Ask HN: How do you monetize personal code if it's not an "app"?
Hey HN,
I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately and wanted to ask — how do you monetize your personal code if it doesn’t really fit into a classic product or SaaS model?
For example:
* I have a trained ML model that solves a niche task really well — but turning it into a full-blown app seems like overkill.
* I’ve written a CLI tool that processes log files better than anything else I’ve found, but it’s too specialized to justify making a company out of it.
* I built a few small functions in different languages (Python, Go, Rust) that do neat things — data cleanup, API scraping, PDF generation — but none of them are “products” by themselves.
I’m exploring ways to package and expose this kind of work: maybe as paid APIs, small function services, or even “pocket FaaS” instances others can plug into.
Curious if anyone here has tried something similar — or if you’ve seen creative ways to turn technical tools or utilities into sustainable side income.
Thanks in advance for sharing ideas or examples!
IMO you don’t need to build a full app or company. You could just build a series of niche sites or properties. If your code solves a specific pain point really well, wrap it in a simple front end or paid API and let people use it.
Some possible ideas:
Micro SaaS: Turn it into a one-page tool (log parser, file cleaner, PDF transformer) with Stripe and add rate limits. People pay for simplicity.
Paid API: Use RapidAPI or Plain.com to expose it. Charge per hit or via metered billing. Maybe even a slackbot for some of these would make sense.
Productized utility: Sell it as a $49/month “done-for-you” service to whatever niche audience would benefit (dev teams, SEO people, lawyers, etc).
Digital bundle: If it’s CLI or script-based, package it up with a guide or demo on YouTube and sell on Gumroad.
You’re not necessarily building a startup, and that’s fine! just something useful enough for strangers to pay for which is more than enough
Exactly this.
People will pay for micro tools if they solve a problem.
Need to extract just 'text' from a webspage? Need to convert iPhone sized images to web sized images? Need to send sms but not that often?
Connecting dots is a lot easier than building each step. I'll happily pay $ for a tool if I don't have to build and maintain the function.
That’s a great advice,
Have you heard of any success stories where people made good income building micro-tools
Others have some great suggestions here, but my advice is - don't.
I don't mean this negatively, but your focus seems to be wanting to share cool shit you've done. a successful business sells a solution to a problem, and sometimes to solve the problem you actually sacrifice the cool shit ans just build boring code you've built 100 times before.
If you're super keen, pick a problen to solve and build a conpany. Open source all the above code on github and use it as a funnel with links back to your new company site. Then you can share the cool shit, no matter subgenre it is.
Don’t do this. When you open source stuff you want to monetize, people will take it and not pay you. This is not ideal, but real.
If you released the code do it under a non permissive, commercial license and add license key activation and telemetry. Don’t let anyone use it for free. If you want to be generous give people a temp SaaS free tier. Don’t trade your time and IP for Stars, trade it for dollars.
People will not reciprocate if you just give them avenues to free use. they will take, then act entitled if you ever charge. Keep it locked solid from the start.
That other thing to avoid is companies that try to use contracts or employment to rip off your IP because they assume that as you are a developer building stuff you’re an easy mark. Protect yourself from such abusers. Many “legitimate” companies use highly shady practices to try to exploit the individual selling good IP.
Just use one of the good ideas and productize the shit out of it. You got this.
Yeah, never open source your code. There are no benefits to it. I speak from experience.
1. Unless you have business connections and raised funding from people who do, open source wil not help gain any additional adoption or raise awareness of your project. This only worked in the past.
2. Hardly anybody who does happen to use your open source project will pay you. You need massive global exposure just to make a developers' standard salary... I remember for years Evan You who built VueJS was getting like $120k max in sponsorships annually (I think it was Patreon), at the peak... And VueJS was extremely popular at the time and being updated frequently... And companies got something (e.g. exposure) in exchange for the sponsorship.
