non-passive, but: on iOS the demo video loads, goes full screen, then immediately exits for me.

[iqonik]

"In order to send emails on your behald, "

Spelling error on your FAQ's - nice product.

[enraged_camel]

This is very cool.

If there was a way for autopest to automatically stop when the other party responds to your "pests" (maybe via an email client plugin) I would sign up for sure.

[lwhalen]

This is awesome! As a musician and bandleader, I could absolutely use something like this. Are there any plans to make it work with a standard SMTP/IMAP setup? I don't use Gmail for privacy concerns, and have hosted my own email server for years now.

[Im_a_throw_away]

Awesome product! Do you mind giving more information about how long have you been building this, and how much do you make?

[dangrossman]

Improvely (https://www.improvely.com) and W3Counter (https://www.w3counter.com) have grown to $45,000 MRR.

W3Counter is completely passive -- no new code or features in over a year, no customer support load, autoscaling frontend (EC2) and backend (Aurora). Improvely gets feature updates a few times a year and has some light e-mail support load.

I also added a single banner ad to each of my open source projects' documentation sites, and that's added ~$200/month via AdSense. Developers are surprisingly lucrative targets for advertisers I guess.

[lukestevens]

Incredible. You're the unsung, bootstrap SaaS success story of HN imo :)

[going_to_800]

Mate, this looks like a modified version of piwik, how much is different from it?

[ddgflorida]

ConvertCsv.com (http://convertcsv.com) brings me in $600-$800 a month just on google ads and one recent affiliate link. The site converts delimited data into different formats. Written completely in HTML and JavaScript. It's been out there for several years and has steadily increased in traffic.

[palidanx]

Awesome idea! How did you initially advertise the site?

[pedrokost]

A very simple website which does the maths for `today() + N.days` for you.

http://daysfromnow.js.org/

Total earnings: 7.35EUR in total from Google Ads

[tedmiston]

Is that profit beyond covering the domain, hosting, etc. or before?

[turley]

https://www.ottopost.com/ - a simple Instagram postcard printing service.

I created it as an alternative to the many printing services that require a dedicated app. OttoPost doesn't require an app since it just searches for your new Instagram photos and prints automatically (that's configurable).

Not exactly world-changing, but definitely something hands-off at this point and better than nothing :)

[robinhoode]

Is anyone doing old-fashion landlording these days? I'm trying to break into that space, but I have no idea what I'm doing and could use some advice from someone who's done it before.

[douche]

Yup. I was renting one unit in a duplex. My landlord put it on the market at a way-too-high price. Fast-forward nine months of having to get out of the way when the real estate agent wanted to show the property, and the price steadily dropping into my range, and I realized it would be a real PITA to have to move all my stuff out and find another apartment if someone bought it and hiked the rent or wanted to move into my unit. Went to one bank, was told that I'd need to put down 20-25% on a commercial loan. Went to another bank, and the loan officer worked out that I could get an FHA first-time owner-occupant loan, since I was planning on staying in my unit, and renting out the other one. Stockpiled cash for a few months by only paying minimums on my credit cards and cutting back on anything extra, plus a little help from my folks, for the down payment(FHA was only about 3.5% down), and bought the building.

Now I'm collecting $1300 a month rent from the other tenant, which covers almost all of the mortgage and taxes. Upkeep isn't that big a deal, since the way my lease was written, I was already responsible for all of the groundskeeping and snow removal when I was renting anyway. Also, it's worth it to make sure you have good tenants, that pay on time, and don't make a mess.

[callmeed]

Yes. Our family sold an ag property this year and I purchased 3 rental properties. Two of them are 3 bedroom condos that I rent to students at Cal Poly SLO. The third is a 3 bedroom home that is a family rental. It's been going smoothly so far. While student rentals seem risky on the surface, I like them because (a) most students (here, at least) are paying their rent with student loans or parents' money, so its fairly guaranteed, (b) turnover is easy to predict, (c) you'll have no guilt of evicting a young family who has fallen on hard times, (d) if you find serious STEM or grad students, they usually don't party too hard.

After the initial fixes and repairs we had to do during the purchase process (every home in California has termites), I've been working to automate as much as possible. Here's my "Landlord Stack":

1. Cozy for applications and rental payments (https://cozy.co/) (Price: free)

2. Rocket Lawyer for leases, other documents, and random law questions (https://www.rocketlawyer.com/) (Price: $50/mo)

3. Xero for accounting (https://www.xero.com/) (Price: $9/mo)

4. Trello for organizing information and to-dos (https://trello.com/) (Price: free)

5. We bank at Chase and use their online bill-pay to handle the few utilities we're responsible for.

So for I've had to unclog a couple toilets and fix a window screen. Other than that, smooth sailing so far. Email in profile if you want to get in touch.

[ggambetta]

My novel -- in English http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00QPBYGFI and Spanish http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00I1EU1Q0

Sells a couple Kindle copies per week. In terms of actual income, it's negligible. The feedback has been unanimously positive, so my problem is to get it in the hands of as many people as I can. Therefore, if you want the epub/mobi files, just message me (see bio) and I'll be happy to send them :)

[webstartupper]

You may want to follow how self published author of Wool, Hugh Howey has sold his books on amazon.

He broke each novel into a four or five book series and sold each book for a dollar. He also made sure to schedule the releases every two to three months. (agile-writing?)

He makes six figures a month on most months [1]

[1] http://edition.cnn.com/2012/09/07/tech/mobile/kindle-direct-...

