An independent income-methods database
Most of these pay less than a job. Here is which ones don't, and what it takes.
Every other site in this field reports the people who made money. We report everyone who tried — including the ones who earned nothing, because they are most of the population.
The median, not the mean
An average is what this field quotes when it wants you to start. A median is what you should actually expect. The two are not close, and the gap between them is the whole story.
Mean versus median monthly US side-hustle earnings. Half of all side hustlers earn under $200 a month; a small group of high earners drags the average up to $885.
The Penny Hoarder, 2026 side-hustle survey
Share of revenue-verified Indie Hackers products earning exactly nothing. Only about 5% ever clear $8,300 a month.
Analysis of 937 Stripe-verified products
Mean versus median monthly income for French micro-entrepreneurs. The same gap shows up in administrative tax records, not just in surveys.
INSEE, base Non-salariés, from URSSAF records
Why nobody publishes this
The teacher's income comes from teaching, not from doing. A site funded by affiliate commissions and course sales cannot lead with the median, because the median does not sell the course. That single incentive produces every other symptom in this field: cherry-picked screenshots, missing failure rates, and recommendations ordered by commission rather than by outcome.
What a method record has to contain
Every method is filled out against the same schema, so that two methods can genuinely be compared. A record missing any required field stays unpublished rather than shipping with the gap quietly hidden.
| Field | Why it is required |
|---|---|
| Effective hourly, net | Earnings after expenses and after unpaid setup, admin and marketing time. Computed, never typed in by hand, and it is the default sort order of every list on this site. |
| Failure rate | The share of people who attempt this and never clear a meaningful monthly figure, with the population it was drawn from named explicitly. |
| Median monthly net, and the spread | The median with the 25th and 75th percentile either side of it. Never a mean. |
| Time to first dollar | Usually the number that ends the fantasy, which is exactly why it is mandatory rather than optional. |
| Capital required | Minimum and typical. Most methods advertised as free to start are not free to start. |
| Who should not do this | An explicit disqualifier list. Marketing never tells a reader to walk away; a reference resource has to. |
| What kills it | The platform change, saturation point or rule change that ends this method — and whether it already has. |
| Lifecycle status | Emerging, viable, saturated or dead. Dead methods stay published as obituaries, with a date and a cause. |
How the effective hourly rate is built
Four steps, applied identically to every method so that the resulting order actually means something.
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Start from the median, not the mean
We take the median net figure for the population that actually filed, and keep the 25th and 75th percentiles beside it so the spread never disappears.
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Subtract the real expenses
Fuel, vehicle wear, platform fees, materials, software, insurance. Quoting gross earnings is the most common way this field inflates a number without technically lying.
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Count the unpaid hours
Setup, admin, invoicing, finding the next customer, waiting between jobs. A rate that counts only billable time is not the rate you experience.
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Publish the denominator alongside it
An hourly rate without the share of people who never reach it is half the information, and it is the half that sells courses.
Read the full methodology, including exactly which unpaid time is counted
Where the numbers come from
Failure rates are not editorial guesses. They come from the tax and census records of everyone who actually filed, which is the only place a real denominator exists.
Census Nonemployer Statistics
Counts and receipts for businesses with no employees — the self-employed and independent contractors — compiled from IRS records. Its breakdown by receipts-size class is what makes a failure rate calculable at all, and it goes down to county level.
IRS Statistics of Income, sole proprietorships
Business receipts, deductions and net income by industry as reported on Schedule C, with a series running back to 2000. The time series is what lets us detect a method decaying rather than guess at it.
The limitation, stated up front
Industry codes are coarser than a method. Several distinct methods can share a single code, and where that happens the figure is labelled as shared rather than presented as specific to one. Nonemployer data also excludes very small receipts, and gig income paid on a W-2 is not a Schedule C at all. Every record carries a confidence marker that reflects this.
What this site will not do
These are enforced in code rather than promised in a mission statement. They are the reason the ordering can be trusted.
No affiliate links on method pages
Not disclosed — absent. A recommendation that pays us cannot be a neutral recommendation, and disclosure does not repair the incentive.
No courses and no coaching
Selling you a way to make money would turn us into the thing this site exists to correct.
Ranking position is never for sale
Order is computed from the effective hourly rate. There is no field that a payment could write to.
No number without a source
Every figure carries an evidence tier and links to what it came from. Where we lack reliable data for a market, we publish no number at all and say so plainly.
What is published so far: nothing
No method records are live yet. The federal data pipeline that produces the failure rates is being built first, because a method page without a real denominator is precisely the kind of page this site was created to argue against.
We could fill this page today with a ranked table of familiar methods and plausible-looking numbers. That is the normal way to launch in this field, and it is the reason the field cannot be trusted. The first record goes up when it can carry a real denominator, a real evidence trail and a real disqualifier list — and not before.
Common questions
Is this just another list of side hustles?+
No, and the difference is structural rather than editorial. A list ranks methods by how interesting they are to write about, or by how well they pay the publisher. This is a database in which every method is filled out against one schema and sorted by a computed figure: earnings after expenses and after unpaid time. That means two methods can be compared directly, and it means no method can be promoted by anything other than its own numbers.
Why does this site keep saying most methods pay badly?+
Because the published data says so, repeatedly and across several countries. Half of US side hustlers earn under $200 a month. More than half of revenue-verified independent software products earn nothing at all. Half of French micro-entrepreneurs clear under €350 a month in administrative tax records. Saying this is not pessimism; it is the background against which the genuinely good methods become visible. Without it, everything looks equally promising, which is the state most readers arrive in.
How can you possibly know the failure rate for something?+
By starting from the population that filed taxes rather than the population that posted about it online. US census and IRS records report how many people operated a business of a given type and how their receipts and net income were distributed. That distribution answers the question of what share earned almost nothing, which is the failure rate. The data is public, free and authoritative. This field does not use it because the results are unflattering to the business model.
Do you cover countries other than the United States?+
Not yet, and coverage will expand only where equivalent data exists. France, Australia, the United Kingdom and Canada all publish administrative records good enough to support a real failure rate. Many countries do not. For those we intend to show which methods are available and what they require, while publishing no earnings figures at all rather than borrowing another country's. A translated interface is not the same thing as data coverage, and we will not let one imply the other.
How does the site make money without ads or affiliate links?+
From the demand side and from tooling, never from ranking position. Platforms and employers can pay to list real opportunities, while readers pay nothing to read. Separately there are tools people need once they are actually earning: tax estimation, rate calculation, invoicing. Both revenue lines only grow if readers genuinely start earning, which points our incentive in the same direction as the editorial. Pricing is published in full.
What happens when a method stops working?+
It is marked dead, given a date and a cause, and kept published as an obituary. Most content in this field is a corpse that still ranks: a method that was viable in 2019, written up once, and never revisited. Retiring a method loudly is far more useful than quietly deleting it, because the reader who was about to start it is exactly the person who needs to know that it is over.
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