Which side projects make over $10K/month now?

Which side projects are actually making over $10K/month now?

Several genuinely small internet businesses are making more than $10,000 per month today, including Voicy, ScreenshotOne, AudioPen, 750 Words, SocialCrawl and portfolios built around products such as AI Directories.

The interesting part is how small some of these businesses still are. Voicy, Kourosh Ghaffari's voice-dictation software, currently shows about $11,700 in Stripe-verified MRR on TrustMRR, with roughly 1,400 active subscriptions. ScreenshotOne, Dmytro Krasun's screenshot API, was above $25,000 MRR with more than 800 paying customers when Krasun gave Indie Hackers his latest detailed numbers. AudioPen, Louis Pereira's voice-to-text tool, has recently been reported around $15,000 a month. Buster Benson's private journaling site 750 Words was producing about $26,000 per month from roughly 5,800 paying members in his latest detailed disclosure.

A few newer businesses have joined them. Selene Lee told Indie Hackers that SocialCrawl had reached about $12,500 per month after four previous products failed. Sergiu Chiriac said his collection of internet products usually brings in more than $10,000 per month, with AI Directories alone generating $9,500 during a recent record month.

So there is a real group of small products making five figures every month. The harder question is how many still deserve to be called side projects.

Product	Latest useful revenue figure	What it sells	Current situation
750 Words	~$26K/mo	Private journaling membership	Founder now full-time
ScreenshotOne	$25K+ MRR	Screenshot API	Founder's main focus
AudioPen	~$15K/mo	AI voice-to-text tool	Solo product
SocialCrawl	~$12.5K/mo	Social-data software	Founders went full-time
Voicy	~$11.7K MRR	Voice dictation	Still alongside a day job
AI Directories portfolio	$10K+/mo	Startup-directory services and tools	Small founder portfolio

Are these really side projects, or are people stretching the definition?

Most $10K/month "side projects" are businesses that started on the side and later became full-time, so calling all of them current side projects gives the wrong impression.

750 Words is a perfect example. Buster Benson created the journaling site while building plenty of other things, then spent years working at companies including Twitter, Slack, Patreon and Medium while 750 Words largely looked after itself. Benson eventually decided to work on it full-time once the business was already around $20,000-plus per month.

ScreenshotOne also began from Krasun's long-running attempts to build independent products, but he now calls it his passion and his only focus. SocialCrawl started while Lee and her cofounder were doing full-time academic research; Lee left academia once the company became serious. AudioPen began as a half-day experiment and was initially run alongside Pereira's family's offline business, although recent accounts increasingly describe AudioPen as his main online business.

That leaves a much stricter category: products still producing at least $10,000 per month while their founder keeps a separate full-time job. We can verify examples, but there are far fewer of them than internet lists usually suggest.

Can someone still make $10K/month from a side project while keeping a full-time job?

Yes. Voicy currently gives us one of the cleanest examples of a side project above $10K MRR that still coexists with regular employment.

Ghaffari describes himself publicly as a senior product manager while building Voicy as a solo business. TrustMRR recently showed approximately $11,700 in recurring monthly revenue, around 1,400 active subscriptions and more than $20,000 of total revenue collected over the preceding 30 days. The recurring figure matters more here because Voicy also sells lifetime plans.

Ghaffari has separately published a month in which Voicy generated $18,699 of revenue while salary and contract work generated another $8,162. That combination makes the case unusually useful: the product revenue and outside employment income existed at the same time.

Examples such as Voicy prove that five-figure side-project revenue can coexist with a job. They also show why we should be skeptical when a list contains dozens of supposed $10K side hustles. Once we insist that the founder must still have a separate primary job, the pool shrinks dramatically.

Why do $10K/month side projects so often turn into full-time businesses?

A side project making $10,000 or $20,000 every month gives its founder both the money and the workload to reconsider the day job.

Benson's experience with 750 Words is unusually revealing. The site sat around $20,000 monthly revenue for years while receiving limited attention. Benson eventually went full-time, pushed revenue toward $26,000 and set a $50,000 monthly target. He had reached the point where giving the business more attention had a credible financial payoff.

SocialCrawl followed a faster version of the same path. Lee and her cofounder began building products alongside academic jobs in 2024. Four attempts failed. Lee left academia in 2025, and their fifth product subsequently climbed to about $12,500 per month.

