Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?
Building and selling macOS apps is a pretty good niche to be in right now.<p>I escaped my stressful corporate job 1 year ago and I’ve been living comfortably since then from app revenue only.<p>I’m making between $3.5k and $9k per month with <a href="https://lunar.fyi/" rel="nofollow">https://lunar.fyi/</a> and the smaller apps I create at <a href="https://lowtechguys.com/" rel="nofollow">https://lowtechguys.com/</a><p>It’s not much for some parts of the world.  But I’m well enough from this that I even took the time to build a small calendar app (<a href="https://lowtechguys.com/grila" rel="nofollow">https://lowtechguys.com/grila</a>) from which all the funds will go to my brother’s college costs so he can stop working 12h/day jobs.<p>Before this I tried creating paid web services but none took off. I realized I actually don’t use any indie web product after 8 years of professional coding. I’m only using web products from big companies like Google, fly.io, Amazon etc.<p>Desktop apps on the other hand, most that I use and love are made by single developers.<p>With the ascent of Apple Silicon, and the ease of SwiftUI, this has the potential of bringing a modest revenue while also being more fulfilling than a corporate job.<p>In case you’re curious how the code looks for something like that, here’s a small open-source app that I built in a single (long) day, which has proven to be useful enough that people want to pay for it: <a href="https://github.com/alin23/Clop" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/alin23/Clop</a>