How to Earn Money with your Side Project

As a general equivalent, the price is used for measuring the value of an object or a service. As long as your side project manages to help someone, whether it's paid or not, it is of value.

Common Strategy

There are some common strategys for transitioning from a side project to a paid service:

  1. When your product is yet known by others or immature, provide it for users free of charge. (But you'd better tell them it won't be free forever, in order to give them a psychological expectation)
  2. Polish your product according to early users' feedback to accumulate seed users.
  3. When the product is mature enough and has enough users, find a reasonable pricing method and republish it. At this time, the possibility of publishing and paid conversion rate will be relatively high.

Charging Tools

It might be much too tiring to access the payment system. For instance, you may be unwilling to spend two days on Stripe, you only spend two days on your side project after all!

But please at least consider the easiest way to get paid: accepting sponsorships. The only thing you need to do is to attach the sponser link to your side project.

I still remember the joy when my side project first received sponsorship after so many years, it was a feeling that what you did was really recognized.

Some Commonly-used Sponser Platforms:

If your side project receives sponsorship, it is an affirmation of its value. When you make it more useful, it provides users with greater value. If you want to make it a "Major Project", you can choose the following payment systems:

  • Stripe (Worldwide, Hong Kong or international bank card needed, Low rates)
  • Gumroad (Worldwide, Available in China, Easy set-up)
  • Paddle (Worldwide, Available in China, Relatively high rates)
  • Coinbase commerce (Worldwide, Available in China, Pay with cryptocurrency)
  • MBD (China)
  • WechatPay/Alipay (China)
  • Wechat Store (China)

Common Paid Patterns