- Improvely (<a href="https://www.improvely.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.improvely.com</a>) and W3Counter (<a href="https://www.w3counter.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.w3counter.com</a>) are my SaaS apps and make about $600K ARR. I check the support e-mail twice a day on weekdays and once a day on weekends. There's typically less than 20 minutes a day of work. One day a week I block a few hours to hack on new features or tweak ads or something productive.<p>- I have a couple open source projects, and hosted "webmaster tools" type projects, with one-page websites like <a href="http://www.daterangepicker.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.daterangepicker.com</a> that get ~10K visits/day, and run one AdSense ad on each page, which brings in a couple hundred dollars most months.<p>- I run a web store where I resell another company's products (with permission) targeted at a different customer group than their own website. I advertise it on Google AdWords and Bing Ads on just a handful of keywords. Fulfillment is automated through the other company, so I haven't touched the store except to update the design every few years, and it brings in $500-$1000/month in profit. Sorry, don't want to link to this one, too easy to copy.<p>- Dividends from stocks and high-dividend-yield index funds are totally passive. But first you have to earn and save the money to invest in them. I also have some money in REITs, investing in real estate without having to buy and manage the real estate.<p>- I used to run some referral ads on my sites for a merchant account provider I used 5-10 years ago. A couple businesses signed up through those links and still use that company for their credit card processing. The commission agreement was a lifetime residual based on their monthly processing volume... I'm still getting $100-200 transferred into my bank every month from that company even though I haven't been referring anyone to them for years.
I have to be honest here. Posts like this kind of confuse me - you're basically asking people to either share their secret sauce so others can copy it, or to provide vague descriptions that won't help overly much building your own passive income.<p>Anyway, I'll get this started even though it's not what you're probably looking for: my best passive income is rental properties. I purchased a small house in Florida that is now renting for all costs + a few hundred a month, and will be adding a second property in a few months. It's about as low-maintenance as a SaaS side business and required basically zero marketing to get a "user".
Unfortunately, all of the best moneymakers probably won't get shared, because the people don't want competitors.<p>I don't have any real passive income, myself, but one of my buddies has a pretty sweet setup.<p>He wrote a bunch of trading bots that would automatically perform arbitrage between all of the bitcoin exchanges. He wrote a variety of bots with different strategies, and then he would lease them out to people and take a cut of the profits (in addition to doing his own arbitrage trading with his extra money). From the sound of it, he was making some serious cash (like thousands of dollars a day).
<a href="http://www.ferryschedules.co" rel="nofollow">http://www.ferryschedules.co</a><p>As someone who commutes via ferry, I got sick of checking the official schedule of my ferry because it's not mobile friendly and was slow. Then I noticed more of the official schedule sites are typically in pdf, slow, not optimized for mobile devices or all of the above. So I've been slowly putting some of the schedules on this site over the past week. While not fully passive, the schedules will only have to be updated a couple of times per year since they change fairly infrequently.<p>It is just monetized via Google Adsense right now, but already paid for itself with a couple of ad clicks and when all said and done it should be some decent beer money every month.<p>Next steps are to learn how to automate the monitoring of the official schedule sites, so I can automate the updating of my site to match the official schedules. That would make it more passive.
Most of my income currently comes from:<p>1) ~45% - Two hand-selected ads on a major developer website. These were individual deals with the companies placing the ad.<p>2) ~5% - Ad network ads on two websites.<p>3) ~45% - Rental income from my house on AirBnB.<p>I wish I could say that these were clever projects or startups, but I haven't yet found a "traditional" software side project that makes money. I have one that's been running for a little over a year, although I haven't figured out how I want to actually charge for it. People are just using it on a free tier right now.
Dash (<a href="https://www.dash.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.dash.org/</a>). Currently return is just over 10% ROI per Master Node (just a full node Bitcoin client running on a server for a few $$ a year). Aside from the 100%+ increase in the currency since I bought it, running five Master Nodes nets about $10,000 a year of passive income.
I have an ad-supported informational site that provides some healthcare data, which is updated annually. I have found that some refresh occurs with Google search rankings for data like this. We are still only talking about hundreds of dollars each month with my offering, but I believe this annual cycle has helped my site compete with some of the longer-standing competition. I've noticed a similar trend with a seasonal sports site I have. There seems to be a window of opportunity each year if you are able to craft your SEO to take advantage of search spikes specific to the season/year.<p>And these are truly passive in the sense that the hard work of building the site is done, and I only have to do a quick updated once each year and then sit back and rake in ... hundreds!
Should active projects really considered passive income?<p>I'd consider passive something that requires virtually no involvement: stocks, bonds, real estate, etc
YTD by revenue:<p>Stock > Job > Books > Affiliate Websites<p>Stocks are auto-invested each month.<p>Job is not passive.<p>Books were written a while ago. Some by me most by others. Probably a couple hours a week evaluating how they're doing. Sometimes I'll do sales, etc. Less passive as I'm trying to grow their revenue.<p>Affiliate websites are all 100% passive at this point. I automatically generate content for them. Maybe an hour or two updating the VPS/WP.
After 3 months the visually lossless image optimization tool Optimage (<a href="http://getoptimage.com" rel="nofollow">http://getoptimage.com</a>) I'm developing in my free time has started to bring ~200$/month. Hoping to resolve the last performance issues and launch a server edition.
Hopefully a brand new blog talking about my half-baked and fully-baked projects from past and future, in that cultivating a more public profile for my not-so-many years to come.
I can buy a coffee at the end of the month with <a href="http://www.learn-2-type.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.learn-2-type.com</a>