The threshold also changes what the founder has to manage. A product with hundreds or thousands of paying customers creates support requests, payment problems, infrastructure work and marketing decisions. At $500 a month, neglecting the product for a week may barely matter. At $15,000 a month, the opportunity cost gets much harder to ignore.

That is why genuinely part-time businesses above $10K per month are less common than businesses that crossed $10K on their way out of being side projects.

What kinds of side projects are making over $10K/month?

Small software utilities dominate the strongest current examples, especially products that handle one repetitive task people already understand.

ScreenshotOne turns webpages or HTML into images through an API. Voicy lets people dictate text into their computer. AudioPen turns rambling voice notes into cleaner writing. SocialCrawl sells access to social-platform data. AI Directories helps founders distribute products across startup directories. 750 Words charges people to maintain a private daily-writing habit.

None requires the customer to learn an entirely new behavior before understanding the value. Someone already wants a screenshot, transcription, social dataset, product distribution or private writing space. The product makes that existing job easier.

Narrow utilities have a structural advantage here. They can reach meaningful revenue with a relatively small customer base because the customer already knows why the tool might be worth paying for.

Do you need thousands of customers to make $10K/month from a side project?

No. B2B side projects can reach $10K per month with a few hundred customers, while cheap consumer products usually need thousands.

ScreenshotOne illustrates the first model. Krasun reported more than 800 paying customers alongside revenue above $25,000 MRR. That works out to more than $30 in monthly revenue per customer on average, before allowing for differences between plans and usage charges.

750 Words sits near the opposite end. Benson reported roughly 5,800 paying members generating about $26,000 per month. The standard plan costs $5 per month, with a $10 higher tier. Its economics depend on a large group making small, recurring payments.

Voicy falls between those examples. TrustMRR recently showed around 1,400 active subscriptions supporting approximately $11,700 MRR. The average recurring subscription contribution is therefore only around $8 per month, although one-time lifetime purchases push total cash revenue higher.

The customer count needed for $10K monthly revenue is mostly a pricing question. At $100 per customer, 100 customers can theoretically get a product there. At $5 per customer, the founder needs around 2,000.

Are simple side-project ideas really reaching $10K/month?

Yes. Some of the strongest five-figure businesses we found can still be explained in one sentence, even after years of development.

AudioPen started during a 12-hour building challenge. Pereira made a simple interface that let someone speak and receive cleaned-up written text. Starter Story was still reporting roughly $15,000 a month from the product recently.

ScreenshotOne began with an equally narrow promise: send it a webpage and receive a screenshot. The infrastructure eventually became much more complicated as the customer base grew, but the customer's reason for buying it remained easy to understand.

AI Directories came from Chiriac repeatedly doing an annoying task himself. Every time he launched a product, he submitted it to directories. He eventually turned his internal process into something other founders could buy. According to his recent Indie Hackers interview, AI Directories generated $9,500 during a month when his whole portfolio made $15,700.

The takeaway is pretty simple. A $10K/month product does not need a complicated premise. The implementation may become complicated later, but customers should usually understand the useful part quickly.

How long does it actually take a side project to reach $10K/month?

Reaching $10K per month can take anywhere from roughly a year to more than a decade, and the current examples make any universal "90-day side hustle" formula hard to take seriously.

Voicy reached $10,000 MRR roughly a year and a half after launch, according to Ghaffari's public milestones. SocialCrawl reached about $12,500 per month after its founders had already spent more than two years experimenting across a succession of products. ScreenshotOne took about four years to climb above $25,000 MRR.

AudioPen moved faster. Pereira built the first version in 12 hours and had a product generating about $15,000 monthly within roughly a year, helped by an existing online audience and unusually strong launch traction.

750 Words gives us the other extreme. The product existed for well over a decade before Benson began actively pushing revenue again. It spent years around $20,000 monthly revenue before reaching roughly $26,000.

Those paths have almost nothing in common in calendar time. What repeats is the number of iterations. Pereira had already built about 15 unsuccessful internet projects before AudioPen. Lee and her cofounder failed with four products before SocialCrawl. Krasun had repeatedly tried entrepreneurship before ScreenshotOne worked. The successful project often looks fast only when we start the clock after the founder has accumulated years of failed attempts.

Product	Rough path to the reported level	What happened before the win
Voicy	~18 months to $10K MRR	Built alongside a product-management job
SocialCrawl	Product #5 over ~2.5 years of building	Four previous products failed
ScreenshotOne	~4 years to $25K+ MRR	Founder had tried several businesses
AudioPen	~1 year to ~$15K/mo	Founder had built about 15 previous projects
750 Words	More than a decade	Long periods with minimal founder attention

Does "$10K/month" always mean $10K of recurring revenue?

No. Some side projects make $10,000 in a good month without having anything close to $10,000 of true MRR, so we need to look at how customers pay.

AI Directories is a good current example. Chiriac recently reported that his portfolio usually produces more than $10,000 per month and hit $15,700 in one record month, with $9,500 coming from AI Directories. He also explained that most of his products use one-time payments. That is real revenue, but next month's sales have to be won again.

Voicy shows the distinction clearly from another angle. TrustMRR reports approximately $11,700 MRR while recent 30-day revenue has been substantially higher because the business also takes one-time payments. Both numbers are valid; they answer different questions.

Subscription products such as ScreenshotOne give us a cleaner recurring base. Usage charges can move monthly collections around, but more than $25,000 MRR represents revenue already tied to active customers rather than a single successful launch.

So whenever someone claims a side project "makes $10K/month," one more question matters: does $10K arrive again if the founder makes no new sale next month?

Does a $10K/month side project actually leave the founder with much money?

Often yes, especially for software, but $10,000 of revenue can still produce very different owner income depending on contractors, advertising and computing costs.

Voicy provides an unusually detailed example. In one public monthly breakdown, Ghaffari reported $18,699 in product revenue. He also disclosed roughly $1,690 of API costs, $4,550 paid to employees or freelancers, $1,326 of software costs and $1,300 of advertising. The business therefore had meaningful expenses despite being founder-led.

AudioPen appears leaner. Recent profiles continue to describe Pereira as running the product with no large team, while the basic service is built on external transcription and AI infrastructure. ScreenshotOne also remains intentionally small even though its technical stack has become more involved.

Revenue screenshots skip this part. A $10K MRR API with inexpensive infrastructure and low support can be an excellent one-person business. A $10K app buying thousands of dollars of ads or paying several contractors every month may leave far less behind.

For a side project, profit and time requirements are usually more revealing than the revenue headline alone.

What actually pushes a side project from a few thousand dollars to $10K/month?

The founders who crossed $10K usually found one distribution channel that kept working, then spent far more time exploiting that channel than inventing new features.

Voicy is a strong recent case. Ghaffari created pages around very specific searches such as voice typing in individual apps instead of relying on broad articles about dictation. Search became a meaningful acquisition engine, while earlier customers had come from communities and forums where he could solve individual problems directly.

ScreenshotOne took a different route but reached the same basic realization. Krasun has said that understanding exactly who he was selling to changed his marketing, pricing and product decisions. Reddit worked for him, but he cautions that the channel itself is less important than repeatedly testing until one source of customers proves useful.

750 Words grew in a slower, almost accidental way. Word of mouth and search kept sending people to the product during years when Benson barely marketed it. More recently, he has tested Reddit ads, SEO and referrals as he tries to move beyond the roughly $20,000-$26,000 range.

Building gets disproportionate attention because it is visible and fun to talk about. In these businesses, distribution was usually the harder part.

Has AI made $10K/month side projects much easier to build?

AI has made it dramatically easier for one person to ship useful software, but the recent $10K/month examples still show that finding customers is harder than creating the first version.

The current crop contains plenty of AI products. Voicy relies on transcription and rewriting. AudioPen combines speech recognition with AI-assisted rewriting. SocialCrawl emerged from a series of AI product experiments. Chiriac built several AI products before AI Directories became the main earner in his portfolio.

Yet those same founders supply the counterweight to the easy-money story. SocialCrawl followed four failed products. Pereira had spent years shipping products before AudioPen became his breakout. Chiriac's recent account is largely a story about discovering that distribution was harder than development.

AI has compressed the cost of experimentation. A founder can test five ideas faster and with less engineering help than before. The evidence gives us much less reason to believe that AI has compressed customer acquisition by the same amount.

These days, producing software is becoming less scarce. Getting enough people to care remains the bottleneck.

Is it better to build one side project or a portfolio of small products?

