A full invoice app now costs $3.65 in model tokens to build. That used to eat two to three weeks by hand. Building got cheap. Making money did not. A builder asked r/SideProject whether these Claude Code projects actually earn. The thread’s verdict was blunt: code is 5% of the business.
The reported outcomes back it up. Most builds in the thread earn between $0 and a few hundred a month. The rare winners got there on months of SEO, not slicker code. One builder relayed a friend’s split: 90% of the work is getting users, 10% is building.
In today’s indie hacker news:
- 💰 Claude Code makes the build cheap, not the money
- 📄 A CV tool hit €2k MRR, then the founder hid it
- 🐛 A Spore-style creature game that ditched the engine
- 💬 Microsoft open sourced 1996’s Comic Chat
- 🎬 The “$100” AI music video that cost $73.65
TOP STORIES
💰 NOBODY PAYS FOR THE EDITOR
The story: FStorm045 asked r/SideProject the question every solo builder circles. Is Claude Pro worth it, and do these projects ever make real revenue? They admitted feeling like they were “just chasing shiny tools.” The replies were generous but honest. The top one, from HoratioWobble, said most projects don’t make money, regardless of how they were coded. The receipts, inside the thread and out, tell the same story.
The details:
- Where the $3.65 goes: Rohith Singh’s one-day invoice MVP burned about 5.8 million tokens. That was $3.63 on Claude Sonnet 4 and two cents on Haiku 3.5, then open sourced with no revenue.
- A paying customer by week five: NetOk7015 shipped an email-parser SaaS in three weekends. The first paying customer landed in week five at $29 a month. Their verdict: “a fancier IDE, not a business model.”
- Outliers sold, not just shipped: Piotr Kulpinski booked $79k from side projects in 2025. His top earner, a directory built in 48 hours, made $57,361 only after a year of SEO and sponsorships.
- The floor is low: Queasy_Race5586’s three builds net one at about $200 a month and two at nothing. The editor was never the bottleneck.
- The entry price is trivial: Claude Code starts at $20 a month on Pro, or $17 billed annually. Commenters agreed it pays for itself on speed alone.
Why builders care: So the subscription answers itself. At that price the speed alone clears the bar. The number that should scare you is the calendar. Budget most of your weeks for distribution, because that is the 95% Claude Code will never write for you.
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📄 BORN FROM A BRUTAL JOB HUNT
The story: Single-Possession-54 posted to r/SaaS that they had hit a first €2k MRR and were “honestly a bit emotional about it.” The origin is textbook. Job hunting in a rough market, they got sick of retailoring the same CV. So they built a tool that tailors and grades a resume for each role before you send it. It helped them land a job. Friends hit the same wall, it worked for them too, so it went online. Then the twist: the post never names the product or drops a link.
The details:
- The comments became a manhunt: with nothing to click, the top replies are people asking what the tool is and where the link went.
- First MRR has no set pace: Pat Walls needed about 10 months to reach $1,000 MRR on Pigeon for Gmail. Others have hit several times that in a fraction of the time.
- The category is already crowded: one commenter, air_akshar, says they built the same kind of CV tool “out of frustration.” It is working out for them too.
- The unglamorous questions came too: another asked how you even pull the money out of Stripe and pay tax on it.
Why builders care: The wedge is the lesson, not the unverified figure. A tool born from your own pain is a strong start. If friends with the same problem pay, that is the signal. The newer move is the withholding. You can post the milestone and keep the playbook, so competitors see the win but not how you got it.
🐛 SPORE, MINUS THE GAME ENGINE
The story: A developer who goes by tulkaswo built playsever.io, a physics-based procedural creature game. They shared it on r/SideProject with a one-line pitch: “i enjoyed playing spore. so i just inspired and made this.” Someone asked what engine ran the physics. The answer was the flex. None. It uses custom Verlet physics and procedural leg animation in a homemade sim, rendered in Pixi.js, a 2D web renderer. The whole thing runs from one browser link, nothing to install and no store review.
The details:
- Spore did the marketing: commenter after commenter invoked Spore unprompted, one confessing to “way too many hours in the spore creator” doing exactly this.
- The niche is proven and cheap: Keiwan’s Evolution, a Unity build on itch.io, holds 4.5 stars across 1,327 ratings at $2 and up.
- The idea is three decades deep: evolving virtual creatures trace to Karl Sims’s 1994 experiment breeding block creatures to swim and walk.
- A frequent game-jam target: entries like Wiggly Sim, built for a Godot game jam, keep re-creating the genre from scratch.
Why builders care: The reusable edge is delivery, not the physics. A browser-native toy rides free nostalgia and skips the app store. The whole funnel is one link you can drop in any thread. In a crowded genre, shipping playable-in-a-tab beats having the cleverest idea.
