Ask HN: How to monetize from my PHP side projects?

[aruggirello]

Hello HN,

As a developer, I have a few PHP side projects:

1. PHPippo, which I recently released on GitHub, is a PHP preprocessor and a PHP source micro-optimizer (the only free one I know of). PHPippo will soon gain version targeting, allowing users, say, to develop on latest PHP and deploy on PHP 5.2, with PHPippo altering/stripping away incompatible code.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7861616

2. a PHP anti-badbot class, which will block traffic from most scrapers, harvesters, etc., ensuring crawlers abide by your robots.txt policies, exploiting a number of culprits to discern legitimate users and crawlers from bad ones, taking action by logging, forbidding requests, or even banning originating IP(s). (IPv6 compatible).

3. a (multi-platform) PHP+MySQL customizable desktop activity monitor which monitors time spent within each application, possibly identifying the single files being edited, URLs visited, and automatically taking snapshots of unidentified windows. By saving data to a database, it enables tracking habits and usage patterns. I envisioned this tool for personal use; however, it could be deployed to monitor employees in a centralized manner, though this might be illegal in many countries.

4. (perhaps too complex) a PHP opaque data storage layer for sessions/user data on top of a database; designed to only make user data available to legitimate owners, which share them (or part) (via public/private key encryption) with authorized personnel only. Think of it as a database layer which, in case of breach, still protects your data, emails, credit card numbers, etc. from harvesting, while still allowing users to register, validate their email addresses, forget their passwords, and do whatever required with their user accounts (via a set of API).

So, which project(s) would you prioritize? What should I do next? I would even be willing to sell them.

[chrisjack]

1- you could have a open/free version and have a more specialize version that you charge a fee

2- you could sell a package with some of your project (3-4 for seem might go well together in some case) charge per parkage

3- charge for support to install

4- make a guide how to set up them on an hosting company (like bluehost) and link to a affiliate link to bluehost

5- build a free guide and a more advance one sell the advance one

6- create a course, sell it on udemy or on you site.

Why did you started this project ? Was there a hole in the market for that kind of need ? Try to find the old you and how he would buy that product. For the first project it seem it will probably need to stay free, the 3 other can probably be monetize. Check if there other product that are similar to your project and how do they monetize their product.

[aruggirello]

I was thinking along this line. PHPippo is of course free; I could have a page prompting visitors to 'submit your PHP script to get it instantly micro-optimized' or 'version checked'. But then I would basically charge users for something they could do themselves for free, so I would add a 'manual review' process to provide some added value. Even then, _would you trust a website you don't know with your sources?_ I don't know.

Perhaps there is room for 5- or 6-, as preprocessor directives are a powerful, yet tricky language, and might take some time to master.

I could try to sell a Wordpress/Drupal/Magento/etc. plugin based on the anti-scraping class - in fact there are a couple Wordpress 'security' plugins available for sale which are quite similar, though none of them addressing bad user agents/scraping bots.

[tim333]

Dunno really - all your stuff seems fairly specialised to particular niches. I'm not a PHP guy and don't understand that stuff too well. But maybe put up some sales pages for your products with "buy for $30, money back guarantee if not happy" or similar and an explanation of what the stuff does in a way that people who need to, for example, "develop on latest PHP and deploy on PHP 5.2" can find you with Google?

Plus blog the odd 'how to' article with links to your stuff again so people can find it?

[aruggirello]

Please, help me! I really need your advice.