11 Side Project Ideas for Developers (and Which Ones Actually Make Money)
Most developer side projects are resume decoration. These are sorted by whether there is a paying buyer underneath or just a nice GitHub star count.
The fun part of a side project is the code, which is exactly why most of them never make a dollar. The trap is building a tool you would use, shipping it to other developers who also want it for free, and calling churn a marketing problem. The ideas below are split by whether a real buyer pays or whether you are building a portfolio piece with no business under it.
1. Chargeback dispute automation for Shopify stores
PromisingAuto-assembles the evidence packet and files the dispute when a store gets a chargeback.
Read the full teardown →Why it works. It touches revenue directly, so you can price it as a cut of recovered money and the ROI is obvious on day one. Store owners pay for anything that protects cash.
Watch out. You live inside Shopify and the payment processor's dispute rules, both of which can change under you without warning.
2. Self-hosted analytics dashboard for indie SaaS
CrowdedA privacy-friendly, embeddable metrics dashboard developers can drop into their own product.
Why it works. Real demand from indie hackers who want MRR and funnel charts without wiring up a data warehouse.
Watch out. Your buyers are developers, the most price-sensitive audience alive, and half of them will fork your open-source version instead of paying. Expansion revenue is thin.
3. Yet another link-in-bio page builder
TrapA single page of links for a creator's social bio, with a slick editor.
Read the full teardown →Why it works. Enormous top-of-funnel demand from creators searching for a Linktree alternative.
Watch out. Linktree and a dozen clones give it away free, it is one screen with nowhere to expand, and it is trivial to copy. This is a feature, not a company.
4. Cron-job and uptime monitor for small agencies
CrowdedPings the scheduled tasks and endpoints an agency manages for its clients and alerts when one goes silent.
Why it works. Agencies bill clients for reliability and will happily pay a small monthly fee to avoid the embarrassment of a missed cron breaking a client site.
Watch out. The space is full of established monitors (Cronitor, Healthchecks, UptimeRobot), so a generic version loses. You need a sharp agency-multi-client angle to stand out.
5. Stripe webhook replay and debugging tool
PromisingCaptures, inspects, and replays Stripe webhook events so developers can debug failed payment flows.
Why it works. A genuine pain for any team running Stripe, and the buyer is a company that already spends real money on payments infrastructure.
Watch out. Stripe keeps improving its own dashboard and CLI, so you are one product update away from being redundant. Narrow to a workflow they will not bother building.
6. Another habit tracker app
TrapA clean app to build streaks and track daily habits.
Read the full teardown →Why it works. Universal appeal and a satisfying thing to build, with healthy search demand around New Year.
Watch out. The market is saturated with free apps, retention collapses after week three, and willingness to pay for self-improvement is near zero. The people who would pay churn fastest once the novelty fades.
7. Status page and incident updates for WordPress hosts
CrowdedA hosted status page plus customer notifications, sold to the small hosting and agency shops running client WordPress sites.
Why it works. These shops need to look professional during outages but will not build it themselves. It is a clear back-office expense they can pass to clients.
Watch out. Statuspage and free alternatives anchor the price low, so you must win on the WordPress-host niche and integrations rather than features.
8. Automated PDF data extraction for bookkeepers
PromisingTurns the receipts and bank statements bookkeepers receive into clean, categorized line items.
Why it works. Bookkeepers spend hours on manual data entry and bill by the hour, so a tool that gives time back has direct, measurable ROI. They already pay for software.
Watch out. Accuracy is everything. One wrong number erodes trust permanently, and incumbents like Dext and Hubdoc own the category, so you need a niche or a price wedge.
9. API uptime and changelog tracker for developers
PromisingMonitors third-party APIs a team depends on and flags breaking changes from their changelogs.
Why it works. Real pain when a vendor ships a breaking change quietly, and teams with revenue feel it immediately.
Watch out. Hard to make reliable across hundreds of inconsistent changelogs, and developers will argue they can just read the docs themselves. Selling to engineers means fighting the build-it-myself instinct.
10. Code snippet manager for teams
TrapA shared library where a dev team stores and searches reusable snippets.
Why it works. Teams genuinely lose snippets in Slack and Notion, so the problem is real.
Watch out. GitHub Gists, Notion, and the IDE itself already half-solve this for free, and developers will not adopt a separate tool for something low-stakes. Adoption, not building, is where this dies.
11. Embeddable changelog widget for SaaS products
CrowdedA drop-in widget that shows a product's release notes and lets users react to updates.
Why it works. SaaS teams want to surface shipped features to drive activation, and the buyer is a company with a budget.
Watch out. Crowded with established players (Canny, Beamer, LaunchNotes) and it is easy to dismiss as a nice-to-have. You need a wedge tied to activation metrics to make it a painkiller.
Where the real openings are in Side Projects
The side projects that turn into income share one trait: they are sold to someone who runs a business, not to other developers who expect everything free and self-host the moment you charge. The fastest path to revenue is finding a narrow operational job inside an existing platform ecosystem (Shopify, WordPress, Stripe, a specific SaaS) where you can charge the platform's customers, not other engineers. Developer-tooling side projects look easy because you understand the problem, but they have the worst willingness to pay of any category, since your buyers can clone you in a weekend and resent paying for what feels like a script. The work that pays is usually boring: automating a manual back-office task, plugging a gap an incumbent ignores, or removing a recurring cost for a small business. Most attempts die not from bad code but from picking a buyer who was never going to open their wallet, so confirm willingness to pay before you write a line.
Got one of these? Find out if it holds.
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Side Projects ideas: common questions
What is a good side project idea for a developer who wants to make money?
Pick a narrow operational job for a business buyer, not a tool for other developers. The best ones touch revenue or save a small business measurable time, like chargeback recovery for store owners or data extraction for bookkeepers, because the ROI is obvious and they already pay for software.
Why do most developer side projects never make money?
Because developers build for other developers, the most price-sensitive and self-host-prone audience there is. The fix is to sell to someone who runs a business and treats your tool as a cost of doing business, not a script they could write themselves.
How do I validate a side project idea before building it?
Find where the buyer already complains, confirm they pay for a worse solution today, and run a landing-page smoke test or pre-sell before writing code. If you cannot get a single business owner to express interest, the build will not save you.
Which developer side projects should I avoid?
Anything a free tool or the IDE already does (snippet managers, habit trackers, link-in-bio pages) and anything sold purely to other engineers who will fork it. Those are portfolio pieces, not businesses.