I made dividend tracking website. I am a backend engineer, so the UI is simple bootstrap and I focus on having data I find valuable.
I've been working on it since I finished University, so it's like 7 years, and current MRR at $740 isn't great, but at least I don't have to pay for hosting (and financial data sources are expensive).
I believe that spare money should be invested in stocks, so I like that I work on something I use, and will be using in the following decades.
The website is DIGRIN.com (DIvidend GRowth INvesting), good value for free users as well IMHO.
decomissioning like this makes businesses focus more on traditional and big partners, as migration is expensive. More and more I realize, how many problems discontinued projects can cause. sustainability of the projects might be an advantage.
My MMR was on 538 EUR at the end of 2023. I am building not that visually pleasing, but hopefully a useful dividend portfolio tracker - digrin.com. I wrote a small summary here - https://lucas03.com/digrin-com-in-2023/
As it is important to me to reach financial independence, I realized most investors are tracking their portfolios in spreadsheets. As I was focused on dividend growth investing, dividends are high maintenance to track in a spreadsheet, especially for bigger portfolios. So thanks to dogfooding, I've been developing a website to track dividend income for the past 8 years. If I wouldn't be using it, I'd probably have abandoned the project a long time ago.
https://www.digrin.com/
If you are interested in investing in stocks, Joseph Carlson is a nice podcast. I would recommend starting from first few episodes, after some basics you might switch to recent videos.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbta0n8i6Rljh0obO7HzG9A
For me it's easy. I've been working on it for past 8 years, as it started as a school project and I have been slowly extending it. Why I don't care if it makes money? I keep the costs low. Why I don't care if it won't get attention? Hmm, I guess I do, positive feedback is always nice to hear. But I would be working on it even if nobody else would be using it, as I use it myself and I find it helpful for planning my future. Oh, it's digrin.com, portfolio manager for dividends.
It coded that website 8 years ago as a master's degree thesis. I am an investor myself, trying to achieve financial independence before retirement, so I kept using the site myself and hopefully will never stop. Stripe is there for the past year, I try to keep costs as low as possible. Only pay for a domain, hosting, and an affiliate program. It's a dividend growth investing tracker - digrin.com
Even after reading bunch of suggestions from fellow hackers, I would still focus on your view of the world and what assets have value to you.
My main core would be real estate and stocks. I find them safe, real estate more than stocks. Though stocks are connected to products that produce value. For retirement maybe DGI might be interesting.
then probably gold, diamonds, etc -> to store value, not to expect huge gains
p2p lending -> can do ~10% annually, but it's risky.
crypto - risky bet, as you are in software, small % might make sense. Choose the coin that makes most sense to you as a software developer
I am trying to build a SaaS myself, currently, it's at $80 MRR with minimal costs (single server). Though if I counted my time spent there and compared to the average salary, that project would be a total failure.
It's been probably 15 years since I started thinking how having a passive income covering living costs would be greatly liberating. I like FIRE movement, and was lucky enough to create a website for tracking dividends as my master thesis at the university. As any website requires time just to keep it running, I always knew I have to create a website that would be useful for me, so I don't lose interest in it and the project doesn't die after few months.
Financial independence is not that hard, it's just simple math on cash flow and how inflation and debt works. I knew dividends will be probably hard to beat long-term with other passive income, so I was pretty confident I would keep building a dividend tracking website for me, even if nobody else would be using it. I thought there must be a better way to track dividends than putting them manually on spreadsheets.
So how much time it took me to reach profitability? Probably a few years. I have not been asking for paid membership before that. I added a paid membership that was equal to free membership about a year ago. I called it supporter, as there were no upsides from paying for it. But some payments did come. And as I had new ideas, I started to bring these ideas to life only for paid memberships. Slowly it grows. I still want to have a usable free membership for the majority of users, but I think I would not be doing it forever for free.
So what I think works well? Find a community for a problem you are solving, so you get a lot of feedback and improve it all the time. Give paid membership to valued members in those communities - moderators, admins, youtubers, ... Be active on those reddits/facebooks, solving their problems and getting the users for your service. As the site grows, you can slowly implement more and more features for paid membership only, until you have a good free/paid ratio (up to you to decide ideal %).
Most importantly I still use it myself, for tracking my own portfolio - https://www.digrin.com/portfolio/24-dividend-growth-investin... and keeping an eye on my estimated financial independence year. I feel much better building a tool for myself and like-minded people, not just profit.
It's a stock portfolio manager focused on dividends.
I have been thinking about financial independence and financial literacy for years. How so many of us were never taught about the impact of credit card loans and inflation on our financial situation. So as I've read more about how a brand new car is the worst thing you can do with your money, I dug deeper into how money can make money.
As I started investing right after university, I thought the web would be a better way to track dividends automatically, instead of manual google spreadsheets. So this is my project I work on weekends mostly, trying to visualize dividend stocks and what passive income I can expect. It's always half baked project because there are so many exchanges and stocks that all have their own problems and it's hard to automate from free data sources.
I really like building the project I use myself! Hopefully, it will last!
These common excel spreadsheets used by investors are partly why I am writing my web application. It focuses on DGI investing and dividends in general and I have a lot o plans and room for improvements, but e.g. automatic dividend calendar must be 100 times better than keeping track of dividends in google spreadsheet manually :D