S3stat is the one that let me pack in the day job. Twiddla kicks in enough to bring the total up to "Senior Dev Salary, anywhere but the Bay Area".
Neither one grew particularly fast (aided by my only charging $2/month for S3stat when it launched). It was probably 4 years before it was enough to scrape by on, then 2 more after that before it looked like I'd be able to live off it for real while raising kids.
The big upside is in free time. I can ramp the two established products down to close to zero hours/week for months on end to focus on building the next thing (and playing with the aforementioned kids). Every time I tried that with a normal Software Engineering day job, they stopped sending me money. SaaS just keeps ticking away in the background, and is happy to pay me whether I'm in the office or not.
Neither one grew particularly fast (aided by my only charging $2/month for S3stat when it launched). It was probably 4 years before it was enough to scrape by on, then 2 more after that before it looked like I'd be able to live off it for real while raising kids.
The big upside is in free time. I can ramp the two established products down to close to zero hours/week for months on end to focus on building the next thing (and playing with the aforementioned kids). Every time I tried that with a normal Software Engineering day job, they stopped sending me money. SaaS just keeps ticking away in the background, and is happy to pay me whether I'm in the office or not.