3. It doesn't matter how good it is. Implementation details don't really matter. If your product is useful, some big tech company will build an inferior alternative but promote it like crazy. Nobody will even know your project exists. It doesn't matter if your product is better for many use cases; people won't know it exists so that fact is irrelevant.
4. At best, some big tech monopoly will use your open source code to train their AI to replace you in the marketplace or drive down your wages.
People like Linus, DHH, Matt Mullenweg, Solomon Hykes... Who made millions; are from a different epoch and different place too. Not happening anymore. Don't be fooled. They all had to move to Silicon Valley at some point. It's a big club and you ain't in it.
My advice is; if you can't sell it, keep your code and use for yourself and your friends/family.
Fine, I'll bite. I don't write code professionally anymore, but I occasionally bang out code to help me get shit done. It is of no monetary value to me or anyone else, and I'm more than happy to vomit it onto GitHub under WTFPL for anyone to use.
Anyone dumb enough to base a commercial product on it will have gotten what they deserve, and anyone with more time than money is welcome to use it for, well, whatever the fuck they want to. Anyone with the wherewithal to make big bucks off of it is only a couple hours ahead of starting from scratch.
If you're training an LLM, it's of middling quality at best. Take it. You're no better or worse off than if it wasn't out there.
Before you decide to keep your code for yourself, think hard about how much it's really worth. If the answer is very little, what do you really lose by letting anyone use it?
If all that one is concerned with is maximizing one's finances, then yes, you're entirely correct. A developer who takes the attitude of "fuck you, pay me" for the 80 line function they wrote that wraps some API to make it easier should never open source their code.
For anyone not taking these attitudes, the above comment author is either unfamiliar with, or familiar with and choosing to ignore, the point of the FOSS movement.
Yes but your project won't be sustainable without funding.
Unless you're already financially independent, won't be able to find the time to maintain it after some time.
Don't be fooled, somebody else will benefit from your work. Open source is for privileged fools who don't understand reality or human nature.
If you get into it with the mindset that it's for fun, you won't see it the same way in 10 years... Good chance you will be disgusted by the whole scheme. I have seen horrors which destroyed all illusions I had about the subject.
Almost nobody in open source nowadays really cares about code quality or engineering excellence. So it fails on that front too. It's a pointless status game. Only big corporate projects get any exposure nowadays. The others can't form communities.
> Open source is for privileged fools who don't understand reality or human nature.
I get what type of people you are refering to, but it's possible to be fully aware of the reality of human nature and nonetheless to choose open source. There are other business models, like selling consultancy services, educational materials and such, that work well alongside open source codebases.
In addition to this I’d say that the incredible abundance of amazing open source software and tools is a wonderful proof of a generous and collaborative human nature.
This is a reality not less valid than the capitalistic transactional worldviews.
> Yes but your project won't be sustainable without funding.
> Unless you're already financially independent, won't be able to find the time to maintain it after some time.
Okay...so it isn't "sustainable". So you stop maintaining it.
So what?
You made a neat thing. You had fun making it. You shared it with others because you thought it was neat, and maybe someone else found it useful too. That's the happy ending of a happy story.
Gasp, someone found your free software you published, and...profited using it? Darn that person! How dare they! Don't they know that each of us is supposed to start as an infant in the woods? No one should be able to benefit from any other person's work.
That's bullshit. Just make something you think is neat, let it out into the world if you think it's useful, and let it go and move on as soon as you don't care to maintain it anymore.
> Yes but your project won't be sustainable without funding
What project? Maybe the ML model OP has might be a decent amount of work. OP clearly has no project, just a collection of tools they could conceivably use in a project. People don't pay for code, they pay for solutions to problems.
If OP wants to keep the code to themselves then go ahead, your IP nobody cares. If OP wants to build an actual project to monetize the code that way then go for it. But the industry long ago decided that random code snippets that haven't been integer into a project just isn't worth the overhead of monetizing. Open source it or keep it to yourself.
