Ask HN: Inspirational money making web apps made by hackers.

[clyfe]

Please post money making web apps that you know of, like 37signals stack, dabble etc. That

1. were made by single hackers (or verry small teams)

2. make money

If possible add a short description.

[podman]

I've made three:

http://www.boostcam.com - Built it in a weekend a couple of years ago. costs next to nothing to run and makes money on adsense.

http://www.sproutvideo.com - SaaS video hosting platform that I built with a partner (I coded everything and he's the business man) in a couple of weeks. We've got a lot of paying customers already.

http://www.physicalfix.com - Fitness web app that I've been building with another partner (Again, I'm the coder and he's the talent) for a couple of years and just launched. Taking a little time to get tracking but doesn't cost much to run and has a few paying customers already.

None of them make me enough money to work on them full-time yet but it's a nice supplement to my day job salary.

[JangoSteve]

(Again, I'm the coder and he's the talent)

Funny, I would have considered you the talent ;-)

[candeira]

> I'm the coder and he's the talent

I love this treatment for the role of your non-techical co-founder. Doesn't come across as false modesty either.

[mrlebowski]

Wow! Do you do all the maintenance of these sites yourself?

[SteveMorin]

This is a nice set of site congratz

[ammarkalim]

What kind of video player are you using in the video hosting platform? I want to sell finance courses as screencasts but i am having huge problem with video hosting platform. All the html5 players i have seen are crap. Vimeo is good but it does not support commercial hosting.On the other hand Viddler is AMAZING. Their video player is amazing and the streaming is quite good as well but i am ready ready to pay $100 per month in the start. The only option i have is screencast.com. What do you recommend?

[swombat]

http://www.github.com seems wildly profitable and was created by a team of 3 hackers, afaik.

[user24]

http://www.bingocardcreator.com - made by HNer patio11, here's his (amazingly interesting and useful) blog: http://www.kalzumeus.com/

[patio11]

I'll elaborate to answer what I think are the questions behind the question, since I answered them a hundred times in the last three days at the Business of Software conference and one more time won't kill me:

a) It makes bingo cards for elementary schoolteachers, which is one very specific problem a large group of people know they have, is close to trivial technically to solve, and for which almost all solutions suck. This makes it very achievable for one guy to tackle as a hobby project. (It eventually got to the point where full-time employment was my poor paying quirky hobby project.)

b) The business, as distinct from the application, works because over the course of four years I became very good at organic SEO and metrics-based optimization. These are broadly applicable skills in software (and marketing generally). Surprisingly few people can do them well.

c) No, I do not see myself being the bingo guy for forever. If you wanted to address a similarly small niche yourself, I would say it is a wonderful learning opportunity and has been lifechanging for me. I wouldn't recommend starting with bingo cards for elementary schoolteachers, because if you are capable of beating me at it your skillset is worth a heck of a lot more money than can ever be extracted from that market for that problem, but virtually any developer can find something similar and learn enough to make it work. The amount you learn from having your own experimental laboratory is better than grad school, and you get paid to study. I wouldn't particularly recommend that route if you take money from investors. Two models, vastly different lifestyles, pick your favorite.

[arn]

http://appshopper.com - I contracted out the design, some of the backend code. I coded the rest and tied it together. Since then, have hired a programmer to handle maintenance, new features. pays his salary + makes a profit.

[tocomment]

Cool. How does it work? How does it make money?

[bignoggins]

I love appshopper b/c iTunes is blocked at work so I can't check my app rankings without it =)

I'd love to see rankings for other countries besides the US.

[chrisrhee]

http://lighthouseapp.com — Bug tracking app created by 2 people. Used by businesses big and small, as well as some popular open-source projects (like Ruby on Rails)

http://tenderapp.com — Customer support app created by 2 people (out of necessity when Lighthouse started getting big).

Both apps are by ENTP. We have 2 programmers & 3 designers now and are working on redesigns for both Lighthouse & Tender. We actually just released a sneak peak yesterday: http://hoth.entp.com/2010/10/5/sneak-peek-tender-admin-2-0

[mitjak]

Oh boy, I love Lighthouse (worked for Bluenotion over the summer). Pure joy to use!

[acangiano]

http://anynewbooks.com is made by me and it's already bringing in some revenue. Not serious money yet (hundreds not thousands of dollars), mind you, but it has been profitable from day one and growing relatively fast.

[run4yourlives]

I've been using this since you mentioned it a couple of weeks ago on HN. I like it. Can I offer a couple of suggestions?

1. The first thing I go looking for is a synopsis. Amazon isn't always good at this, you should try to incorporate this somehow. (I realize the difficulty with email)

2. On your "staff pick" could you do a bit of a review?

3. Canada. Give me some Canada options eh! (I know, I know, bigger market etc etc)

Keep up the nice work... I will buy books from this.

[revorad]

This looks useful. Well done!

