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Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2020?

by imsky on 12/5/20, 6:28 PM with 171 comments

Side projects, games, open source.

Previous threads:

2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18906094

2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18479588

2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16815842

  • by yboris on 12/5/20, 6:31 PM

    I released Video Hub App almost 3 years ago and have been adding features over time. It's a project of love, and I give $3.50 of every purchase ($5) to charity, so the income isn't the main point. This year I averaged about 100 sales per month.

    https://videohubapp.com/ - browse, search, and organize your videos (PC, Mac, Linux)

    GitHub: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App

  • by natchy on 12/5/20, 6:42 PM

    I have a cookie delivery company[1] that I started with my sister. It’s doing well but I personally only take out $50k/yr. completely supplemental to my main job.

    [1]: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/166-sam-eaton-of-crave-...

  • by fimdomeio on 12/5/20, 7:01 PM

    Not really passive but almost. I sell bicycle bells on etsy[1]. It started with a friend that had the idea and later left the project. Initially I joined mostly because I was interested in finding a technical solution for how to print them.

    The fun tech is that I use a pen plotter. [2]

    I don't really make that much money selling them but at the same time I had a 400% increase in sales this year (Thank you etsy algorithm, and probably thank you pandemic). 0 investment in marketing, I just make sure I have stock (16h of work per year probably, but hard to measure). Also this year I moved to a place where the grocery store and the mail office are in the same place and 5 minutes from my home which is perfect.

    I have a a bit too much fun optimizing processes. finding weird ways to automate the writing of shipping info in the packages.

    The only thing I wish I had more time to, was at improving the drawings.

    [1] https://www.etsy.com/shop/gunaPT

    [2] https://www.evilmadscientist.com/2019/bike-bells-with-axidra...

  • by bob1029 on 12/5/20, 6:47 PM

    To me, passive means little or no ongoing time investment. If we are looking at "best" in terms of revenue, then dividends from investing in the stock market are by far the best source of passive income I can imagine.

    I've got a 1.5x leveraged portfolio over on IBKR that is currently yielding ~2.9% dividends across a wide range of sectors. I am paying ~1% in margin fees at the moment, so I basically get to use their money for "free" on the growth side (of which there is plenty right now). It is turning into quite the comfortable safety blanket.

    I almost feel like this is not in the spirit of the topic posed here because of how mundane and uninteresting stock investments are, relatively speaking. I am far more interested in reading through all of the tales of crazy side projects that have turned into something more.

  • by mtlynch on 12/5/20, 6:45 PM

    https://isitketo.org

    It's just a content site about the keto diet. It runs in the background and earns money from Google AdSense and Amazon Affiliate links, the latter of which are dwindling because I haven't had time to fix dead product links. It's a plain static site, so it doesn't need any server maintenance or software upgrades.

    Not totally passive because I actively tried to grow it for three months when I had to cancel my main business due to COVID.[0]

    Jan: $786.71

    Feb: $682.62

    Mar: $362.28 (Amazon slashes affiliate payouts + drop in traffic due to COVID)

    Apr: $220.48

    May: $221.53

    Jun: $180.66

    Jul: $369.91

    Aug: $486.22

    Sep: $362.18

    Oct: $510.86

    Nov: $431.52

    Total: $4,614.97

    If you're interested in the details, I write retrospectives every month sharing stats and thinking through strategy.[1]

    [0] https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2020/04/

    [1] https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2020/07/

  • by larrykubin on 12/5/20, 7:04 PM

    I started a niche YouTube channel on Python for Stock and Crypto Trading, very beginner level:

    https://youtube.com/parttimelarry

    Over $2K/month as of November from a combination of YouTube ad revenue, Buy Me a Coffee donations, and affiliate links (TradingView Pro Subscriptions, Tradier, Amazon books etc).

    Should hit 10,000 subscribers in the next couple of weeks. Plan is to grow this to 100,000 subscribers over the next 3-4 years.

  • by dave333 on 12/5/20, 7:46 PM

  • by turtleofdeath on 12/5/20, 7:30 PM

    Roughly $350/mo at this point, and I’d love to 10x it this coming year.

    I have an Etsy business that I set up last year that doesn’t require much input from me and uses third party fulfillment. I average about 30 sales per month including the holiday season and about $10/order profit.