A portfolio can increase the chances of finding a winner, but recent five-figure portfolios usually depend heavily on one or two products rather than ten equal successes.

Chiriac is a good example. He builds several products and recently reported portfolio revenue above $10,000 per month, yet AI Directories generates the lion's share. During his $15,700 record month, that single business contributed $9,500, or about 61% of the total.

SocialCrawl emerged from the same portfolio logic in a different form. Lee and her cofounder built four products that failed to gain enough traction before product number five reached about $12,500 per month.

The portfolio approach works best as a way to run multiple experiments without assuming that the first idea has to succeed. Once something clearly works, the economics start pulling attention toward the winner.

That pattern also explains why the phrase "portfolio of side projects" can be misleading. Many founders have several live URLs. Most of the money tends to come from far fewer businesses.

How trustworthy are all these $10K/month side-project claims?

The best $10K/month side-project claims are credible enough to use, but we should still avoid treating founder interviews as audited financial statements.

Voicy currently has stronger evidence than most because TrustMRR connects directly to Stripe and displays MRR, recent revenue and active subscriptions. ScreenshotOne's latest detailed figures come directly from Krasun in Indie Hackers. Benson disclosed the membership count and revenue of 750 Words himself. SocialCrawl and AI Directories likewise come from detailed recent founder interviews.

Evidence gets weaker when a third-party blog repeats an old figure without establishing whether the business still earns that amount. It becomes weaker again when "MRR" is casually applied to annual payments, lifetime deals or one-time product sales.

There is also obvious survivorship bias. Indie Hackers, Starter Story and founder communities naturally feature people whose products worked. We do not see comparable interviews with the enormous number of people who launched something and earned $0, $100 or $500.

The useful reading is narrower. These examples prove that tiny products can currently generate $10K, $20K or more per month. They tell us almost nothing about the probability that a random new side project will get there.

Which $10K/month side projects look most convincing today?

Voicy is the strongest example of a genuine current side project, while ScreenshotOne, 750 Words, AudioPen and SocialCrawl are stronger examples of what successful side projects can become.

Voicy wins the strict test because we have recent verified recurring revenue above $10,000 and clear evidence that Ghaffari still has separate professional work. Very few examples satisfy both conditions so cleanly.

ScreenshotOne is especially convincing as a small-business model: more than $25,000 MRR, over 800 paying customers and one narrow API. 750 Words shows the durability side of the story, having survived for years around five figures per month before Benson returned to working on it full-time. AudioPen shows how quickly a very focused AI utility can grow after launch. SocialCrawl gives us a fresh reminder that the winning business may arrive after several failures rather than from the first idea.

AI Directories deserves a slightly different label. Chiriac's portfolio clearly exceeds $10,000 in strong months, but much of the revenue is transactional rather than recurring. We would classify it as a five-figure small internet business rather than use it as clean evidence of $10K MRR.

Example	Does it clear $10K/mo?	Still genuinely "on the side"?	Evidence strength
Voicy	Yes	Yes	Very strong: recent Stripe-verified data
ScreenshotOne	Yes	No	Strong: recent founder disclosure
750 Words	Yes	No	Strong: founder disclosed members and revenue
AudioPen	Yes	Borderline / evolved	Good: repeated founder and interview disclosures
SocialCrawl	Yes	No	Strong and very recent founder disclosure
AI Directories portfolio	Yes in total revenue	Small founder business, but mostly one-time sales	Good, with revenue-quality caveat

So can a side project really make more than $10K/month today?

Yes. A side project can absolutely make more than $10,000 per month today, and Voicy proves that the strict version of the claim is still possible while the founder keeps a normal job.

The broader evidence goes further. ScreenshotOne, AudioPen, 750 Words, SocialCrawl and AI Directories show that remarkably narrow internet products can reach five-figure monthly revenue without venture funding or large teams. A screenshot API, a private journal, a dictation tool or a directory-submission service can be enough.

What we should reject is the much looser internet claim that there are endless passive $10K/month side hustles requiring a few hours on weekends. The strongest businesses we reviewed took repeated experiments, years of accumulated experience or sustained work on distribution. Several founders left their jobs once the products became large enough.

Five-figure side projects are real. Five-figure businesses that remain casual side projects are rare. The most realistic path we found is to start with something narrow enough to build beside a job, find a repeatable way to acquire customers, and accept that if it works extremely well, the project may eventually become the job.