Commerce · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Analyzing 9 years of HN side projects that reached $500/month
After analyzing 9 years of HN side project posts, I found some counter-intuitive patterns about what makes projects profitable. Three things that stood out: 1. B2B dominates: 73% of $500+/month projects target businesses, not consumers 2. Speed matters more than polish: Average 47 days from launch to first sale. Most started charging with 3-5 core features. 3. Pricing cluster: 87% price between $20-49. Low enough for impulse purchase, high enough to be sustainable. I compiled this into a dataset of nearly 700 projects with tech stack, pricing, and timeline data. Built it because I was…
This product is a dataset and analysis report of nearly 700 profitable side projects from Hacker News spanning nine years. It reveals patterns in what makes projects reach $500 monthly revenue, including that… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
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Data-driven insights from 9 years of $500+/mon side projects
Feb 2026 · haileyzhou.gumroad.com · its alternatives →
- 2SP
Several years ago, I had a client whose salespeople were using Excel to generate sales proposals. This was inefficient and the resulting documents looked awful, so I developed a new process for them using a no-code platform. It featured a web form that was tied to a workflow engine, and a fancy PDF got emailed to the customer to sign. When the client loved the solution, I knew I was on to something. However, the no-code platform wasn't very customizable, so I decided to rebuild the process as a SaaS product. The client's CTO wanted in and we became cofounders. Today, we passed the…
2021 · its alternatives →
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I loved this recent "Show and Tell" thread about side projects posted on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42373343 It inspired me to build a mini directory that aggregates over 500 side projects posted to HN since 2017. You can filter by year, category, or revenue level. Thank you Cursor + Next.js for making this insanely fun to build. Hopefully you discover hidden gems or find inspiration in what the HN community is creating. Happy browsing!
2024 · hnsideprojects.com · its alternatives →
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Hey HN! Christine and Steven here. As a PM and engineer, we’ve both evaluated and purchased a lot of software. One of the biggest frustrations was figuring out how much it would cost us without having to go through the sales process. When we did have a quote, we had no idea if we were getting a good deal or ripped off. We built a site where you can see what other companies are actually paying for SaaS and enterprise software. Buyers contribute prices via quotes, pricing proposals, and other documentation to ensure quality. We unlocked Talkdesk for Show HN users so that you can use the…
2024 · pricelevel.com · its alternatives →
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Accessible end-to-end deep dive of crawling, embedding, projecting, and semantic searching all of Hacker News for my Hackerverse project.
2024 · blog.wilsonl.in · its alternatives →
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1Kprojects▲585Neglected side projects for less than $1000.
2018 · indiemaker.com · its alternatives →
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Revenue and stats from my various revenue-generating side-projects. | Cory Zue
2020 · coryzue.com · its alternatives →
- 8
Since January, we've accomplished quite a bit. We've successfully launched two productivity tools that people seem to love. The vast majority of ratings are 5/5. Our userbase is growing steadily by about 2,000 people a day. And we haven't done any marketing yet. I wanted to write abou
2011 · qbix.com · its alternatives →
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How I built, marketed, and sold a side-project in 3 months
2020 · nscode.gumroad.com · its alternatives →
- 10
I scraped every Show HN from the last 12 months (41,301 posts) plus the full comment tree of every launch with 10+ comments, ~100k comment timestamps, all from the Algolia HN API. The median launch gets 2 points and 0 comments. For launches that do get traction, half the comments they'll ever get arrive within 7.2 hours and 90% within 26, and the top decile decays on the same clock as everyone else. Vote timestamps aren't public, so comment timing is the attention proxy; caveats are in the post. Everything reproduces from the repo with one command…
Jul 2026 · jonno.nz · its alternatives →
- 11HH
Hi HN! A few days ago I saw a graph[0] that showed the # of job postings on HN was declining. I started wondering what other trends I could glean from the data, so I created this! You can filter through the top level comments by keyword; for example you can filter by "remote" to see the massive spike around March 2020. Another interesting thing I found is that I can compare hiring across cities. I hope you enjoy! I made it so that the links to your search are sharable so if you have some interesting data you should be able to just link the page you're on! [0]…
2023 · hnhiringtrends.com · its alternatives →
- 12AT
Hi HN, I spent a few weeks looking at the top HN posts of all time. This included exploration, clustering, creating visualizations, and zooming in on what (to me personally) seems like some of the best discussions on here. Three things in this post: 1- The interesting groups of HN posts 2- The interactive visualizations that you can explore in your browser 3- The data from this exploration -- this includes CSV of the titles as well as the text embeddings of 3,000 Ask HN articles. Blog post about this whole process here: [1] ============ 1- The interesting groups of HN posts From the…
2022 · its alternatives →
- 13FY
2016 · antontarasenko.github.io · its alternatives →
- 14
Have been working on this for months, hope you guys will like it. Feel free to share your own side project in the comments.
2012 · sideprojects.com · its alternatives →
- 15
Free product usage analytics for teams who care about growth
2018 · paddle.com · its alternatives →
- 16
No-VC Reports▲181Build a startup in 6 months by reading 5-min reports
2020 · flexiple.com · its alternatives →
- 17
Public datsets made with https://getomni.ai/. Contribute to getomni-ai/datasets development by creating an account on GitHub.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 18
$50k Investment + 3 Month Program for Web 3.0 Startups
2021 · btcfrontier.fund · its alternatives →
- 19IA
Hey HN, I aggregated a bunch of GTM advice, including their rankings. Thought it could be useful for some founders here. Let me know if you have any feedback. Thanks!
2025 · fellowry.com · its alternatives →
- 20
I figured, "what better way to look at a list of (hopefully) inspiring projects?" The upvotes work and are globally synced.
2024 · guycombinator.net · its alternatives →
- 21WU
hey y'all -- can you please tell us if our job search tool sucks? :D we built it using an investor platform called Harmonic.ai to gather startup data, then contextualize it so that job seekers could find out about the most exciting startups hiring first (like if they just raised, growing headcount fast, have an ex-unicorn founder, etc). pretty sure we're the first platform doing anything like this. anyway, let me know what you think. really excited to launch this thing soon! getting feedback from the hn community first is really fun :)
2022 · joinmaasive.com · its alternatives →
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Life, learning, and startups.
2016 · drift.com · its alternatives →
- 24
http://www.hnshowcase.com Moses (nnythm) and I browse Hacker News daily. Show HN posts are some of our favorite parts of HN. We wanted to create a way to browse Show HN articles, even those that might not quite make it to the front page. We created http://www.hnshowcase.com last weekend to make discovering projects posted on HN easier. It searches all "Show HN" posts and generates a thumbnail view for each of them. You can sort by submission date, points, and number of comments, and navigate with left/right or j/k keys. We used the following technologies: HN Search API, Pyramid web…
2011 · hnshowcase.com · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →