Your best passive income? (2014)

Not much has changed since the last thread. Improvely (<a href="https://www.improvely.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.improvely.com</a>) is still in the 5-digit monthly RR range and growing, and I do no outbound marketing other than some PPC ads that don&#x27;t need much active management. Everything that can be automated has been automated (onboarding, lifecycle mails, dunning mails for billing issues, etc), leaving me free to spend all my time on support and improving the product.<p>Two things that fit the &quot;passive&quot; mentality that have been picking up steam recently:<p>1) I offer an affiliate program with a revenue share commission (upfront bonus plus 10% of the referred customer&#x27;s payments for a year). A couple of my best customers have become my best affiliates, recommending the product on industry blogs they write for regularly. It doesn&#x27;t get better than having excited customers marketing your product for you. In the early days the affiliate program wasn&#x27;t doing much at all, now it&#x27;s a meaningful contributor to subscriber growth.<p>2) I&#x27;ve been running Improvely long enough now (just over a year) that some of the clients are growing their businesses significantly. I&#x27;ve got quite a few marketing agencies on board, and they&#x27;re picking up new clients and adding them to their accounts. As their business grows, and their usage grows, they upgrade to plans with higher usage limits. Same customer base, higher revenue per customer. In the beginning, a new customer was worth $30ish per month. Today that&#x27;s over $70&#x2F;m per customer on average.

A few years ago, I wanted to build an oscilloscope in my pocket, so I went ahead and did it. Then I wanted a spectrum analyzer, and then an equalizer.<p>1) oScope — an oscilloscope in your pocket. <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/oscope/id344345859?mt=8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;itunes.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;app&#x2F;oscope&#x2F;id344345859?mt=8</a><p>2) Octave — a real-time audio analyzer. <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/octave-an-rta-for-the-iphone/id386083594?mt=8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;itunes.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;app&#x2F;octave-an-rta-for-the-iphone...</a><p>3) Fourier — a spectrum analyzer. <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fourier/id386084557?mt=8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;itunes.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;app&#x2F;fourier&#x2F;id386084557?mt=8</a><p>I built all of these for fun in college, and I&#x27;ve occasionally updated them afterwards. The only thing I do now is answer a few emails a week. I&#x27;ve since gone back to grad school, but the yearly income has not changed, and approaches my stipend (low 5-digit).<p>What&#x27;s been really neat is how people have found unexpected ways to use the apps. Sound engineers for halls and communities use Octave to set up the sound for concerts. Teachers use oScope to help kids understand how sound is composed of moving pressure waves of air, and how pitch is the frequency of these waves. Also, oScope had a tiny cameo in the show Homeland, as a &quot;fancy science-looking analyzer tool for spying on people&quot; (uncredited, unfortunately).

I&#x27;ve got a job where i do almost nothing. It&#x27;s my passive income.

I have been working on my Google Map Gps Cell Phone Tracker for several years now. Recently, I updated the project to include tracking for Android, IOS, Windows Phone and Java Me&#x2F;J2ME phones. The project allows you to track a phone periodically (every 1, 5 or however number of minutes) and display them in real time on Google maps.<p>You can also save routes and display them later. I use google adsense on my website and also on youtube. I have been averaging about $600 per month in revenue. Now that I have done this update (which took a few months), I suspect that my adsense income is going to increase dramatically. If you want to learn more about my project, here is the landing page:<p><a href="http://www.websmithing.com/gps-tracker/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.websmithing.com&#x2F;gps-tracker&#x2F;</a><p>I&#x27;m 53 now and I&#x27;ve been a software contractor for the past 17 years. Because of the economy and my age, I was having an increasingly difficult time getting contracts. It&#x27;s hard to compete with young programmers who can work a lot faster than you and at a much cheaper rate. So I decided it was time to step out on my own. It has been very challenging, a little frightening (ok, a lot frightening), but I am making slow progress.<p>Today, I was very happy to find out that my project was nominated for &quot;Project of the Month&quot; on Sourceforge. It&#x27;s been downloaded about 8000 times in the past 4 days and has gotten 24 5-star reviews. If you have an account with Sourceforge and have the time to look at my project, would you please vote for me if you feel it&#x27;s worth it?<p><a href="https://sourceforge.net/p/potm/discussion/vote/thread/7d522915/?limit=25#b8f0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sourceforge.net&#x2F;p&#x2F;potm&#x2F;discussion&#x2F;vote&#x2F;thread&#x2F;7d5229...</a><p>Thank you. I appreciate the help and let me know if you have any questions.

My iOS app that teaches you what a tesseract is and lets you manipulate it in 3D and 4D.<p><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-fourth-dimension/id504201783?mt=8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;itunes.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;app&#x2F;the-fourth-dimension&#x2F;id50420...</a><p>It blows my mind that people still find out about this app and happily buy it every day even though it occupies such a small geeky niche.

I run Built With Bootstrap (<a href="http://builtwithbootstrap.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;builtwithbootstrap.com</a>). It&#x27;s making 4 figures a month at the moment.<p>It&#x27;s mostly passive income as I spend no more than a few hours per week actually working on the site. Though I spend considerably more monitoring the stats and feeds etc etc<p>My biggest win with this site is the extremely low cost to run it - something I want to talk about more if anyone&#x27;s interested. My only real regular cost is the domain name! Pretty phenomenal for a site that continues to attract thousands of visitors per day :) a model I&#x27;m proud of and hopefully can continue!<p>But of course, all standing on the shoulders of giants! Many thanks has to go to far more talented people than me... both for the site&#x27;s foundations and it&#x27;s popularity.

For me it&#x27;s still residential real estate.<p>Between 2010 and 2012 or so I picked up some condos here in San Diego at short sale for about 1&#x2F;3 of what their price was a few years earlier. I get about 1.5% of their purchase price every month in rent. At the same time, the property values have appreciated so the rents are starting to increase as well.<p>The longest I&#x27;ve had any of them vacant was about two weeks and that was only during the time I was replacing carpet, appliances, furnace, painting walls, fixing stuff, etc.<p>To make it completely passive I have a property manager (I live in the area, but I value my time). That along with HOA fees and real estate taxes eat into my bottom line, but combined it&#x27;s only about 1&#x2F;5 of the monthly rent.<p>These properties allowed me to quit my job, self-fund my company, and I&#x27;m actually putting money away every month. Go figure.<p>I&#x27;m not a real estate expert, but if you have any basic questions feel free to get in touch (contact info is in my profile). As background, I bought my first house at 21 and owned 5 homes by the time I was 27 (I&#x27;m 29 now). I was in the military until a few months ago, so I didn&#x27;t make a whole lot, but I&#x27;m pretty good with money and invested wisely. I didn&#x27;t grow up with much, so I learned what not to do with money. I&#x27;m also pretty deliberate about how I spend my money, which is different than being frugal.

Why does everybody list books, webapps and mobile apps as passive income? I hope you created them yourself. Then they are not passive income but a product. Like every product they have a lifetime, then you need a new product. Therefore you actually have a first or second active business and not a passive income. &quot;Passive income&quot; is rent for condos you own, or having shares in your friend&#x27;s profitable business that yields dividends etc. or did I completely misunderstand the meaning of that word?

50€&#x2F;month with adsense and amazon affiliates. It demands from me 5 minutes each day (or 4-5 hours each month, so it is not exactly passive...). It&#x27;s a niche blog about architectural models: <a href="http://archimodels.info" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archimodels.info</a> that I started as a hobby to learn about web development. I know that i&#x27;m near the bottom in the hierarchy of passive income but anyway I&#x27;m leaving my 2 cents.<p>Tips:<p>- I agree with cdaven. Good content is better than SEO, but you only take the fruits 1-2 years later. Use your expertise. It is much easier&#x2F;faster&#x2F;more rewarding if you blog about something you are an expert.<p>- Adsense is ugly but is the fastest way to monetise a blog. I was making 15€&#x2F;month before adsense and now I have slightly less traffic. Text ads or images ads? If you have an text intensive blog go for image ads and for an image intensive blog go for text ads.

I know this isn&#x27;t entirely passive, but I occasionally rent my spare room on AirBnB. I&#x27;m quite clear that it&#x27;s a basic room and if they use the kitchen etc. they need to clean up after themselves - this isn&#x27;t a hotel I&#x27;m running... So there&#x27;s basically no work to do other than cleaning the bedsheets, which I do as part of cleaning my bedsheets anyway... I do this for a maximum of 1week&#x2F;month, which gets me roughly £4000&#x2F;year and since it&#x27;s tax exempt in Scotland (under lodger laws), it&#x27;s the easiest money I&#x27;ve ever made.

My book &quot;Mastering Modern Payments: Using Stripe with Rails&quot; continues to sell well, in the $2k range per month. It&#x27;s not exactly passive, though, as I write blog posts and develop other related content in the same theme.<p><a href="https://www.petekeen.net/mastering-modern-payments" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.petekeen.net&#x2F;mastering-modern-payments</a>

I&#x27;m currently earning around $45-60 a day mining cryptocurrencies with a little over $5000 in hardware. Once setup it&#x27;s completely passive.<p>Edit: ROI could be improved a bit on this too since I intentionally bought hardware that was good to experiment with rather than optimizing ROI.

I&#x27;m making negative 15 USD&#x2F;month hosting two side projects:<p><a href="http://srctree.net" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;srctree.net</a> - A pastebin with version control <a href="http://blocksim.net" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blocksim.net</a> - A poor man&#x27;s online simulink-like thingy<p>I am aware that there is a _lot_ of room for improvement in both services, but the fact that nobody uses it at all is not very motivational.

A stupid app, called That&#x27;s Not Funny, that I wrote in 2008 or so to teach myself Android programming (when v1 came out) continues to make around $40 a month from ads.<p><a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vbrad.android.notfunny&amp;hl=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;play.google.com&#x2F;store&#x2F;apps&#x2F;details?id=com.vbrad.andr...</a><p>I wrote it, released it, then to my surprise, it got a pretty massive amount of downloads. Over the years, I&#x27;ve updated it to new versions of the OS, but very minimal work.<p>Not a lot of money, but it wasn&#x27;t a whole lot of effort either. It covers the internet bill.

I have a quite simple web site with some calculators for taxes and stuff, that I originally built in 2007. The Google AdSense and affiliate income has grown from about $1000 per year to almost $1000 per month.<p>It is &quot;passive&quot; in the sense that I respond to the occasional e-mail (once a month), update the data once a year, and add another calculator when I feel like it.<p>A few years back, I was in the same position with another (online casual gaming) website, that I sold for 2.5x the yearly revenue. Looking back, I should probably have kept that site as well.<p>Pro tip: quality content beats SEO in the long run. Be the tortoise.

Current passive income for me - blog and niche sites with articles (ads e.g. <a href="http://www.flagshipstorelondon.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.flagshipstorelondon.com&#x2F;</a>), e-commerce business (sales), ETFs (investments), and teaching a skill.<p>Flagship stores - I went around taking pictures of the best of the best stores for the top retail brands in London and made a directory. Created page on Blogger.<p>Ecommerce business is my best passive income. It&#x27;s a physical product I really wanted so I made it. It&#x27;s a map of London but made in the historic style. <a href="http://www.wellingtonstravel.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wellingtonstravel.com</a><p>I still need to spend time on it because I am customer service, legal, accounting, finance, marketing, IT, R&amp;D, and operations. I have outsourced manufacturing and fulfillment to someone I found on <a href="https://sortedlocal.com/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sortedlocal.com&#x2F;</a> and Amazon&#x27;s FBA. It&#x27;s great because it&#x27;s more money and something I&#x27;m passionate about but it definitely takes 5-7 hours a week.<p>The teaching one is interesting in particular because it leverages your strengths, improves your communication, and is probably something you really enjoy since you took the time to get good at it (i.e. sailing, swimming, kettlebell workouts, or even English). I wrote a post about teaching English (<a href="http://www.taigeair.com/websites-to-help-you-teach-english-online/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.taigeair.com&#x2F;websites-to-help-you-teach-english-o...</a>) for people who complained they couldn&#x27;t find a job so did nothing all day, but they could be teaching a special skill which is what I did when I became unemployed. I learned code, created a few websites, interviewed, and taught swimming.<p>And rental income is good but definitely, not very passive...<p>Lastly, I&#x27;m developing a really cool website for helping people sleep which I can see being profitable.<p><i></i>I&#x27;d like to hear how much time you spent or are spending on these side projects. Also I heard babies are a time and money sink. So I&#x27;d be interested in hearing about people doing side projects&#x2F;passive income with kids.

My free-to-play Solitaire web app, at <a href="http://www.solitr.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.solitr.com&#x2F;</a>.<p>It&#x27;s making a bit over $1,000 in monthly ad revenue. Traffic is at ~3k dailies.<p>I did this as a weekend project 2 years ago, and at some point migrated my blog to it to pick up DomainRank. Other than that I&#x27;ve mostly left it alone.

I created the app 3dweapons for Android about 2 1&#x2F;2 years ago. (<a href="http://www.3dweapons.net" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.3dweapons.net</a>) The free version was downloaded &gt;1.7 million times. The paid version around 8k times.<p>I added adds from multiple sources (mopub, admob etc) and in app purchases.<p>For the paid app: In the top months (2 years ago) I made around 800 euro. But it dropped to 90 euro per month currently. For in app purchases: I am making 30 euro per month currently. For ads: Making about 200 euro per month currently.

If you&#x27;re looking for some dropshipping insights (which the OP&#x27;s link suggests), here&#x27;s a nice story: <a href="http://www.ecommercefuel.com/selling-an-ecommerce-store/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ecommercefuel.com&#x2F;selling-an-ecommerce-store&#x2F;</a>

At first I started with a Blogspot with a bunch of cat gifs and a couple of Google ads. Once I earned enough money to buy a domain name for this project, I bought <a href="http://catgifpage.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;catgifpage.com</a> and designed a cheap-but-fun interface for the visitors I targeted.<p>As I am more a “dog” person, I decided one year (and about 1000€) later to open <a href="http://doggifpage.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;doggifpage.com</a>. It increased a bit my incomes but not so much. As you may know, the Internet loves cats, cats and cats! In 2013, I earned almost 4000€ for about 10 fun hours of gif gathering!<p>I have some plans for 2014 but I want to keep this project fun and certainly not time-consuming.

1) Selling Elon Musk t-shirts: <a href="http://www.zazzle.com/elonmuskspaceman" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zazzle.com&#x2F;elonmuskspaceman</a> Did not make that much but was great fun.<p>2) Helping my artistic friends selling their products. If you want to sell designer products, you can sign up here: <a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1dmyfzRwBbpcKAyRplHs0i2RMqsCykRdZ7oJnBvZh2ZA/viewform" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.google.com&#x2F;forms&#x2F;d&#x2F;1dmyfzRwBbpcKAyRplHs0i2RMqsC...</a>

I created and sold Stickonspy (<a href="http://stickonspy.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;stickonspy.com</a>) just after mid last year. The initial month I launched it did pretty well as the NSA news was still a pretty big deal. All in all it&#x27;s made me &lt; £1k but it&#x27;s been great fun to build and ship a product from scratch. I&#x27;ve shipped to around 12 countries too which is cool. I also spent no money on marketing.<p>I&#x27;d say my time - which was evenings after work - investment was around 3-4 days initially and then fulfilling orders is simply writing a customers address and posting the stickers - which if the demand was bigger I&#x27;d probably outsource.<p>It&#x27;s been great. I&#x27;ve learnt a shit tonne &amp; the conversations it started has given me an idea for a similar product which I&#x27;ll be focusing on very soon!

A website promoting ebooks about seduction : <a href="http://www.ebookseduction.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ebookseduction.com&#x2F;</a> (in french, english version coming soon) It&#x27;s not a big business but it is good pocket money considering it takes me few hours of work per month.

I created a web game called Pit of War (<a href="http://www.pitofwar.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pitofwar.com</a>) about three years ago and it has been generating enough monthly income to pay all my bills and affords me the ability to travel and live anywhere I like. It isn&#x27;t completely passive but that is because I choose to add new features and updates. It is a niche game but the Internet is a big place with lots of people. :) Books like The Long Tail and The Curve have taught me that you don&#x27;t need to have the #1 product in an industry to make a good living.

I&#x27;m going to toss this out there - I&#x27;ve considered building an affiliate site in the porn space. I&#x27;ve looked at a couple API&#x27;s and it looks easy. However, I have never built anything in this space - I just hear that there&#x27;s money to be made so have been tempted. Let the flogging begin!

Income is often called passive but essentially there is always something you need to do, monitor, improve or change in order to keep cash flow steady. If you don&#x27;t, your income will decrease over time until reaching zero. It is surely easier to maintain &quot;passive income&quot; than to start from scratch.

I make $0.70 cents (1 sale) every month from my iOS puzzle game: <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/simpl/id672601351?ls=1&amp;mt=8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;itunes.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;app&#x2F;simpl&#x2F;id672601351?ls=1&amp;mt=8</a><p>In a few months I&#x27;ll be able to buy myself a coffee! =)

Bought the app Sleep Cycle Calculator from its previous owner. Completely redid the interface for iOS 7, and I&#x27;m now finishing up a version with a custom UIView.<p>I paid a designer to completely redo the interface, but then iOS 7 happened. Lost a lot of customers with the transition, because I had to throw away the new design and start again.<p><a href="http://appstore.com/sleepcyclecalculatorwakinguprefreshed" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;appstore.com&#x2F;sleepcyclecalculatorwakinguprefreshed</a>

My first source of passive income came this year. It&#x27;s an app for rooting (and then fixing some problems on) a modem used for U-Verse(<a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.earlz.nvg510fixer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;play.google.com&#x2F;store&#x2F;apps&#x2F;details?id=com.earlz.nvg5...</a>). I&#x27;ve only made a handful of $100 bills with it, but the extra income is welcome.<p>The amount of work I&#x27;ve actually had to do was really quite little. I had to do initial development, and then fix some bugs. Then, it just sat there and brought in $5-20 a day. Eventually AT&amp;T patched the original exploit I used for root access so I had to do research and development to find a new one and implement it, which took about 2 weeks or so. And since then, it&#x27;s just been sitting there bringing in bits of money. I plan on adding some often requested features over the next month though<p>Also, I provided the app only for convenience. The information on how to root the modem for free is published freely on my blog, I just provide the app because I know that the steps required are too complicated for many people

It will sound banal, but Bitcoins I bought year-and-something ago.

I own&#x2F;operate a luxury resale business that specializes in high end womens fashion, art, cars, and collectibles. My only time expense is picking up the items... everything else I have automated. On a good month I can clear $10K+ and on a bad month $2-3K. I do all this without any advertising and the primary selling point of my business is thats its discreet and anonymous.

Created a PHP ad server &#x27;mySimpleAds&#x27; at <a href="http://www.clippersoft.net" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.clippersoft.net</a> and continue to maintain support it. Brings in some money monthly to help with credit card bills. I get some referals from SO and the like, but also spend $ on Adwords. Last year created a hosted SAAS version at <a href="http://mysimpleads.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mysimpleads.com</a>, but hasn&#x27;t really taken off.<p>As always with my products - marketing and getting more people to see them is always a big problem. Once they use them, customers like them - it&#x27;s getting them to the site to even see them.<p>I&#x27;m in the process of re-writing mySimpleAds and adding in a bunch of stuff, but I don&#x27;t know if it will still be stuck in neutral and not bring in the folks. I&#x27;ll also plan to write more products, figuring maybe that will bring people in.

Oh well, it&#x27;s hardly an income but I created a rhyming dictionary years ago where one adsense container pays for all my personal hosting bills. <a href="http://rhymebox.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;rhymebox.com&#x2F;</a> <a href="http://rhymebox.de/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;rhymebox.de&#x2F;</a>

Few bitcoin Antminers. They are paying as much as I&#x27;ll be earning at my new job I&#x27;m starting with the beginning of the February. I basically cloned myself in terms of income by buying them. They should pay for themselves in 3-4 months. I&#x27;m not sure if that&#x27;s passive income or capital gain though.

I made a super simple paid Android app with a list of interesting Physics Puzzles (<a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.boredominnovations.physicspuzzles" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;play.google.com&#x2F;store&#x2F;apps&#x2F;details?id=com.boredominn...</a>). Took a month to make and now it is completely passive. Brings in some spare change with zero maintenance (~$50&#x2F;month).<p>I built this in 2011 to learn app development (its a webapp built using PhoneGap). Took about a month of evening&#x2F;weekend work to push out, and most of that time was consumed by collecting and creating interesting puzzles. It was featured on Google Play&#x27;s Top Paid Educational Games leaderboard for a while, and that contributed to a spike in income. That apart, I haven&#x27;t done&#x2F;don&#x27;t know of any viable means to promote it.

I have been running a simple career site for Marines for the last 2 years, and have now slowly grown to capture about half the Marine Corps monthly. It slowly drags in $400 a month and has been creeping up to the 5k mailing list mark. I work on it about a day a month, if that.

My first Android app: Scratchpad <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.avabodh.scratchpad" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;play.google.com&#x2F;store&#x2F;apps&#x2F;details?id=com.avabodh.sc...</a><p>I made it to learn Android development. It took me total of 5 days: 2 days to learn basic android stuff then next two days to develop this app and on last day creating dev account and publishing on Android store.<p>After publishing I forgot the password of signing key I used, so I never updated this app except for a description change. Initially there was almost no revenue but it increased over the time as the download count increased. After two year(of publishing), it is giving me around $70&#x2F;per month through ads (admob).

I have great expectations of my DogeCoins!

$100+&#x2F;mo (through adsense and affiliate programs) from <a href="http://assembleyourpc.net" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;assembleyourpc.net</a> - a simple tool for assembling pc online. I spend 1-2 hours per month on some tweaks&#x2F;updates.

My app and side project &quot;lolipop&quot;. An &quot;instagram for gifs and funny images&quot;-niche app. 100k + downloads.<p>Gotten hugely popular in Norway. Released a revamped iOS 7 version to the US last week (?). Things are going slow over there. Not even reached 1000 downloads.<p>Traffic always spike during 23:00 - 03:00 when kids should be sleeping... 99% of users lurk and browse reddit&#x2F;9gag&#x2F;imgur some contribute (no account needed for browsing).<p>Link for the lazy: <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lolipop-funny-images-gifs/id523423502?mt=8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;itunes.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;app&#x2F;lolipop-funny-images-gifs&#x2F;id...</a>

Running Hammer for Mac (hammerformac.com), our web-development OSX app. On a good day we might hit $100+ profit (after Apple&#x27;s cut). Some days we don&#x27;t get anything. It&#x27;s rewarding to know that people are using it.

I wrote a book titled &quot;Expert PHP Deployments&quot; on how to deploy any PHP application using Vagrant, Capistrano, and Phing.<p><a href="http://growingsoftware.org/expert-php-deployments/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;growingsoftware.org&#x2F;expert-php-deployments&#x2F;</a><p>It hasn&#x27;t made me rich, but it usually sells about a copy a day. I love that it&#x27;s entirely passive. I wrote it, published it, and it just sits there on my website making money.<p>It&#x27;s also been a good way to build a list of people who would be interested in other things I make.<p>PS. Use coupon code &quot;hn&quot; for $2 off if you&#x27;re interested.

I wrote a sci-fi short novel that received a good feedback (surprisingly not at Amazon, where nobody has reviewed it). It&#x27;s placed at the iBookstore and the Kindle store, and it sells some units from time to time:<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/value-memories-Carlos-Paramio-Danta-ebook/dp/B009SHVSZ2" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;value-memories-Carlos-Paramio-Danta-eb...</a><p><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/en/book/the-value-of-memories/id573698565?mt=11" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;itunes.apple.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;book&#x2F;the-value-of-memories&#x2F;id573...</a>

A silly project for playing with Unicode (sıɥʇ ǝʞıl) and ASCII Art. About 900 visits per day, 10€ per month income. Almost pays for the server.<p><a href="http://lunicode.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lunicode.com</a>

I&#x27;ve got an iOS app that I&#x27;m lucky if I get a sale or two a day. It was really more of a project to teach myself how to build iOS apps and be an accompaniment to an ebook my GF wrote that sells fairly well. I guess technically it hasn&#x27;t &#x27;made&#x27; any money since we&#x27;re still in the red when factoring in the cost of the icon design, Apple dev account, etc.<p>I&#x27;m currently working on an app that is aimed at kids that should encourage them to write more and be creative. Hoping to get more traction with that.

I make some passive income off affiliate link blogs. Not a lot, varies widely per month.<p>I&#x27;ve been making extra cash lately by running bandit algorithms to optimize the click through rate, basically choosing the optimal call to action. I&#x27;ve got a wordpress plugin which does that automatically which I&#x27;ve just made public:<p><a href="http://bayesianwitch.com/wordpress/index.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bayesianwitch.com&#x2F;wordpress&#x2F;index.html</a>

<a href="http://pressbulgaria.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pressbulgaria.com</a> - it is a SaaS for sending press release to the media. This tool gives the citizens a lot of power to ring the alarm on certain problems. Also my customers use it as channel for promoting books, exhibition, events, etc<p>We have a tor hidden service for anonymous submissions. We offer free service for whistleblowers, that want to stay anonymous (and can&#x27;t pay us).

At the end of 2013 I launched <a href="http://www.comedylib.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.comedylib.com&#x2F;</a>. It&#x27;s a site with curated Youtube videos of comedians, comedy shows and comedy movies.<p>I built this out of my passion for comedy and because I wanted to have only comedy videos in one place and not the mix that Youtube offers. It&#x27;s not making any money yet, but I haven&#x27;t put much effort into promoting it so far.

I wrote a trading simulator app for iOS. It&#x27;s not a huge earner, but does give me some pocket money. It&#x27;s not exactly passive either since I still develop on it, but I would probably be doing it anyway - the fact people buy it is just a bonus.<p><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/spoof-trader-trading-simulator/id560758114?mt=8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;itunes.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;app&#x2F;spoof-trader-trading-simulat...</a>

<a href="http://www.dicerealm.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dicerealm.com</a> makes me minus $5 per month, but it was mostly an experiment to validate some of the advice from Start Small Stay Small (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Start-Small-Stay-Developers-Launching-ebook/dp/B003YH9MMI" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Start-Small-Stay-Developers-Launching-...</a>), which is a fantastic book.

My gf did couple of CSS animations(icons, js components etc) over the years. Then we published them to Envato marketplace and got some monthly income around 100USD per month. See link (referral): <a href="http://themeforest.net/item/animated-404-or-maintainance-page/5957991?ref=aleksandrovamaryna" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;themeforest.net&#x2F;item&#x2F;animated-404-or-maintainance-pag...</a>

I made this PHP library about 5 years ago:<p><a href="http://zervaas.biz/escapianet/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;zervaas.biz&#x2F;escapianet&#x2F;</a><p>Probably make 2-3 sales&#x2F;yr which is always a nice surprise. It comes up first when you Google &quot;escapianet php&quot;<p>I also wrote a PHP book in 2007. I still get royalty cheques, although they&#x27;ve almost approached 0 - the last quarter was about $30 ;)<p>Most of my income now is from app sales.

I started wcfstorm (<a href="http://www.wcfstorm.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wcfstorm.com</a>) about 4 years ago. I started out with just 1 product and has now added 2 more. The income is pretty nice. It usually exceeds my monthly salary. I love it when some stackoverflow users recommend it to others when a question gets posted about WCF testing.

I had created <a href="http://notationtraining.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;notationtraining.com</a> in 2010 when I was learning how to play piano. I did update this project few times, but otherwise it is completely on its own. It makes only about 300 USD&#x2F;month but I am quite happy with it as I am not doing anything to promote it or anything else.

Nothing as of yet. I used to receive donations from my blog and some Windows programs I&#x27;ve written: <a href="http://www.softpedia.com/developer/James-Brooks-12392.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.softpedia.com&#x2F;developer&#x2F;James-Brooks-12392.html</a> but that seems to have dried up. I probably generated £100~ from all donations.<p>I&#x27;m now working on several iOS (<a href="http://james.brooks.so/contare-my-first-ios-app/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;james.brooks.so&#x2F;contare-my-first-ios-app&#x2F;</a>) applications (paid) however I do intend to offer free versions with iAds.<p>I&#x27;ve also got an Android app on the Play Store that&#x27;s made me a few quid; <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jbrooksuk.xcrate&amp;hl=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;play.google.com&#x2F;store&#x2F;apps&#x2F;details?id=com.jbrooksuk....</a><p>Apart from my iOS applications now, I intend to develop some SaaS apps that I can use to generate some more income.

I have a few things going on.<p>1. Income from ~5 non-fiction Kindle books for sale on Amazon. Around $100 a month, though at one point when I was more heavily marketing them it went up to $900-$1000. Would be great to spend more time on this and automate a system where I have a couple of assistants doing this for me around the clock (marketing and book creation).<p>2. Income from a single Youtube video which links to a simple blog (about solar power) with Adsense ads. I get about 50 cents to a dollar a day from this.<p>3. I used to work for a jewelry firm doing SEO, going into their office on weekdays. Had to quit later, so I asked if I could do the work from home and send a work log each week. They pay me $300 per week for simple social media and blog posts. I pay a girl in Pakistan (who has good English skills) $70 per week to do the work for me. She&#x27;s very good and I&#x27;m thankful to have her. They have no clue.<p>Feel free to PM me if you&#x27;d like to speak about these things &#x2F; wanna brainstorm.

Making $2-300&#x2F;month off Android apps (AdMob). Despite best efforts, this is dominated by a soundboard app. Not what I expected, but we&#x27;ll take it!<p>Internet yellow pages, www.ablocal.com, doing quite well. Can&#x27;t disclose metrics, but it makes more than you probably would guess.<p>Domain sales - again can&#x27;t disclose specifics, but in the $xx,xxx range this year from domains. Not a huge portfolio, but some good ones.<p>And we just launched Gold Plugins (last Friday), a membership club for our premium WordPress plugins. Hoping it will become a good vehicle, although we do pride ourselves on awesome support, so not that passive. Previously, we were selling these plugins separately, for about $1k&#x2F;month. No stats on the membership system yet.<p>Gold Plugins: <a href="http://goldplugins.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;goldplugins.com&#x2F;</a><p>I have some others, but nothing that&#x27;s making enough money to be interesting! I&#x27;ll add more if I think of them; we have a bunch of random properties.

I&#x27;ve had www.rickshawart.org for a now.. two years. Not making a lot of money, still a no-loss project, and a ethical, profit-sharing one =)<p>The structure is a tad special in that we have no fixed costs (apart from the hosting part).<p>Any feedback of course is appreciated - that&#x27;s really niche, and we&#x27;re wondering how to move forward when our product is that special.

I spent more than some time to create a Shopify admin app for Android, <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.shopify.admin" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;play.google.com&#x2F;store&#x2F;apps&#x2F;details?id=com.shopify.ad...</a>. It&#x27;s up and running and generates already some money each month (60$ - 100$). Zero marketing, just Google Play. I wanted the app to be so much better than it is right now but unfortunately Shopify will release their own Android app soon which will render my app useless. It&#x27;s quite devastating. So I consider this endeavor a failure. Now I am on the lookout for a new project idea. I think I will stay in the ecommerce realm since I like it very much and think it&#x27;s easier to make money with merchants than with ordinary consumers. In case anyone would like to team up, my email is in my profile ;)

I bring in 5-7k a year DJing and personal training. They&#x27;re technically &quot;work&quot; but I&#x27;m literally getting paid to live out my hobbies I already do for myself, which to me is passive income. I would, however, like to turn a programming side project into something that&#x27;s passive income.

Let&#x27;s see. There&#x27;s a few somewhat passive channels for us.<p>We just launched our product Blogvio (<a href="http://www.blogvio.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.blogvio.com</a>) which is yet break even. Right now we&#x27;re only partnering with platforms to white label our Editor and widgets, but we&#x27;ll soon release a pricing plan for all users of the website.<p>Our 2008 marketplace Flabell (<a href="http://www.flabell.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.flabell.com</a>) (flash products... I know) is still going strong, although we too think Flash is dead. People still buy those components, so we still provide support for them. We stopped advertising though a few years back. :-)<p>Same goes for our Flash Components on ActiveDen, these still sell a couple of hundreds every month. So it&#x27;s still passive income after 6yrs+. :)

12 years ago I started a vertical social network for schools. We tried to hustle and visited schools one by one to sign them up. It crashed. Hard. Over time it evolved into a simple school directory, and after 3 years or so, it started making consistently about $300&#x2F;month on AdSense. Revenue continued to rise (slowly), and now somedays it breaks $200&#x2F;day. In the last 10 years I&#x27;ve spent like a week at most on the site.<p>Weren&#x27;t it for years of stupid decisions (and a family, the one best decision ever though), I could almost live comfortably off of that.<p>Motivated by breaking $100&#x2F;day a few months ago and now $200, I&#x27;m using it as a sort of template to launch other sites. By this time next year I might actually break $10,000&#x2F;month and then finally relax :)

The Random Amazon Product Generator brings in enough for a small book purchase every few weeks. It&#x27;s still mostly for my own amusement. (<a href="http://thanland.com/projects/random-amazon/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;thanland.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;random-amazon&#x2F;</a>)

I made 10.35 BTC from mining dogecoins for the last month.

Rebrickable (<a href="http://rebrickable.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;rebrickable.com</a>) shows you what you can build with your existing LEGO collection, including hundreds of fan contributed designs. Not truly passive as I work on it every day.

I have 2 iOS apps that are selling something like 5 copies per day each.<p>One is an iOS text clipboard manager (with iCloud sync) <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/copycopy-clipboard-manager/id725292832" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;itunes.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;app&#x2F;copycopy-clipboard-manager&#x2F;i...</a><p>The other one, for the lazy students in the italian market, is a database you can use also offline of recaps from books you study in school, with in app purchases.. <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/iriassunti-riassunti-di-italiano/id574956492" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;itunes.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;app&#x2F;iriassunti-riassunti-di-ital...</a><p>They are both in the 4&#x2F;5 star ratings

I may have posted about this before, but <a href="http://askjud.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;askjud.com</a>, a simple trick that you can play on your friends makes around $300&#x2F;mo.<p>Its hosted on github, and costs $8&#x2F;yr for the domain name.

Not much to mine, but they seem to be doing pretty well.<p><a href="http://www.thingsunder15.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thingsunder15.com</a> and <a href="http://www.myfancysauce.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.myfancysauce.com</a>

Just in the middle of getting this up (was a way of teaching myself Rails) that works as an Affiliate style site for gadgets and cool gift ideas. <a href="http://fmhgifts.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;fmhgifts.com&#x2F;</a>

Earning low three figures with my Android apps[1]. Haven&#x27;t touched them since August, so I guess that counts as passive income. It&#x27;s even still building momemtum[2], so maybe if I had spent some money on marketing it would have grown faster?<p>[1] <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Smartician" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;play.google.com&#x2F;store&#x2F;apps&#x2F;developer?id=Smartician</a><p>[2] <a href="https://fbcdn-sphotos-h-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-prn1/t1/1545771_10151836107067014_2000335479_n.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fbcdn-sphotos-h-a.akamaihd.net&#x2F;hphotos-ak-prn1&#x2F;t1&#x2F;15...</a>

I&#x27;ll try to start an ecommerce for France, following the other ones who specialize themselves in just one kind of well made product, like socks (www.archiduchesse.com), or underpants (www.leslipfrancais.fr). Coming soon ;)

An IOS game I made 1 year back.. :) <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/royal-cribbage-lite/id591048477?mt=8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;itunes.apple.com&#x2F;ca&#x2F;app&#x2F;royal-cribbage-lite&#x2F;id591048...</a>

Hipster CEO - a tech startup sim. 6.5k downloads at $2.99 in the past 3 months.<p>www.hipsterCEO.com

<a href="https://www.bankaccountchecker.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bankaccountchecker.com</a> enable the validation of UK bank account (web app and API). It is not making loads of money but I get enough traffic to pay for summer holiday. I often get request for the logic behind the API. the sort code file is also selling well. I have created another saas service at <a href="http://www.conceptuel.co.uk/burnDown/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.conceptuel.co.uk&#x2F;burnDown&#x2F;</a> but there is not enough demand to make it a profitable passive income.

Somewhat different area, but earns me around $300 a month- Churning credit cards for rewards. So called “award&#x2F;travel hacking”. 2 new credit cards per calendar quarter, conservatively estimate each signup bonus is worth $600 (if you know how to redeem them, usually that means for travel).<p>Have to live in the U.S. and have good credit to do it, but I’ve been at it for a few years now and haven’t paid for airfares or barely any lodging costs on almost all my travel. Working on an online class that teaches how to do it, looking to sell that for some “real” passive income.

I recently started a jobs site that makes about 10 dollars a day in affiliate revenue and adsense. Rolling out a network of them.<p><a href="http://phjobs.org" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;phjobs.org</a>

Not nearly as successful as some of the other guys here but I have couple of avenues for passive income:<p>1) I make a few bucks a month off my reddit client: <a href="http://www.ruddl.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ruddl.com</a> - I pay $0 for hosting on Heroku so I&#x27;m more or less net positive.<p>2) I also make a few bucks off my blog in tips: <a href="http://jes.al/blog/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;jes.al&#x2F;blog&#x2F;</a><p>I&#x27;m working on ideas for a SaaS product or even a book to add to that list.

Made some custom maps based on OpenStreetMap designed for reading on the Kindle. Have made about ~€100 so far, but there&#x27;s a lot more I could do.<p><a href="http://www.kindle-maps.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kindle-maps.com&#x2F;</a><p>The books themselves: <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/s?_encoding=UTF8&amp;search-alias=digital-text&amp;field-author=Rory%20McCann" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.co.uk&#x2F;s?_encoding=UTF8&amp;search-alias=digita...</a>

I make about $400 a month quite passively by selling software with Envato. Just the occasional comment and email which takes 5 - 10 minutes a day at most. I also sell a beginners book on creating and selling WordPress plugins which only sells one or two a week.<p>I have a bunch of cool stuff out there but my biggest weakness is marketing. I can never seem to drive enough targeted traffic to my projects.

I spent 10 minutes creating this coffee mug and I&#x27;ve made about $80 selling them over the past year on Zazzle. I plan to add more soon. <a href="http://www.zazzle.com/go_away_im_coding_coffee_mug-168224001705050233" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zazzle.com&#x2F;go_away_im_coding_coffee_mug-168224001...</a>

At the moment I only have a source of passive income, which is through mining Litecoin with a couple miners I have.

Connecting product designers and entrepreneurs. Not really passive since we review the products and contact the designers.<p>Link: <a href="http://www.scscale.com/post/74753106293/new-business-ideas" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scscale.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;74753106293&#x2F;new-business-ideas</a>

I have just released <a href="http://selfstream.io" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;selfstream.io</a> - a platform for event organizers to host and live stream their events. Right now making a negative $25 for hosting, without counting a small ad campaign on Google Adwords.

I wrote a book on adult ADHD. I published it 3.5 years ago, and it brought in $75 last month.<p>It used to bring in more, but some people wrote very negative reviews which were upvoted, so its sales dropped.<p>I don&#x27;t feel too bad because many people who read it say it is unusually helpful and accessible.

SearchTempest.com got to the point where it was my main gig about 5 years ago, although it&#x27;s since leveled off. Like anything, you end up being pretty active if you want to continue making that &quot;passive&quot; income. :)

I make about $300-$500 a month on my Android app Valet. <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.valetapp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;play.google.com&#x2F;store&#x2F;apps&#x2F;details?id=co.valetapp</a>

<a href="http://PrimalPal.net" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;PrimalPal.net</a><p>5 $digits&#x2F;mo

The Music Virtual University (<a href="http://www.musivu.co" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.musivu.co</a>) does four-figure sales+RR monthly, a year after starting and just working nights&#x2F;weekends.

Im currently building a client proposal service specially for designers: <a href="http://nusii.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;nusii.com</a><p>Not getting much passive income yet but I hope 2014 will be our year :-)

I run a couple of language learning sites. Doesn&#x27;t make me rich but pays the rent. :)<p><a href="https://www.antosch-and-lin.com/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.antosch-and-lin.com&#x2F;</a>

I have an Android app that&#x27;s use to find local bus times for my area. It makes around 150$ per month after optimizing AbMob ads. It generated around 50$ per month at first.

Reading all the comments made me think the only passive income I ever had was my blog. Trough my blog I&#x27;ve got all the consulting opportunities and made quite a lot.

<a href="http://getkratom.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;getkratom.com</a> still, but as it has grown passive income has become a solid 20 hour a week grind.

I make around $200&#x2F;month from my crappy articles at <a href="http://ankitkumar.in" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ankitkumar.in</a> and affiliate marketing.

I made -20$&#x2F;month hosting<p><a href="http://uk.zapping.io" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;uk.zapping.io</a>

most of the comments relate more to residual income not passive income. I think passive income is mostly a fallacy and the only thing that comes to mind is saving accounts and bonds.

Your best passive income

Owning a flat in Moscow and renting it out? Easily 1000$&#x2F;mo. You can live in Thailand on that money.

Bitcoin :-)

anyone?