5 Fullstack Software Ideas to make money with details included

Building projects help you cement ideas you've learned as well as teach you new tools and concepts. Today we'll take a look at 5 software project ideas that can make you money.

You are free to use these ideas as long as you hit that like button.

But, first I think it's important to mention an idea is just an idea. Most of them are not unique or new. What really matters is the execution, that is what determines the success of them. Without the execution of these ideas, they aren't worth anything.

As Steve Jobs famously said...

Ideas are worth nothing unless executed ... Execution is worth millions.

If you find building new projects difficult you should check out my other video where I break down the 3 key steps used by many software developers.

1. Lending App

Our first idea is to create an app that lets users rent items to others in their local area. This way everyone wins, people can make some extra money while others can use the items at a reduced cost.

Building an application like this may require some legal work to figure out liabilities, but you charge some percentage fees on top of each transaction.

Implementation

You could build this application using any mobile technologies like NativeScript, or Flutter. All of these integrate nicely with Amplify for the backend. Amplify is a set of services by amazon that can be used for scalable full-stack applications.

You'll also want to use a third-party payment gate since building one of those can be very challenging. For that, I would recommend Stripe.

Stripe offers a bunch of payment APIs to help make this process easy. It's used by many teams around the world, and you can continue to use it for other projects in the future.

2. Poll App

If you are more into creating social platforms you could create a poll app, where users could create questions for others to answers. Almost every platform, Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, support poll questions but building a platform dedicated to it would provide a better user experience.

What's great about polls is they provide high levels of engagement. Users may be interested in the question, and the results of the question.

Implementation

You could build this app using firebase and react native, and then monetize it using ads.

This app idea could become really popular if you create a recommendation engine to show users polls they are most likely to interact with. You'll probably need to create a machine learning model and deploy it to production. Thankfully firebase offers a service for doing this.

Just keep in mind building an app that runs on iPhones can have a large upfront cost. You may need to purchase a mac and as well as pay an annual app developer cost.

3. Opensource Course Platform

Skillshare, Udemy, and other platforms are great for finding and sharing courses to learn about different technologies. But many content creators or companies don't want to pay fees for using such platforms. Additionally, these platforms don't let users create custom interactive elements for making their courses more personal.

If someone was to develop an open-source platform, companies and content creators could use it.

You might think if it's open-source it would be hard to monetize. But many companies have been built on top of open-source products.

A common way to monetize them is to offer consulting services, which could be for hosting, managing, or adding custom modules. Many people also recognize the amount of work that goes into building free software so they may donate to you.

Plus, sharing the code makes it easier to show your work to potential employers.

Implementation

You could build this using any frontend technology like React, Vue, or Svelte and a custom backed using Nodejs as a GraphQL server. This way you can avoid vendor lock, which means users can deploy it to any cloud provider.

To make deployment easier you'll want to containerize your application with docker and maybe even write some configuration YAML so it can be deployed to Kubernetes for scalability.

4. Plant sensor

Any other idea is to build plant sensors. In your start, you can hook up a microcontroller and a moisture sensor to determine when you should next water the plants.

These sensors would report their values to a central web server that can run on your computer.

Implementation

You'll need to wire up a basic circuit with an ESP and moisture sensor as well as learn some lower-level language like C. Then you can send the results over the wifi to a nodejs process running on your computer. This process would read and save the results into an excel file where you can visualize the data.

What also great about this idea is you can really expand on it. You could add more sensors to the microcontroller like a light sensor or even a pump. You could also create a desktop interface with electron where you could visualize and see the results of these sensors in real-time.

To monetize this idea, you could sell these sensors along with an online service for visualizing the data.

5. Items in stock

While data from plants can be useful, information about an item in stock is more important for many.

You could create a web scraping tool to check if specific items are in stock. Once you grab the data you can use this information to send notifications to users.

This concept can really be used for any type of item but with the current situation on the latest graphics cards, you could use it to get your hands on one of those 3000 series.

Implementation

To build a system you can use a nodejs process that uses puppeteer to scrap sites and then fires off emails with nodemailer.

Make sure you follow any rules set out by the websites you are scraping.

An even better way to implement this would be to use a pub-sub system where you could have multiple processes scraping data and publishing the results, while other services like a mailer or SMS message could fire off messages whenever the events happen.

You could also create a frontend webpage where users could come and see which items are in stock across multiple stores.

Conclusion

I hope you found some useful ideas in this video. If you like to learn more about any of the technologies I talked about in this video check out my channel.

I also have a growing community over on discord if you'd like to chat.