Alternatives
Products that do what Analyzing 9 years of HN side projects that reached $500/month does
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…
- 1AD
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
- 2SC
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
- 3
- 4IM
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
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8IS
Hey everyone! I'm back with an update on this post [0]. Last year, I quit my corporate job and went full-time on ProjectionLab, the long-term financial planning app I've been building for the past 4 years, which some of you may recognize. The decision to go all-in felt like a huge leap. But it was the right call, and it's been a good year. And without the HN community, it would not have happened. As I mentioned last time [0], the feedback on my original Show HN is THE reason I'm still here working on this. I'm really grateful for that. And I hope the way I’ve grown PL -- staying bootstrapped…
2024 · projectionlab.com
- 9IA
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
- 10
- 11IB
Hey HN community, I built a tool that helps optimize your post for hitting the first page of Show HN. How it works: I used a Hugging Face dataset of all Hacker News posts from the past 3 years and trained a model that predicts how successful your post might be. There's still a lot of randomness on HN, so nothing is guaranteed, but the tool helps optimize your post for higher odds. A couple of interesting findings: - GitHub repo links work x3 better than regular domains - Open-source tools have a steady virality rate (13.9% - one of the highest) - "I built" outperforms "We built" - Using…
May 2026 · wannalaunch.com
- 12SH
I analyzed 10 years of Hacker News data (2016-2025) to track Show HN submission trends. - Show HN posts went from ~900/month (2016-2019) to 3,315 in Dec 2025 - Share of all stories: 2.4% (2016) → 12.8% (Dec 2025) - Notable spikes: COVID-19 (2020), AI boom (2023), and accelerating growth through 2024-2025 Data source: HackerBook (144k Show HN posts / 3.4M total stories)
Jan 2026 · imgur.com
- 132Y
We took the top 3 HN stories every day since October 2006 (~21K stories total), ran topic clustering on them, and visualized how topics rise and fall over time. You can zoom into any period - some patterns are surprisingly clear (AI overtaking startup culture as HN's top topic, crypto's rise and fall, remote work spiking with COVID). Happy to answer questions about the methodology.
Mar 2026 · app.lenzy.ai
- 14OS
2012 · blog.elastic.io
- 15
Show HN submissions peaked at 6.3x their ChatGPT-launch level, while the number of successful submissions remained relatively flat.
25d ago · orangecrumbs.com
- 16IB
I’ve always found it funny how simple feedback widgets end up as $20–$30/month products. The tech is dead simple, infra is cheap, and most of us here could rebuild one in a weekend. So as a “principle experiment” I built my own today as a side project and priced it at 1 dollar. Just because if something is cheap to run and easy to replicate, it should be priced accordingly, and it’s also fun marketing. 1$ feedback tool. Shipped today, got the first users/moneys today, writing this post today. Side Sunday project, then back to the main product tomorrow.
Dec 2025 · onedollarfeedback.com
- 17SH
Jan 2026 · petegoldsmith.com
- 18AC
2019 · docs.google.com
- 19TS
Some interesting posts/comments. Meteor (April 2012) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3824908 Codecademy (August 2011) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2901156 Kimono Labs (Jan 2014) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7066479 Firebase (April 2012) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3832877 Dropbox (April 2007) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 Watsi (August 2012) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4424081 Heap Analytics (March 2013)…
2014
- 20
Fifteen years of Show HN: the thirty-four repeat fliers and the top ten of every year. Volume 2 of 2.
20h ago · artifactbin.dev
- 21
From side project to $100K ARR - Actionable insights weekly
Jun 2026 · superframeworks.com
- 22
- 23TP
Hi HN, I am a CTO/Founder usually stuck in "development hell" on long-term projects. To fix my perfectionism, I started a challenge on Jan 1st: Ship 12 startups in 12 months. This is Project #01: TierWise. The Problem: Most SaaS founders price for the US/EU market. Charging a flat $49/mo excludes huge segments of users in LATAM, India, or Southeast Asia where purchasing power is lower. Building a custom GeoIP/PPP logic for every side project is a distraction. The Solution: I built a drop-in JS widget that detects the visitor's country and calculates a discount based on…
Jan 2026
- 24QO
Hi HN, A while ago I had a mildly depressing realization. Back in 2010, I had around $60k. Like a "responsible" person, I used it as a down payment on an apartment. Recently, out of curiosity, I calculated what would have happened if I had instead put that money into NVIDIA stock. I should probably add some context. For over 10 years I've worked as a developer on trading platforms and financial infrastructure. I made a rule for myself - never trade on the market. In 2015, when Bitcoin traded about 300 usd, my brother and I were talking about whether it was a bubble. He made a bold claim that…
Feb 2026 · shouldhavebought.com
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Refine with a description →