Best 4 Easy Passive Income Sources for Programmers Do It Now!!!!!: Who doesn’t want to earn some extra money? But the thing is, everyone has a job, and to make extra money, we have to put in some extra time.

Regular overtime is almost impossible and also harmful to your physical and mental health.

Hence passive income. You can make money without actively working. There are many ways to generate passive income, but let’s talk about how programmers can do it.
What is passive income?

Passive income is money you make that doesn’t require you to do a very “active” job to keep doing it. It’s as if you own a house and make money on rental income. You can make money from rental income without actively working.

According to Wikipedia, it’s called progressive passive income when the income goes into little effort to increase income. Programmers have more opportunities than anyone to generate passive income because of their skills.

Here are four easy ways:

1. Sell software for a one-time fee

This is one of the best ways to make money as a programmer and make the most of your skills. Most (89%) of B2B researchers use the internet in their research process. There are some great marketplaces where you can sell your software.

Let’s see where to sell and how much you can make.

App Store/Play Store: You can sell your mobile apps for a one-time fee on the Apple App Store or Google Play Store. His attitude was clear as they handled the payments.
This photo was taken by Flickr under a Creative Commons license

You get 70% for every sale on Google Play Store. Starting July 1, Google Play will reduce the service fee from 30% to 15%.

Apple also charges a 30% commission but also lowers fees for small business owners by up to 15%.

You can also spend a few dollars promoting your app in the store or doing SEO. Once you start getting good customers and reviews, the money comes automatically.

Themeforest: This is the largest marketplace for WordPress themes on the web. The tremendous traffic that this website receives will help you get your first few sales and then off to the races.

If you sell your products exclusively to Themeforest, you will earn 62.5% of each sale. Your commission continues to increase as your total sales increase. Once you reach $75,000 of total sales on their platform, you will save 87.5% on each sale. Non-exclusive authors receive only 45%.

CodeCanyon: This is another popular marketplace from Envato. If you are interested in selling WordPress plugins, CodeCanyon is a good candidate for your product.

There are many other markets where you can sell your software.

Developers make a lot of money selling themes. All you have to do is create a good topic or software.

The first two themes last month on Themeforest earned $780,000 and $128,700, respectively.

2. Start blogging

I found this way easier than others. The hard part is being accepted as a writer on a good blog/post. Before you start writing, read a lot of articles. I share some websites for you to make money as a tech writer:

Medium: For passive income, Medium is one of the best. You write once and receive payment based on member read time. While it is difficult to make money at first, there are no limits. An article can earn 200 to 1000 or more if it attracts a lot of readers!
Word cloud for blogs and bloggers
Word cloud for blogs and bloggers
Image by Kevin King (Chandana Perera) from Pixabay

You can also create your own personal blog. However, at first it will be difficult to attract traffic. You can also earn more by including affiliate marketing links in articles.

But if you want steady or active income, there are plenty of blogs to make money programming/technical writing.

Some of them are clubhouse.io, tutorialspoint.com, vonage.com, digitalocean.com, and many others. They will pay you between $250 and $500 per item.

3. Do video tutorials

If you have certain programming skills, you can create tutorial videos on these and sell them in the education/training market.

If you can do classes in English, you can touch the world market. There are now “Udemy”-type local markets in almost every country. You can also try it.

There are many websites where you can make money, but I would recommend two.

Udemy: Some people kill it with big sales ($20,000 a month or even more!) while many don’t make a dime. The average course builder can make $15 to $30 per month per course, but the top performers make $2,000 per course – monthly.
This photo is taken from Wikimedia under Creative Commons license

Skillshare: Teachers typically earn between $0.05 and $0.10 per minute views. That said, if your students watch 10,000 minutes of your class in the first month, you’ll earn between $500 and $1,000.

I know some young Bangladeshi programmers earning $500 a month passively teaching local languages!

4. Create a SaaS product

Saas stands for “Software as a Service”. SaaS is one of the best business models. They make software and sell it for a monthly subscription fee. We use SaaS a lot in our daily life, such as Adobe software, Microsoft Office, Dropbox, Slack.

If you can make useful products that people need, you can make a lot of money. You don’t need to build complex software like this. You can create simple and useful software.
SaaS word cloud
SaaS word cloud
Image source: www.epictop10.com under Creative Commons license

One of my senior developers makes $1,000 to $1,500 a month with his SaaS product. He created an app to help people lose weight. The secret formula is very easy UX. He grabbed 500 paid monthly subscribers who paid $2 a month. He also makes extra money showing ads to subscribers for free.

Here’s another motivational story. A single founder makes $20,000/month for their three SaaS products.
Tips and hassle

Make a plan for 2-6 months. First, do market research and use similar products.

The tricky part is how people find your software. There are several services/sites like sellSaaS that will help you find customers. But it is better to work with a marketing agency to develop a profit-sharing model.

Why You Should Consider Passive Income?

More time for you

Passive income has to do with the relationship between time and money. You can earn while you sleep this way. Isn’t that great?

If you are working extra time for extra money, you should definitely give it a try. This gives them more time for themselves because the essence of passive income is earning without active work.
Financial freedom

Most programmers work full-time or part-time. Some also benefit from freelance work. This type of active income is great but can be a little risky in some situations. You could lose your job at the company or a global crisis like COVID-19.

It is not limited by your time and effort. This can have a positive and significant impact on your ability to build wealth. So why not try to be more financially stable?

Final Words

There is no guarantee of how much residual income you will make. This can be good or bad. You can earn more than you expect, but you can also earn less.

But if you never try, you’ll never know. You can earn 10x or 100x more of your active earnings. If you make enough money, you may not have to do your regular work!

I follow the rules – indicators – to calculate whether I win or not, which are:

Hourly passive income > hourly active income

For example, let’s say you make $30 an hour full-time. If you write a blog that earns you $300 in your lifetime and it takes you three hours to write that blog, your profit per hour is $100.

But I ask you not to count so much in the beginning. You’ll also be happy and excited to see your blog, tutorial or software help thousands of people!

Many programmers try this as a hobby! So try it at least once. I’m just sharing a few options. If you do your research – you should get started – you will surely find other ways.