Also, i think we have arrived to the point where publishing open source code becomes hard to sustain even from a moral perspective. Because it is immediately mined by AI giants, it does little but enforces and perpetuates the power of monopolies. Few people will see open source contribution from all but a few most prominent people - but AI mill will see everything.
"Just be rich, bro".
I created a niche CLI tool to clean messy CSVs. It was too small for a startup, so I made a simple landing page. Then, I shared it in forums and added a 'buy me a coffee' link. To my surprise, it brought in small but steady income. You can also bundle tools into a digital product (like a 'developer toolkit') and sell on Gumroad. APIs and microservices on RapidAPI or GitHub Sponsors also work if your tool solves a real pain point.
What’s the link to the csv tool?
The same Gumroad whose founder and CEO is working for DOGE? Hard pass.
My view on open source software and monetization thereof has changed a lot between when I was in my twenties and today when I’m in my fifties.
In the 90s, as a young man, my primary concern was paying bills. Now, I’ve kind of reached the point where I just don’t care. My most-used code¹ is released under the most permissive license possible. I have a github sponsor link which earned me in the low two figures last year and nothing so far this year. I treat any money as a pure bonus and just don’t worry about it.
⸻
1. finl_unicode, a Rust crate for character code identification and grapheme segmentation: https://github.com/dahosek/finl_unicode
You could make one "company" (which is just a few bits of paperwork) and then sell all the tools.
That being said, selling to developers is hard, you have to add a lot of value / save a lot of time before they're willing to pay. Or you need to solve a problem enterprises have at scale where your solution is cheaper than building it themselves.
Honestly, the only way I've seen people turn stuff like what you describe into income is giving it away for free, and then hoping it gets so popular that it gets you a better paying job.
Consulting is the way to make money from specialized tools and code that you can't or don't want to turn into market commodity. Make sure you charge for the value you deliver to your clients, not the time it takes you to run your tools for them. Look into value-based consulting, e.g. the book "Value-Based Fees" by Alan Weiss. I've been doing this with my own tools and tailored code for a good decade, sometimes pulling in multiple 6-figure projects in a year. Good luck!
I follow a sponsorware strategy: public version with basic features, paid version (monthly subscription) with more features. When a funding goal is reached (dollars per month), a subset of paid features become available to everyone. Paying users essentially fund the development of new features. I don't have any "app", only tools and libraries :)
Not everything needs to be monetized. Those kinds of things I just publish on a git repo somewhere to "give back" considering how much I benefited from others doing the same. That can also help you build personal brand and reputation, I guess.
If you do decide to charge for it (and no shame in that), could be nice if you also support people paying you anonymously via crypto.
> I built a few small functions in different languages (Python, Go, Rust) that do neat things — data cleanup, API scraping, PDF generation — but none of them are “products” by themselves.
Publish PIP packages, rust crates, and go gophers (?). You can call them `splime-utils` or something and it'll always be available.
Pro tip: cover it with a few unit tests, and every time you get a bug report add to your series of tests.
Okay, but how does that lead to monetization?
It doesn't directly, a small collection of functions isn't worth paying anything for. When taking money there's a lot more expectations on the author. However, as the project and author becomes more known, the author could still collect donations through sites like patreon, buy me a coffee or Github sponsorships.
And don't forget to respond to bug reports / implement feature requests in a timely manner..
If anyone here has successfully monetized something like this — small tools, niche models, clever functions — I’d love to hear how you approached it. Even if it didn’t work out, examples and lessons are super helpful. Let’s share ideas — maybe we can figure out some creative paths forward together!
A book?
https://github.com/codr7/hacktical-c/tree/main
If you want to see a really nice Qt cpp codebase that acts as a wrapper to a cli app, check out the gui variant Valkyrie.
It's hard to monetize it without doing a bunch more work.
I monetize my code for a living. I'd say about 25% of my time is the fun part of writing the code (that just works for me.)
