5 Best Passive Income Ideas for Developers (Earn Money While You Sleep)
If you know how to write code, then you can make money from that. And in this article, I’m going to prove it to you by breaking down five passive income streams for software developers.
Now, the main thing that I want you to take away from this post is that you have unlimited options. There’s so many things you can do as a developer, and this is a fantastic skill that allows you to work not just in a normal job, but as an entrepreneur.
It’s very important to reshape the way that you think, and to start transitioning into an entrepreneurial mindset and start operating like a business, rather than just an employee or a software engineer.
So I’m going to touch on that in this video with these different topics. But I also have a free guide that I’ll send to you if you sign up for my newsletter. That breaks this down much more in depth. You can do that from the link in the description.
1. Sell Digital Products
Now this is to sell digital products. This can be themes, templates, tools, plugins. As a developer, you can make so many different interesting things and you can sell those online for a very high margin.
The great thing about digital products is they typically don’t take a massive amount of time to make. They don’t require a ton of advertising or a ton of upfront cost. And as long as you get even a few people to buy them, you just have instant profit and instant margin.
Examples of Digital Products
So if you’re a web developer, then you can consider selling things like WordPress themes or website templates. These are typically lower ticket items, but still, if you can sell a few hundred of these, you can make a lot of money.
Now, for people that are just more general software developers, you can sell things like plugins, libraries, or SDK and you’d be surprised how much people will pay for these if they’re really specific to a particular niche.
Next, we obviously have things like tools. So productivity scripts, Chrome extensions, automation tools. I had a friend who ran a startup recently where he was selling a desktop manager for organizing your windows specifically for things like coding.
He was selling this on a subscription basis, about $10 per month. He got maybe 50, 60 people to buy it. And there you go. That’s some passive income immediately.
Platforms to Sell Digital Products
You can really get creative. And when it comes to actually selling these, let me give you some platforms that you should check out:
- Gumroad
- Code Kanyon
- Themeforest
- Shopify
- Google Play Store
2. Selling Courses or Making Online Tutorials
This is one that I’m very familiar with. Whether this be through YouTube and collecting something like AdSense, whether this is your own platform, you’re on Skillshare, Udemy, all of the other sites out there, even if you’re not an expert programmer or have a massive audience like I do, you can still make a lot of money selling these types of resources.
Importance of Niche-Specific Content
My biggest advice when it comes to this specific area is to be extremely niche specific. You don’t want to go out there and try to compete with hundreds of other people, including myself, when it comes to teaching Python or JavaScript or React.
You want to be a niche expert and teach something extremely specific that doesn’t have much competition.
Platforms for Selling Courses
When it comes to selling these courses, you have a lot of different options:
- Skillshare
- Udemy
- Teachable
- Your own website
- Fiverr (for one-on-one teaching)
3. Starting a Business
Many businesses can become passive over time, depending on how you set them up, but obviously it’s easier said than done to just spin up a business and you need a good idea.
Free Business Ideas Resource
I’m going to share with you a fantastic free resource that contains over 50 business ideas that actually work. This resource comes from HubSpot in collaboration with the My First Million podcast. You can check it out from the link in the description.
4. Licensing Your Code or APIs
This is obviously passive in nature because once you make some type of API or code, you can simply sell a license, whether to one person or to multiple people, and then collect revenue, whether that’s on a royalty basis, usage basis, or a one-time flat fee.
Examples of Licensed Software
You can build some SaaS APIs for things like image or video recognition, as well as things like data validation. This is especially big in the AI machine learning space right now.
Another example is building entire libraries or SDKs for very niche-specific industries such as:
- Robotics
- Space Exploration
- Medicine
5. Blogging, Affiliate Marketing, and Newsletters
Even if you don’t have a massive following, you can make money doing this. A lot of people find this a better avenue because they don’t need to get in front of the computer, and it’s a little bit more relaxing to write something like a blog post or a review.
Monetization Methods
- Affiliate links
- Sponsorships
- Ad revenue on blog posts
Example Blog Content
You can start a newsletter, your own personal blog, go on Medium, and write tutorials or reviews for brand new AI tools, monitors, hardware, or tech products.
6. Building Apps or Games
This is definitely the hardest to break into on this list. But whether it’s an iPhone app, a utility app, or a game, there are millions of potential users. Platforms like the App Store, Google Play Store, Chrome extensions, and Steam games provide opportunities to generate revenue.
Challenges and Opportunities
If you can make a successful game or app and sell it to tons of people or have some kind of in-game currency system, you can make a lot of money. However, it requires significant investment and patience to see success in this area.
Conclusion
There are many ways developers can generate passive income. From selling digital products to starting a business, licensing software, writing blogs, or creating courses, the opportunities are endless. Choose one that aligns with your interests and skills, and start building your passive income today!