    Dividend stocks currently pay around $50/mo, which buys more stock every time (DRIP), so that should increase nicely over the next 30-40 years. I also buy more on a regular basis, but that does take some effort/research on my part.

    I’ll leave out stock, bond and mutual fund growth on its own since that’s not really income per se.

    I’m also working on a YouTube channel that I just started last month. It doesn’t even have 10 subscribers but I do point people to product recommendations, which has already gotten me a $45 referral payout. Could be a fluke, but I’m in it for the long term, so we shall see.

  • by enos_feedler on 12/5/20, 7:16 PM

    When the lockdowns started happening in March, I began trading the stock market. My YTD realized gains is equal to my base salary. About 140k. I am proud of all the trading I did. Living on the west coast it also turned me into a morning person, where market opens at 6:30am. Good side effect :)

  • by LoveMortuus on 12/5/20, 9:38 PM

    I have four passive incomes, I guess ^^

    I'm from Slovenia, Europe, so I don't know if there work outside of Europe, which is also why I'm proud of them, because it's actually quite hard to find investment platforms outside of USA!

    Firstly, stocks, combination of growth and dividend with reinvesting dividend yields. Found a blue chip company that grows weed which was very funny to me, so I decided to buy some of the stock, by now it has grown my ~250%, which is pretty nice and even more funny because the stock is _high_

    Secondly, crypto mining, I do this because I have access to _free_ electricity and internet, thus all profits are mine.

    Thirdly, crypto earned from mining I transfer into BlockFi, which isn't insured in anyway, but it does work like a saving account where BTC has a yearly interest of ~6%, other crypto currencies have more and some have less, you can also set that the interest is paid in any other crypto currency.

    Fourthly, one that I'm probably most proud of, Quanloop, they are a lending company but us _investors_ work kinda like a buffer for them so it's not directly us that are loaning the money. On Quanloop I have a yearly growth of ~15.6% with monthly payouts, they also pay you what you have lost due to inflation and what you had to pay for income tax. It's really amazing.

    Here's my referral link: bit.ly/InvestLove If you deposit 0.01€ or more you'll get 5€ reward, but if you want to avoid that, you can just Google Quanloop and do it that way.

    I don't work for Quanloop, I just really find them interesting.

    Fifthly, while currently not active I do plan on putting money onto it and that's Iban Wallet, it's a saving account that pays out interest every day, which seems very interesting to me!

  • by DVassallo on 12/5/20, 7:18 PM

    I sell two products on Gumroad. One is an ebook about AWS, and the other is a 1.5hr video about building on audience.

    Sales past 12 months: $290K

    - Dec: $25K

    - Jan: $26K

    - Feb: $8K

    - Mar: $9K

    - Apr: $43K

    - May: $59K

    - Jun: $25K

    - Jul: $14K

    - Aug: $21K

    - Sep: $12K

    - Oct: $17K

    - Nov: $29K

    Profit: $256K

    https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1333888186762678274?s=2...

  • by EliRivers on 12/5/20, 7:16 PM

    The stock market has had a ridiculous year.

    I'm mostly dull indicies, with a middling adventurous fund that has more than doubled in the last year; my investments increased by about 30% overall. My investments brought home more money than I did (I've been in full-time employment throughout) and I'm starting to wonder if Piketty wasn't on to something.

    Utterly passive and zero effort on my side; I just do what they say and stick my pennies into indicies (and a small amount into more adventurous funds).

  • by philshem on 12/5/20, 6:44 PM

    Before the pandemic I wrote a scraper for web-based data related to crowds and put the code on GitHub with a permissive license. At the start of the pandemic here in Europe I posted a Tweet with an interesting dataviz based on the scraped data - and someone who saw that Tweet is paying me to run a customized scraper for the past 9 months.

  • by winrid on 12/5/20, 6:43 PM

    https://fastcomments.com

    Started Jan 2020, looks like will be at 4.5k ARR by end of year.

  • by andersthue on 12/5/20, 7:00 PM

    I made a watermarking software 10 years ago, still makes 1000$ every month, with almost zero work.

    http://watermark-image.com

    :)

  • by twblalock on 12/5/20, 7:21 PM

    Simply refusing to sell any of my stock during the downturn. Clearly, many people did sell. Sometimes the biggest wins come from knowing what the pitfalls are and avoiding them.

