Has anyone made any money/successes making SaaS's with AI?
A developer expresses frustration regarding the difficulty of monetizing AI-powered SaaS side projects in the current market. They list several personal attempts, including educational tools and games, noting that despite the capabilities of AI, these projects have not generated significant value. The author seeks candid feedback on their strategies and questions whether the window for small-scale success has closed.
- ▪The author has launched multiple side projects, including cluekangaroo.com, drawesome.art, Catchmemeow.com, and therapscalliongame.com.
- ▪Despite utilizing AI technology, the developer reports that none of their projects have achieved sustainable financial success.
- ▪The author feels that the current saturation of AI tools has diminished the potential value of new small-scale applications.
- ▪Specific challenges mentioned include high hosting costs and the inability to convert personal passion projects into revenue streams.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Ycombinator |
| Canonical URL | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49719966 |
| Publication time | Tue, 15 Sep 2026 22:53:53 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-15T23:04:59.207Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-15T23:04:59.207Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | K5_RZRfFC-l4 · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
I've had a few attempts on side projects throughout the years. Nothing seems to stick and now with AI it's as if everything is possible yet equates to 0 value. Can I get some feedback? What am I doing wrong? Is it just too late?My actual public attempts so far: cluekangaroo.com - structured homework help with clues for middleschoolers and highschoolers (I use AI, but anonymize any personal data and encrypt it all)drawesome.art - this is a personal love project because I love drawing esp with my kids and friends I can't of way to make it make money (I think the hosting would be kind of expensive)Catchmemeow.com - my daily game I made for my daughters to help them get dogs/cats adopted.therapscalliongame.com - a silly fantasy game.I just feel having the little side project that makes a…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Ycombinator.