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Ask HN: What's holding you back monetising side projects?

by kulor on 3/11/24, 10:09 AM with 7 comments

I’ve noticed a few valuable projects that fail to charge users, which tends to lead to their demise.

A joke exists in the aerospace world of "what keeps aeroplanes in the air? money" which feels generally analogous to software projects' long-term survival & prosperity.

Is there a rationale for leaving money on the table?

  • by mtmail on 3/11/24, 10:28 AM

    Money and thus contracts add pressure. Suddenly a hobby for some evenings becomes a 24/7 operation where you need to have your laptop ready during holiday.

    Expectations rise. A fun website now needs terms-of-service, privacy policy and all kind of other legal setup. Sure, it's mostly boilerplate but an unhappy customer is more likely to sue for damanges if they believe you're a company (and thus have money) than a free no-gurantees side-project.

    Tax setup should be easy but it can be an annoyance especially if you already have a full-time job. Some people don't like dealing with taxes at all (I used to be one of them).

  • by marssaxman on 3/11/24, 8:29 PM

    What holds me back is that "monetizing a side project" is another way of saying "running a small business", which is a form of having a job - but I already have a job, rather a nice one at that. Why would I waste my precious free time working a second, crappier job, when I could do things I enjoy instead?

    If I am building something in my free time, it is because I am inherently interested in that thing, because the experience of creating it is enjoyable, and because I want it to exist, for its own sake, because I find it personally meaningful. With that kind of intrinsic motivation, who needs money? Why would I bog a pleasant hobby down with a lot of accounting and paperwork and bureaucratic drudgery when I could focus on the fun part instead, by writing the code I want to write and then just giving it away?

  • by legrande on 3/11/24, 8:01 PM

    > Is there a rationale for leaving money on the table?

    Sometimes I just want to do a project for fun and plop it on Github and see people's reaction. Not everything has to be monetized, and that can sometimes become an ulterior motive: 'If I keep releasing stuff with monetization I will profit' mentality creeps in.

  • by tshirttime on 3/11/24, 2:03 PM

    What keeps aeroplanes in the air? Money.

    And what keeps the money coming in? Thousands of man-hours of sales, legal, tax, operations, and finance. Like someone earlier said, code is the easy part.

  • by JohnFen on 3/11/24, 3:06 PM

    Lots of people have side projects as hobbies. If you start charging for it, the hobby becomes a job -- which pretty much eliminates its value as a hobby.

  • by pavel_lishin on 3/11/24, 11:34 AM

    I already have a job, why would I want a second one?

  • by KingOfCoders on 3/11/24, 10:19 AM

    Coding is easy, selling is hard.