How do you monetize personal code if it's not an "app"?

IMO you don’t need to build a full app or company. You could just build a series of niche sites or properties. If your code solves a specific pain point really well, wrap it in a simple front end or paid API and let people use it.

Some possible ideas:

Micro SaaS: Turn it into a one-page tool (log parser, file cleaner, PDF transformer) with Stripe and add rate limits. People pay for simplicity.

Paid API: Use RapidAPI or Plain.com to expose it. Charge per hit or via metered billing. Maybe even a slackbot for some of these would make sense.

Productized utility: Sell it as a $49/month “done-for-you” service to whatever niche audience would benefit (dev teams, SEO people, lawyers, etc).

Digital bundle: If it’s CLI or script-based, package it up with a guide or demo on YouTube and sell on Gumroad.

You’re not necessarily building a startup, and that’s fine! just something useful enough for strangers to pay for which is more than enough

Others have some great suggestions here, but my advice is - don't.

I don't mean this negatively, but your focus seems to be wanting to share cool shit you've done. a successful business sells a solution to a problem, and sometimes to solve the problem you actually sacrifice the cool shit ans just build boring code you've built 100 times before.

If you're super keen, pick a problen to solve and build a conpany. Open source all the above code on github and use it as a funnel with links back to your new company site. Then you can share the cool shit, no matter subgenre it is.

I created a niche CLI tool to clean messy CSVs. It was too small for a startup, so I made a simple landing page. Then, I shared it in forums and added a 'buy me a coffee' link. To my surprise, it brought in small but steady income. You can also bundle tools into a digital product (like a 'developer toolkit') and sell on Gumroad. APIs and microservices on RapidAPI or GitHub Sponsors also work if your tool solves a real pain point.

My view on open source software and monetization thereof has changed a lot between when I was in my twenties and today when I’m in my fifties.

In the 90s, as a young man, my primary concern was paying bills. Now, I’ve kind of reached the point where I just don’t care. My most-used code¹ is released under the most permissive license possible. I have a github sponsor link which earned me in the low two figures last year and nothing so far this year. I treat any money as a pure bonus and just don’t worry about it.

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1. finl_unicode, a Rust crate for character code identification and grapheme segmentation: https://github.com/dahosek/finl_unicode

You could make one "company" (which is just a few bits of paperwork) and then sell all the tools.

That being said, selling to developers is hard, you have to add a lot of value / save a lot of time before they're willing to pay. Or you need to solve a problem enterprises have at scale where your solution is cheaper than building it themselves.

Honestly, the only way I've seen people turn stuff like what you describe into income is giving it away for free, and then hoping it gets so popular that it gets you a better paying job.

Not everything needs to be monetized. Those kinds of things I just publish on a git repo somewhere to "give back" considering how much I benefited from others doing the same. That can also help you build personal brand and reputation, I guess.

If you do decide to charge for it (and no shame in that), could be nice if you also support people paying you anonymously via crypto.

Consulting is the way to make money from specialized tools and code that you can't or don't want to turn into market commodity. Make sure you charge for the value you deliver to your clients, not the time it takes you to run your tools for them. Look into value-based consulting, e.g. the book "Value-Based Fees" by Alan Weiss. I've been doing this with my own tools and tailored code for a good decade, sometimes pulling in multiple 6-figure projects in a year. Good luck!

I follow a sponsorware strategy: public version with basic features, paid version (monthly subscription) with more features. When a funding goal is reached (dollars per month), a subset of paid features become available to everyone. Paying users essentially fund the development of new features. I don't have any "app", only tools and libraries :)

> I built a few small functions in different languages (Python, Go, Rust) that do neat things — data cleanup, API scraping, PDF generation — but none of them are “products” by themselves.

Publish PIP packages, rust crates, and go gophers (?). You can call them `splime-utils` or something and it'll always be available.

Pro tip: cover it with a few unit tests, and every time you get a bug report add to your series of tests.

If anyone here has successfully monetized something like this — small tools, niche models, clever functions — I’d love to hear how you approached it. Even if it didn’t work out, examples and lessons are super helpful. Let’s share ideas — maybe we can figure out some creative paths forward together!

A book?

https://github.com/codr7/hacktical-c/tree/main

It's hard to monetize it without doing a bunch more work.

I monetize my code for a living. I'd say about 25% of my time is the fun part of writing the code (that just works for me.)

The rest is in debugging the code for all the edge cases, writing docs, examples, training, support etc. In other words the "work" part.

Minimally you need to do enough so that someone can use the code. The code itself has minimal value, the value is in the using.

Then you need to figure out how to reach an audience.

Then you need to decide if the user will pay, or maybe it's ad supported. Or maybe donations.

Hint: unless you have a large audience this will result in very minimal income. Is all this extra work worth it?

You can Open Source it, but frankly its unlikely anyone will find it or use it. It might be an interesting line on your CV, bit again probably of marginal value there.

My advice is that if it has little to no value to others, just move on.

>* I have a trained ML model that solves a niche task really well — but turning it into a full-blown app seems like overkill.*

A RESTful API, either metered billing or otherwise with something like Lago[0]

>* I’ve written a CLI tool that processes log files better than anything else I’ve found, but it’s too specialized to justify making a company out of it.*

Enterprise. Find organizations that have this problem, know they have this problem, spent money to solve it, but aren't too satisfied with the solution.