One strange thing I noticed is that when I search for something, say javascript, there are lots of results but the page automatically jumps all the way down to the sign up form. Why don't you let me see the results first? If you want me to sign up, you could have a link next to each result saying something like "Don't miss out on more good books like this. Sign up now for weekly updates." If your suggestions are any good, I would love to sign up anyway. Please don't force me to.

[sgt]

This is pretty cool. I'll check it out!

[modoc]

http://10MinuteMail.com was written by me as a learning exercise. It's profitable and low maintenance.

[mdolon]

Out of curiosity, when did you launch the site? Did you do any marketing or was it natural growth? I ask because the temporary inbox market seems pretty saturated already.

[petervandijck]

How does it make money? With the ads?

[pedromenezes]

10MinutesMail is a cool app. I use it a lot. Thumbs up. :)

[niyazpk]

http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/ - by HNer paraschopra is arguably the best A/B split testing tool available. It was developed without any outside funding, by an extremely small team (1-3), and it is making decent amounts of money AFAIK.

[paraschopra]

Thanks for posting this Niyaz. Yep, it is a specific niche tool developed by me (but have tiny part-time team now) and is making decent money, which I expect to grow.

[dangrossman]

http://www.w3counter.com - developed and operated by myself, profitable since 2006 - real-time web stats, which I've been offering since before Google Analytics and such existed, tracking all activity on over 50k websites

http://www.w3roi.com - developed and operated by myself, profitable since 2009 - real-time conversion tracking for online advertising

[tumblen]

I made http://nicetranslator.com in Nov. 2008.

Probably 2 weeks of work all said but by far my biggest success in terms of sheer numbers.

It makes money to help pay bills now via AdSense and is totally hands off.

Actually, given our analytics, I think that it's really underperforming monetarily. My partner and I have largely moved onto other things, but if anyone out there loves to do that kind of stuff, maybe we can work something out?

[kranner]

Wow. That works really well - hilarious results for a few lines from 'The Wire' translated to Hindi.

Possible bug: The 'link' button shows a nice popup but did not generate either of the two promised permalinks in 15 seconds, at which point I left.

[revorad]

Wowwwwww! Hats off to you sir. I cannot believe how good the translation is.

Do you mind talking about how you are doing the translation?

[drusenko]

http://www.weebly.com - made by a small team, 2 1/2 hackers if you count myself as 1/2 time :)

we're very profitable.

[rokhayakebe]

Are you telling me there are only 3 people at Weebly? Now that is very very impressive.

[acangiano]

Weebly has the best WYSIWYG website designer I've ever seen. The output it produces is beautiful as well.

[hasenj]

How do you make money from it? it's free and no ads

[sahillavingia]

Freckle - http://letsfreckle.com/ - made by a very small team, very usability oriented. Came into a tough space, and is now making a ton of money.

[clyfe]

Oh, I knew this one, I couldn't find it anymore. It's made by some Ruby star guy and Amy Hoy designer.

[garazy]

http://builtwith.com - made for fun not to make money but now its profitable by a team of 1 :)

I think the idea is to not start with the thought "I want to make a web app that makes money" but "I want to make a useful web app that solves a problem" - the money will eventually come if you crack that nut!

[tworats]

http://xpenser.com/ - Time and Expense tracking via voice/email/sms/IM/twitter/iPhone/Android/...

Made by a small team, doing well.

[moshezadka]

Let me start by saying I love xpenser. But note the following:

"""

Why is Xpenser free? How do you plan to make money?

We'll be introducing premium accounts that'll carry a monthly fee in the near future. The goal is to keep the base product free and charge for longer data retention and other services. """

It's not yet making money, which would disqualify it from the criteria for this Ask HN

[base]

http://vendder.com - made by 2 people with ruby and sinatra. just started but already have some paying users.

[acangiano]

For a second I thought I was visiting http://shopify.com. I think it's a little too close to your competitor look wise.

[dclaysmith]

Looks great! Good luck.

[zemariamm]

nice!! thumbs up for vendder !

[wensing]

http://www.stormpulse.com - made by 2 people. Tracks and maps the weather.

[wushupork]

http://shelfluv.com - Single hacker. just launched about a week ago but making some Amazon affiliate revenue from all the coverage it's getting.

[nandemo]

Nico Nico Douga is a sort of youtube where users can write comments on the videos (like subtitles). The first version of was supposedly written by a couple of guys.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nico_Nico_Douga

I have no idea why no one has made an English clone yet. Apart from messy copyright problems and hosting costs (which all youtube clones have anyway), it's practically a guaranteed success.

[udfalkso]

I made http://isitnormal.com, which is almost paying the rent now.

[norbu09]

http://iWantMyName.com - built by 2 1/2 guys over the last two years out of frustration with the domain registrar business practices. we are not hugely profitable yet but we can live off it and work on our own project which is rewarding enough for the moment.

[treitnauer]

Just would like to add that we're completely self-funded and proud of it... :)

[hasenj]

really nice :)

I think I'll use it to register my next website ;)