💬 BLAME THIS FOR COMIC SANS
The story: Microsoft open sourced Comic Chat, the 1996 IRC client that turned live conversations into comic panels. Illustrated characters, speech balloons, and expressions, all inferred from what you typed. It shipped with Internet Explorer 3.0 and gave Comic Sans its first real home. The font was drawn by Microsoft’s Vincent Connare in 1994. The code is on GitHub under the MIT License, archived read-only the day it landed. The part worth stealing is what Microsoft shipped next to it.
The details:
- A tiny expert system ran the art: for every message it chose which characters appeared and how they gestured. It also set each balloon’s shape, the zoom, and when to cut to a new panel.
- The revival kit is the point: bundled worked examples get the 1996 to 1998 C++ and MFC code compiling on current Visual Studio. They add DPI scaling, mouse-wheel scrolling, and TLS for modern IRC networks.
- One-click, signed builds: a GitHub Actions workflow any fork owner can run with no secrets spits out smoke-tested, SHA-256-hashed binaries. Prebuilt Windows 11 builds sit in the release tag.
- It was a research toy first: it began in Microsoft Research in 1995 and reached SIGGRAPH 96. Later it localized into 24 languages and became MSN’s chat client.
- The reception: Phoronix called it “the most unexpected open-source code drop from Microsoft likely ever.”
Why builders care: The nostalgia is the hook, but the revival kit is the payload. Microsoft showed that pointing AI-assisted tooling at a 30-year-old C++ codebase is cheap enough to produce runnable, hash-signed binaries. If you maintain or inherit legacy Windows software, that Actions workflow is a template you can copy.
🎬 THE TOKENS ATE THE BUDGET
The story: TryAI handed two frontier models the same song and a hard dollar budget. Then it let each one direct a full music video on its own. The loop gave them plan, web search, image and video generation, and a shell with ffmpeg. Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol each ran at $25 and $100. Every run finished on its own and shipped a full-length video. The catch: the budget you set was never the bill you paid.
The details:
- The hidden line item: Fable 5’s priciest run cost $73.65 all-in. Of that, $25.05 was model tokens, not the metered generation the budget caps.
- Cheaper tokens, cheaper total: Claude Fable 5’s token pricing runs double GPT-5.6 Sol’s. Sol’s token cost stayed near $3 to $4 a run while Fable’s climbed to $17 to $25.
- The cap barely mattered up high: at the top budget neither model came close, spending $36.57 and $48.60 on generation. TryAI’s read: “$100 was probably too much budget.”
- Quality was rough all around: characters drifted between shots, and every run read lyrics literally: a dragon line put an actual dragon on screen. None of them went back to re-cut its own edit.
- The whole rig is open source: the harness is a plan, search, generate, and ffmpeg loop with a budget guard you can aim at any song.
Why builders care: If you hand an agent a hard budget, budget its tokens too, not just the tool calls it pays for. The metered spend is the number you watch. The model’s own token bill is the one that creeps up, and it scales with how chatty your loop gets. One free win sits in plain sight. No run reviewed its own work, so a simple re-cut pass could beat the frontier default.
TRENDING TODAY
- 🧠 Kimi K3: Open Frontier Intelligence - Kimi’s new open frontier model pulled 1,291 points and 811 comments on Hacker News in a day. Another serious open-weights option lands in the lane builders eye for cheaper self-hosted inference.
- 📓 NotebookLM is now Gemini Notebook - Google folded NotebookLM into Gemini and renamed it, a move that drew 266 points and 136 comments. Rebrands like this quietly break the tutorials, docs links, and integrations that named the old product.
FIRST DOLLAR
FIRST STRANGER, FIRST SALE
🎉 A complete stranger became Pastily’s first paying customer
codewithashfaque spent weeks writing code, fixing bugs, and refreshing analytics too often. Then came the email every builder waits for. Someone paid for Pastily, their desktop app. The money, they wrote, is not the exciting part. A stranger seeing enough value to pay is. The first sale is the hardest dollar in indie hacking, and those late nights finally have their proof.
STACK OF THE DAY
🧩 Mocca
Mocca is a Claude Code wrapper built around plugins instead of chat. The maker got hooked on community plugins, one that searches for jobs, another that plays lofi from your terminal. So they made the plugin the whole interface, not a side feature. If you live in Claude Code and collect extensions, this puts them front and center. It shipped as a Show HN this week.
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BOOKMARKED TODAY
- 🦀 How our Rust-to-Zig rewrite is going - Richard Feldman’s update on porting the Roc compiler from Rust to Zig drew 433 points and 232 comments. A candid read if you have ever weighed a big rewrite against shipping instead.
- 🤖 LM Studio Bionic - LM Studio shipped an AI agent for open models, and it pulled 181 points and 67 comments. Worth a look if you want agentic workflows running on local weights instead of a metered API.
- 📈 An AI that reads your chart screenshots - a solo builder made a trading copilot for chart screenshots. Upload any chart and it returns support, resistance, and a long and short scenario.
Keep shipping. See you tomorrow.
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