  • by atestu on 12/5/20, 7:32 PM

    https://www.satelliteframes.com/ - Affordable framed satellite photos

    I just started this site a couple months ago and made my first sale last week (from an unknown customer).

    It's just a matter of finding public domain, high quality satellite photos!

  • by danfang on 12/5/20, 7:33 PM

    I built a niche site dedicated to professional e-sports streamers (mainly focused on League of Legends).

    https://prostreams.gg

    It just launched a few weeks ago, but is on track for ~300K page views / month. The top 5% of users spend over 8 hours / week watching content. Looking to grow the site first, then monetize through affiliates and advertising.

  • by heavy_239823 on 12/5/20, 7:06 PM

    I made €73k from a Chrome Extension. [1] Went down twice in the last year so I had to spend some time on that.

    Chrome Webstore are shutting down their payment system, so I've spent some time migrating all that nonsense.

    If you're interested, I also wrote about others monetising their extensions and how they did it. [2]

    [1] https://beebs.io/

    [2] https://tillypay.com/blog/how-to-monetise-a-chrome-extension...

  • by dhruvkar on 12/5/20, 6:37 PM

    I invested in 4 industrial real estate projects over the last 1 year. They currently net me ~2500 a month.

    Total investment: ~250K Property values: 3-10M

    I don't own these properties myself. I own a part. This is similar to Fundrise, except it's with a local investment group.

  • by lmiller1990 on 12/6/20, 10:19 PM

    I made some income from content creation. I made 2 courses about Vue.js and wrote 1 book, for a total of around 7K USD. Not exactly passive, but I'm still really happy with my progress.

    I wrote about it here: https://lachlan-miller.me/musings/reflecting-on-a-year-of-co...

  • by Glench on 12/5/20, 7:00 PM

    I made a few hundred bucks licensing my Fuzzyset.js library: https://github.com/Glench/fuzzyset.js#license

  • by k__ on 12/5/20, 6:44 PM

    Wrote a book a few years ago.

    Still make between $10 and $50 a month.

  • by xwdv on 12/5/20, 7:04 PM

    Selling weekly covered calls on stocks in my equities portfolio, 2k per week, super passive.

  • by codq on 12/5/20, 7:05 PM

    https://www.babyrocknyc.com/

    I recently had my first baby and had a few ideas for some sardonic baby attire, so I whipped them up in a store for drop-shipping. It nets a half-dozen sales per month, with almost zero upkeep beyond new designs when I've got a new idea.

    The pictures I get of babies wearing the clothes is exponentially worth the effort put in.

  • by durnygbur on 12/5/20, 7:18 PM

    Buying stocks in the dips this year. Passive income hope-to-be in the following years.

  • by TMWNN on 12/5/20, 6:54 PM

    $5100 in sales (about 30% profit) in three days via dropshipping a popular, hard-to-find videogame-related accessory over Black Friday/Cyber Monday.

  • by mattbgates on 12/6/20, 7:20 AM

    Bought a ton of TSLA when it split, like 115 shares, and held on to it, despite knowing it dropped insanely, but patience paid off. Made this in a single day: https://bit.ly/3gg3US1

    I highly recommend that if you can, you put your money to work for you. This is just a rare occurrence, but as an investor of 10 years so far, just by putting about $5k into the stock market each year, into a few good stocks, whether technology, food, or something else -- do your research, and let your money make its own money.

    You'll also want to maximize your 401k at least to your employer's contribution, but if you can go up to 10% or more, you'll be doing your older self a huge favor.

    And if they ever get cryogenics working, freeze yourself for a thousand years. This will probably happen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JwkaLt9pf8

    Even though by that time... with inflation and all that, you'll still break even.

  • by optimiz3 on 12/5/20, 7:32 PM

    Begin long TSLA (since 2013), and trading options around the core position.

  • by alain34 on 12/6/20, 9:00 PM

    https://www.bankaccoountchecker.com

    Pretty passive as validation rules are fairly static, and I have automated data source import and refresh.

    Around £900 MRR

    Existing customers have asked about other validation types like email which I might offer under a new site.

