I made $2500 from indie projects in 2022

Update: I mistakenly included some music app income from last year due to an incorrect filter setting. I've updated the numbers and the graph.

It has been a fun year for side projects. This year my indie apps made $2500 USD. I also hacked on a lot of open source code, doodled a fair few drawings, and started a new sci-fi lo-fi beats music project. \o/

The side project income is $3800 in my local currency, which is a whole single-digit percentage of what I used to earn as a full-time freelance developer. It's enough to cover a few weeks of family expenditure on food for hungry kids etc. This is tremendously motivating and it feels worthwhile to invest more of my working hours into these projects.

Here's a spreadsheet showing the breakdown of where the revenue came from:

The interesting thing here is all of the revenue came from projects that I barely worked on. The "Git days (2022)" column shows the number of days for each project on which I made a git commit. On average this works out to something like "part time days of work". As you can see the vast majority of the income came from work I did in previous years. That's the very definition of passive income!

The mobile music apps continued to grow from last year despite the fact I didn't do any work on them at all. More on this below.

Roguelike Browser Boilerplate steadily made one sale per month, again even though I didn't touch the code at all or do any marketing.

Hosted Gitea gained a surprising number of customers this year. This is likely due to the articles I wrote at the start of the year which helped a lot with SEO. I have been putting some dev time into Hosted Gitea again recently. I realized I owe it to the current customers to add the features it needs to become a product I am proud of. Next year I expect it will make a bit over double what it made this year. I decided to donate all of the profits from this year to the Gitea open source project and I hope to donate again next year.

Jsfxr Pro was the for-profit project that I put the most work into this year. I spent many days working on it and I only just shipped. Signups have been gradual but I have had good feedback from the people who are using it so far. There is a very long TODO list of important features to implement but I am going to take a break from it while I figure out priorities and see how it grows organically in the coming months.

The most useful numbers from the spreadsheet are RPM and RPTD.

RPM = "Revenue Per Mille" and it measures the revenue per thousand visitors. It's basically a measure of marketing leverage. How much is it worth to point 1000 people's eyeballs at the product page for each app? If an app has a high RPM it means I don't have to do as much marketing (which I don't enjoy) because a smaller amount of marketing gets a larger amount of revenue, relatively speaking. A low RPM means I would have to do a lot of work on the marketing side to get enough people to the product page to make it worth doing. So high RPM means more time coding and less time marketing which is what I want.

RPTD = "Revenue Per Total Days" which is how much revenue the thing made this year, divided by the total number of days on which a git commit was made ever. So it shows how much bang-for-buck in terms of my own dev time I get from that particular thing each year. If something has a high RPTD it means I got more revenue for less work. Note that for most of these projects I did no work this year so they have a yearly revenue-per-git-day of infinity!

This year I got a nice strong signal because the numbers are big enough to be meaningful. Putting those two measures together I can see that PO LoopSync has a high RPM and a high RPTD and is somewhat evergreen. It continues to make money even though I am not working on it or marketing it. So the universe is telling me to make more music apps, especially those with pocket operator sync.

Luckily I really enjoy building simple music apps. So I am going to listen to this strong signal. For the first quarter of 2023 I am going to work on on two new pocket operator music apps (I already started actually). In between working on those I will continue to push Hosted Gitea forwards incrementally. In short I am doubling down on what is working.

Overall it was a super fun year working on apps and music and drawing this year. I look forward to doing the same in 2023. Catch you then for another jaunt around the sun!