[akshat_h]

You may consider pricing it higher. I have seen shorts i.e 40-50 page books at 2.99

[Shorel]

Which version of the novel do you prefer ?

[peterjmag]

Cool! Just bought it. And I agree, you should try raising the price! =)

[coupdetaco]

Sperm donation, 1k/month and I have to go in twice a week.

[_pmf_]

"Passive income" ... you might want to see a doctor.

[IndianAstronaut]

Aren't there potential liability issues arround this? Where you may have to take responsibility for a child.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/23/justice/kansas-sperm-donation/

[eecks]

Do you have to be a certain height?

What about weight?

[nickthemagicman]

Passive outcome is more like it amirite!

[twelvenmonkeys]

My passive income for 2015 was (http://kihi.io) a VPS / cloud server provider for coreos, atomic, shit like that.

Netted me enough income to pay for the data center hosting and a few starbucks coffees per month for myself.

It's not much, but it essentially gives me a free dev area with a ton of computing power for me to roam free.

[panorama]

I wrote a book that helps junior developers (e.g. bootcamp grads) land jobs: https://kokev.in/hired-fast

Decent income in 4 figures, but I didn't do it for the money (it took me hundreds of hours from start to finish). However it's a great feeling when you go out for dinner, check your email, and a new purchase essentially pays for dinner right then and there :P.

[someotheridiot]

https://rebrickable.com - A LEGO database that shows you which sets you can build from your existing collection, also includes thousands of fan-submitted designs.

Although at the moment it is far from passive (probably spend more time on it than my full time job), but it can be left alone for a little while and still generate income.

[andy]

-Advertising affiliate offers from Convert2media. ($1496 profit so far this month)

-Adsense/Lifestreetmedia on my Pirates FB app (Adsense: $29 this month. Lifestreetmedia: $47 this month) http://greenrobot.com/pirates

-Mopub, Inmobi and Facebook ads on my iOS and Android apps ($14 from Mopub this month)

[mherrmann]

I co-founded a company developing QA automation software in 2012. Worked on it full-time until 2014. Had an EU grant covering our costs during that period. In 2015, I invested about 200h into it (mostly answering support emails and dealing with taxes) and made about 20k€ this year.

I've been working on an Appointment Reminder clone for a year now in my home country Austria. I will about break even in 2015, but will have an MRR of ~1500€ in 2016, with low ongoing costs.

So I reckon that in 2016 I can have a pretty passive income (working 5-10hrs/week) of 2000+€ per month. Not that I will work that little because I obviously still want to grow my income. And I also need to add that I've been earning considerably less in the past 3.5 years than I would have if I had stayed employed as a software engineer.

Oh, and then there's the Android app that makes about 15€ per month ^^

[vram22]

> Had an EU grant covering our costs during that period. In 2015, I invested about 200h into it (mostly answering support emails and dealing with taxes) and made about 20k€ this year.

How is it that the EU gives grants to for-profit companies? Is it to encourage business growth so the GDP goes up?

I'm talking about a "grant" which seems to imply gratis, free money, as opposed to a loan that has to be paid back, which is available in most countries.

[mkaroumi]

My watch company.

Started it in September and started selling before the watches were made. They're still in production and will be finished soon.

Wouldn't maybe call it "passive income", but the sales keep coming through WOM. (http://gardannewatches.com)

[grhmc]

What is with these artifacts in this image? Are these real watches? It looks like some image samples poorly photoshopped together.

http://gardannewatches.com/products/gardanne-black-brown-wat...

[wingerlang]

How is this a passive income though? Seems like the literal opposite.

[DanBC]

Are those images renders or actual product? It's a really nice looking watch, at a great price.

[solutionyogi]

I would echo the same sentiments as others. The watch design looks great, however, it does look like a photoshop render than an actual watch. If this was not posted on HN, I would have immediately ignored it as a scam. Have you shipped the watch to any customers?

[rahilb]

Really interested in designing my own watch.

What software do you use to design them? Is there an industry standard format that I would need to send manufactures?

I've tried googling around but I have not found anything conclusive.

[robinhoodexe]

Those watches look very nice!

Is it possible to get the white compass with a black leather strap?

[taprun]

I wrote a book on pricing software [1] that sells for $50+ per copy. Not only does it supply me with passive income, but it serves as instant credibility when I introduce myself to people in the field.

[1] http://taprun.com/pricing

[chown]

After having it free for 2.5 years, started selling LightPaper (http://lightpaper.ashokgelal.com/) couple of months ago. I received a number of emails thanking me for continuing its development. I was pleasantly surprised how generous Mac app users are :) did much better than I expected. Honestly, I started charging it just to get better at "entrepreneurship". And so far I've learned a lot. I usually spend couple of hours every day except on weekends when I put in few extra hours.

[paltman]

I have been running http://aminosoftware.com for almost 10 years now with a partner. It's not huge money but we do zero promotion and support amounts to a handful of emails a year and pays for my kids private school. Our customers are government and enterprise so purchase through invoice/PO paperwork but that's just a few minutes using a google docs template.

[pauljohncleary]

I have a chrome extension and service at http://tab.bz which has around 25k users.

It nets a tiny amount of revenue per month, I'm using it as a testing ground to keep my coding skills sharp, learn meteor and as a case study for growth hacking/product Dev

I run it off a couple of digital ocean droplets at around $10/month