  • by saradhi on 12/5/20, 9:07 PM

    I started a SaaS service [1], in Aug 2019, to extract tables from images and scanned PDFs. Launched with a post on hacker news. I added couple of contractors who share the development on-demand. Last month, for the first time, we hit 10K users, no paid advertising, hitting 170K requests per month. Not expecting to cash out any profits now, investing them in the development. Now, I'm dealing B2B contracts and taking customizations for the businesses. The goal is to hit at least 3K in profit by next year end. Also, releasing a light weight version of the current published version as a new SaaS [2] at low cost.

    [1]: https://extracttable.com

    [2]: https://imagetoexcel.com

  • by JacobSuperslav on 12/6/20, 11:21 AM

    me and my partner own several "niche sites". over 100k income in 2020. monetized with Mediavine and Amazon affiliate, but we're moving in the direction of pure ads slowly - Amazon is getting worse every year. these are pretty much passive(in my case), my assistant handles all the content outsourcing, and I just check the analytics and make decisions once in a while.

    I also sell premade specialized turnkey niche sites to people in the industry on places like /r/entrepreneur, /r/juststart, and my own site and this made me around 140k this year.

    i also do some consulting and work with automation, but that's not really passive at all. i specialize in python and selenium.

    I quit my 9-5 several years ago and retired to a very low cost of living area.

  • by seanwilson on 12/5/20, 10:35 PM

    I run a paid Chrome extension that I'm still working on: https://www.checkbot.io/

    > Checkbot is a Chrome extension that tests 100s of pages at a time to find critical SEO, speed and security problems before your users do. Test unlimited sites as often as you want including local development sites to stop critical issues going live.

    Glad I didn't rely on the Chrome Web Store payment system they deprecated a few months ago. :) Felt predictable they were going to throw in the towel with it since it was lacking obvious features and the support forums always had complaints about it breaking.

  • by twillin on 12/5/20, 6:44 PM

    A few years ago I started a niche healthcare case management SaaS. While I sometimes add new features, upgrade software, or fix bugs, it mostly runs itself. There's currently a handful of clients each paying ~$8k annually.

  • by jborak on 12/5/20, 7:26 PM

    https://packetriot.com

    Provides HTTP/S and TCP tunneling and is a comprehensive alternative to ngrok. I started it in Jan 2019. $4.3k ARR in 2020.

  • by mcrittenden on 12/5/20, 9:29 PM

    I make about $400-500 per month on https://shortkeys.app - a browser extension for custom keyboard shortcuts to do all kinds of stuff.

  • by mtmail on 12/5/20, 6:47 PM

    Also an older (February) 2020 thread with 4 answers https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22379662

  • by olodolo on 12/5/20, 9:35 PM

    I make about $200/month with olodolo.com but it’s not completely passive as I need to manually handle things like disputes and refunds. I’d say maybe 2h/month.

  • by leet_thow on 12/5/20, 7:21 PM

    The newish JEPI etf offers a 10% yield and monthly payments. I tend to buy it as part of my dollar cost averaging strategy when markets seem overheated that week.

  • by Rinum on 12/5/20, 7:25 PM

    I made a simple SQL card game and launched it on Kickstarter. Not exactly passive while developing, but from now on it should be. Not bringing in too much, just a few K this year so far.

    https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rinum/rows-and-tables-t...

  • by bestouff on 12/5/20, 8:13 PM

    Probably a bit offtopic, but I just sold a land I bought 15 years ago with the intent to build a house with my now ex. Very good ROI.

  • by XCSme on 12/7/20, 1:38 AM

    I sell a self-hosted web analytics platform[0] and earned around $15k this year. Not really passive as I quit my job to work on it (mostly updates so far), so I hope that with some marketing in 2021 I will at least 10x that number.

    [0]: https://www.usertrack.net

  • by corobo on 12/5/20, 11:45 PM

    The Cloudflare stock I grabbed to test out US stock trades on my pension app is up 300% so that wasn't a bad shout

  • by amaurymartiny on 12/7/20, 12:54 AM

    I built an open-source email verification API: [link redacted]. It checks if an email exists without sending any email.

    I released the open-source lib some years ago, and built a Saas only this year in April. It started generating revenue (~$100MRR) since September, and I'm not really touching it anymore.

  • by tluyben2 on 12/5/20, 9:02 PM

    Crypto (btc). Hard to beat the returns on that this year.

  • by sixQuarks on 12/6/20, 11:51 PM

    TSLA investment had been the best passive income for me

  • by nathias on 12/5/20, 7:00 PM

    I put all my savings in crypto.