If anyone is curious, czue and I chatted about how he built and hosts Place Card Me at https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/39-place-card-me-let.... Basically a full break down of his tech stack, lessons learned, etc.. It also touches on his Django SaaS example app he linked above too.
Really nice to see your Django boilerplate is pulling in those figures, congrats.
I literally shared your /open/ page the other day, I find it very cool that you have a USD/hour and that for static-ish projects it makes sense that it only increases! That does put a lot of perspective, since I feel it's similar to some of my open source projects (minus the $) in that it just keeps on giving value.
Awesome, so cool you are sharing it and that's exactly the goal I have (both for myself and to inspire others).
I had the idea of adding a "time travel" feature to it, so you can see literally how terrible the numbers were early on. My hourly rate for the first year was about $3!
This is awesome! Your dashboard is awesome too. I’ve been wanting to track time spent on my side projects, but I’ve never implemented anything. You have a chart for your time spent! So I’m wondering what you use to track that with?
You may want to use Paddle (which takes a bigger chunk of your profits) for that or some other marketplace: in that way Paddle is selling to end customers, taking a cut and then paying you in a business to business transaction.
You are also responsible for other types of taxes (assuming you are working via a limited liability corporation): sales taxes / VAT, corporate taxes, personal taxes, capital gain tax.
Some countries allow you to do some trading without setting up a company but as your earnings go up it will become either not very efficient from a tax perspective or not allowed by the law.
From my experience:
You need to pay VAT in European countries no matter where you're selling from (I use vatlayer.com for getting all the different VAT rates).
You generally don't need to pay taxes in other countries until you reach a threshold of earnings / number of sales.
Quaderno.io is another service which track all these different factors for you.
Sales tax / VAT is displayed and charged to customers and you need to pay it to the relevant authorities every quarter.
Then you can pay yourself a salary (which is a cost) from the money you received in the company, based on your country's personal income rates.
On what's left, on your company's profit you need to pay corporate tax rate, based on your country's corporate tax rates.
On the remaining profits in the company you can generally chose to pay yourself dividends (on which you pay other taxes, based on your country's tax rates on dividends).
If you sell your company, you'll have to pay capital tax gain taxes on the profit you made with the company (the delta between the company's capital and how much you sold it for).
Do you mean, sales taxes or personal income taxes? How a person manages those depends on their country. If you can, hire an local accountant to help or at least get advice. If the amounts get large enough you may need to open a business for yourself.
Someone already added a great summary below, but yeah the short answer is "it's complicated". I personally have a single LLC for the businesses and also now hire help to make sure I'm compliant.
When you say invested, was this as in time (you wrote the content and worked on SEO yourself), or did you pay to outsource this? I'm struggling with this myself at the moment.
Hi Cory—your dashboard is really impressive. Did you have to reboot the wedding place card app? Because I remember you commenting somewhere—I can't remember where—that it had tanked. But obviously since this is an end-of-year report that can't be true, right?
Just curious- how did you advertise/market your saaspegasus solution? I Google “boilerplate python and Django SaaS app” and your site is not front page, so I figured SEO probably isn’t the answer.
That's odd. It's mostly SEO and content, actually.
I believe it's in the front page for Django SaaS, Django boilerplate and related terms. I haven't gone as hard after Python keywords, though I probably should...
Your Open Project Dashboard is really cool. Do you have a system for keeping track of everything? Is it somehow automated? I'd like to create something similar for my own work.
Thanks! The tech behind it is pretty embarrassing.
Source data is Stripe (profit), Toggl (hours) and a tiny amount of manual accounting for expenses. I manually dump the raw data once a month into a CSV file, and then have some Python scripts that do intermediate calculations and transform the output to JSON. Then a tiny bit of JS to wire up the charts. So, in short, not automated at all, but takes ~10 minutes a month to keep up to date!
Love that dashboard! Makes me wonder what your Line Impact would be for the various projects, seems like you get a lot of business value from each line of code.
Probably the secret is that I try to spend as much time marketing as I do coding... (I usually fail but I'm guessing I still manage to market more than most devs)
Place cards was a ton of content, SEO and a long game.
Chat stats is so niche that I've literally just shared it a couple times on reddit and that's basically it. But somehow Google has figured out to show it for relevant queries.
I went full time independent in June of this year which gave me a lot more time. Since then I've averaged 60-80 hours a month on it, so I guess it's approaching a half-time job...
I am surprised you're making $1000/mo when you're not printing and sending out the cards. Have you thought of doing that? Would it make it more profitable?
Yeah, I'm sure it would but it would also increase the complexity a lot. I like how simple and low-touch the business is - it's one of my primary criteria for choosing projects!
An app for making wedding place cards that does about $1000/mo https://www.placecard.me/
A boilerplate for making SaaS apps with Python/Django that does $5k/month (highly variable) https://www.saaspegasus.com/
I also have a third that does around $150/mo. It's an app that adds analytics to GroupMe which is a WhatsApp alternative. https://chatstats.co/
I keep complete revenue and effort data here if you're curious: https://www.coryzue.com/open/