>* I built a few small functions in different languages (Python, Go, Rust) that do neat things — data cleanup, API scraping, PDF generation — but none of them are “products” by themselves.*

A suite for organizations that need that.

All these can be your way into these organizations to get to know them, identify their problems, uncover patterns or segments, etc.

- [0]: https://www.getlago.com/

Just wanted to say thank you again for all the thoughtful input in this thread! It really helped shape the direction of a tool we're now building — something lightweight that lets you connect small functions (in any language) into reusable, swappable pipelines, with the option to share or monetize them.

We'll be posting updates here on HN, and also sharing progress via X/Twitter (@splime_proj), LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/sp-lime), and Telegram (https://t.me/+8ekv5cANUXllZDJi) if you'd like to follow along or try the prototype when it's ready.

Really appreciate the discussion — this thread was a huge inspiration!

I see that most responses in the thread focus on the technical challenge, while in reality this barely will reflect on your ability to monetize.

Monetization is almost always NOT a technical challenge. Even less so than marketing and sales.

You need to identify first to whom you're selling. Did you already identify who is going to potentially buy your solution?

He or she determines at the end of the day how you should package it — not necessarily the solution itself.

Disclaimer: I advise scale-ups and investors on monetization on more tactical matters through https://revfixr.com/

Semi related, is there any sort of service or type of professional that does mentoring/handholding of someone who has the core code that does something but who won't/can't take the steps on their own to make it a service or app they could sell?

> how do you monetize your personal code if it doesn’t really fit into a classic product or SaaS model?

Release it, and if it gets popular, you may sell consultancy time to interested parties.

Otherwise, if it really doesn't work as a business, I wouldn't try to monetize it. Unless I misunderstood your post, there is no need to.

From a personal perspective, I prefer writing Free Software, in both senses of the word. From a "I want money" perspective, contributing to Free Software in the past always resulted in better job opportunities to me.

Sounds like you want to make an "app store" for the kind of FaaS that you've developed.

Maybe the industry has moved forward but from 2010-2015 when I was interested in this sort of thing there seemed to be a zillion products aimed at the API economy, some venture backed, some of which spent an fortune on annoying ads and blog sponsorship (spam?) which supported numerous "I could care less" and "nice to have" features but none addressed the problem of billing people and taking payment for an API -- the one feature which you need to have a business.

Paid APIs are definitely a thing. Payment gateways do this.In the LLM era you can do this too - lots of data processing to be done.

But compare Aider/Claude Code with Cursor. One is much more popular than the other two despite being similar quality. GUIs are there to lower the learning curve.

In this era, it's not too hard to make a simple app in a day with AI as well. Cursor goes much faster than Flutterflow or Bubble. The bar is higher too - you now probably need a prototype before a pitch deck. It's probably not scalable, but that's prototyping for you.

SaaS is what you want, turn your API scraper into a tool let someone scrape another API 29 times before they have to pay, sell some of your libraries the old unix way, you sell it, and they get the source for however many dollars you choose, use stripe for all your payment stuff and you should be good.

Just do the things that are overkill. Distribution is a blocker to money. Anyone who will do the app and use you on the backend is strongly incentivized to cut you out eventually.

If you haven't already, check out: https://codecanyon.net/, you can sell scripts

I release it as open source and include it in my resume/portfolio. This has helped me get lucrative jobs. The resulting increased income is likely more than I would have earned selling these small projects by multiple orders of magnitude.

Of course, if I were making software with a wide market fit, or a very valuable narrow market fit, I would strongly consider starting a business. But my personal code generally solves very niche problems.

Honestly wrapping code in a front end is enough of an “app” experience that people don’t care as long as it brings value. Perfect case I ran into last week, I had to convert a legacy .pst outlook file to .eml for new outlook. Only a handful of these tools exist and I picked the one that had a front end and a nice looking installer. $110 to that company for something I will likely never use again.

Starting a business selling software is actually a big job. Even giving code away with OpenSource licensing brings liability risks.

You'll need to find a business model that pays enough to keep your product going.

Maybe you need a suite of micro tools, sold as a single package, that can earn enough to pay for the business costs.

FOSS has impoverished generations of programmers. As originally championed by Stallman & others in the 80's, its scope was foundational & infra-structural codebases, ie. OS, firmware, compilers, databases, and later browses etc. Anything that would bind you to a vendor and inevitably to the Deep State.

He was a visionary and we must all give credit where it's due. However, FOSS, as applied to apps, games & tools is nothing more than tech slavery, which is why nowadays it's championed by FANNG and the Deep State (some countries like Israel and India commercialize FOSS source codes as a matter of statecraft).

As for Stallman, he now, muses about https://stallman.org/articles/genderless-pronouns.html

Well, the obvious answer is you turn it into an app. Why do you think there are so many web devs running around?

There are probably ways to shoehorn what you're doing into a SaaS if you're clever. Specialization of labor, baby!

Release it for free and use the clout to promote yourself in other ways that make money directly.

Just look at the work to date as a portfolio for your resume and go get a job with someone that will pay you and perhaps give you some small amount of equity. You don’t have the skills to sell. Move on

Sell the liscense

> it’s too specialized to justify making a company out of it

How do you know? Did you try?