In today’s world, we all can definitely use more money. Fortunately, as developers, we have a valuable skill that we can use to make money.
In this article, we’ll look at how we can make extra money as developers.
Working as a Developer
Working as a developer is probably the most common way to make money with our software development skills.
Becoming an employee is a bit safer than freelancing, but they both have risks, so we have to have other ways to make money that we outline below.
Sell Digital Products
There’re many things that are digital. Digital products take no money to make other than our time.
We can write exclusive content and put them behind a paid membership site.
Also, we can sell themes and plugins for content management systems and frameworks like Angular and Vue.
We can also make our own component library and charge people for it.
Software as a Service
Software as a Service is software that we can build and charge people for using it.
The only cost would be hosting. However, if we want to save on employee costs, then we have to do lots of things ourselves like customer support and maintenance.
Therefore, the cost can be high and it can be very time consuming and stressful.
Also, we have to build it ourselves and validate that there’s a market for our service by building a prototype.
All that takes a lot of effort, so it’s definitely not for everyone. Hosting costs also add up the more things we do.
Mobile Apps
We can also build our own mobile apps and sell them via subscriptions or charging outright to buy the app.
This is in the same vein as software as a service. We first have to build a prototype to validate that there’s a market for our product, and then we can double down on releasing it to production.
Also, we got all the same customer support and maintenance issues with SAAS.
Either we hire employees to make it easier for us, which is costly, or we do everything ourselves.
Blogs
We can create our own blog to make money by putting ads or affiliate links on them.
Also, we can take sponsored posts once our blog gets popular.
This is a long term effort since we’ve to wait for search engines to give us some search traffic. Also, we need to promote our blog constantly.
Books
Programming books are always popular. People need to learn from books. More often than not, it’ll come in the form of an ebook rather than a physical book.
We can write for big publishers like O’Reilly or we can publish them ourselves.
Online Courses
Teaching programming is easier than doing it ourselves, so it’s better that we create an online course if we want a more relaxing way to make money from our skills.
We can make videos or write a text-based course. Also, we can add one on one tutoring sessions or group tutorial sessions into our online course offering.
Lots of people are stuck on basic programming tasks so we can definitely make money solving those problems for them.
Donations
We can accept donations from sites like Patreon or Buy Me A Coffee from within our blog or social media presence.
This way, we may be some extra cash if someone donates. However, this is all the luck of the draw since most people won’t donate for something they can already get for free.
Make Our Own Job Board
We can make our own job board and get people to pay to post on our board.
Of course, this is another software as a service, so it comes with all the hurdles that come with supporting and maintaining one.
Also, we’ve to promote it hard to get any traction, and we have to get traffic from search engines so that people can see our site.
Conclusion
There’re many ways to make extra money as a developer. We can work full time or freelance developer jobs.
Also, we can make our own software as a service or mobile app. However, these are all hard options.
The easier options probably have something to do with writing or teachings like tutoring, blogging, and writing books.