The rest is in debugging the code for all the edge cases, writing docs, examples, training, support etc. In other words the "work" part.
Minimally you need to do enough so that someone can use the code. The code itself has minimal value, the value is in the using.
Then you need to figure out how to reach an audience.
Then you need to decide if the user will pay, or maybe it's ad supported. Or maybe donations.
Hint: unless you have a large audience this will result in very minimal income. Is all this extra work worth it?
You can Open Source it, but frankly its unlikely anyone will find it or use it. It might be an interesting line on your CV, bit again probably of marginal value there.
My advice is that if it has little to no value to others, just move on.
Well, the obvious answer is you turn it into an app. Why do you think there are so many web devs running around?
There are probably ways to shoehorn what you're doing into a SaaS if you're clever. Specialization of labor, baby!
I release it as open source and include it in my resume/portfolio. This has helped me get lucrative jobs. The resulting increased income is likely more than I would have earned selling these small projects by multiple orders of magnitude.
Of course, if I were making software with a wide market fit, or a very valuable narrow market fit, I would strongly consider starting a business. But my personal code generally solves very niche problems.
Semi related, is there any sort of service or type of professional that does mentoring/handholding of someone who has the core code that does something but who won't/can't take the steps on their own to make it a service or app they could sell?
Like someone to package up and sell your code and give you money in return? Isn't this software engineering employment? (Sorry, couldn't resist)
But seriously, it does sound like a product person or sales person might be able to give you some useful direction.
Yeah to be more specific I mean I'm sure I'm not unique, there's a whole class of people who can create something easily but who don't have the personality or wherewithal or desire to sell it or pretend it could be a unicorn or seek out a formal co-founder.
But who'd be happier tending to the day to day of keeping their own service growing and running well than other kinds of employment.
Hello there.
Cool website, thanks!
Hey. I'll check out your site.
How timely, good day to you!
Oh hi.
Paid APIs are definitely a thing. Payment gateways do this.In the LLM era you can do this too - lots of data processing to be done.
But compare Aider/Claude Code with Cursor. One is much more popular than the other two despite being similar quality. GUIs are there to lower the learning curve.
In this era, it's not too hard to make a simple app in a day with AI as well. Cursor goes much faster than Flutterflow or Bubble. The bar is higher too - you now probably need a prototype before a pitch deck. It's probably not scalable, but that's prototyping for you.
Sounds like you want to make an "app store" for the kind of FaaS that you've developed.
Maybe the industry has moved forward but from 2010-2015 when I was interested in this sort of thing there seemed to be a zillion products aimed at the API economy, some venture backed, some of which spent an fortune on annoying ads and blog sponsorship (spam?) which supported numerous "I could care less" and "nice to have" features but none addressed the problem of billing people and taking payment for an API -- the one feature which you need to have a business.
If you haven't already, check out: https://codecanyon.net/, you can sell scripts
Starting a business selling software is actually a big job. Even giving code away with OpenSource licensing brings liability risks.
You'll need to find a business model that pays enough to keep your product going.
Maybe you need a suite of micro tools, sold as a single package, that can earn enough to pay for the business costs.
What liability risk does opensource licencing have ?
Honestly wrapping code in a front end is enough of an “app” experience that people don’t care as long as it brings value. Perfect case I ran into last week, I had to convert a legacy .pst outlook file to .eml for new outlook. Only a handful of these tools exist and I picked the one that had a front end and a nice looking installer. $110 to that company for something I will likely never use again.
Just look at the work to date as a portfolio for your resume and go get a job with someone that will pay you and perhaps give you some small amount of equity. You don’t have the skills to sell. Move on
Just do the things that are overkill. Distribution is a blocker to money. Anyone who will do the app and use you on the backend is strongly incentivized to cut you out eventually.
Release it for free and use the clout to promote yourself in other ways that make money directly.
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> it’s too specialized to justify making a company out of it
How do you know? Did you try?