How to Make Money with Programming

If you're looking for an article that lists all the techniques for making money simply and quickly through programming, this article is not the one you're looking for...

But if you want to discover all the different methods for generating income, more or less substantial, and more or less regular, depending on your philosophy, your desires and your skills, then what follows should interest you!

Note that the goal is to list all the possibilities exhaustively, without passing judgment!

#1 - Selling your time

Finding a position (permanent/fixed-term contract)

The term may sound scary, but in reality, this is what the majority of developers do on a daily basis (and what I did for years).

When you're an employee, on a permanent or fixed-term contract, you sell your skills, but above all your time. Very often, we're paid by the hour, by the day, by the month, etc...

For different rates, different services, different skills, but the basis for pricing a salary is time spent!

This is definitely the most common method, and also the least risky, because once you've found a contract, once you're "hired" (even if you can be evaluated on your performance), it's a stable situation.

Selling your time is possible in all professions related to programming, that's an advantage!

The constraints, on the other hand, are notably: the lack of flexibility (this depends on the company of course), and the loss of motivation, if the results produced are not rewarded at their fair value!

#2 - Selling your expertise

Being a consultant/freelancer

To sell your expertise, you first need to acquire expertise, which sounds logical. That's the first step, but not always the most complicated one.

If you're an "expert", or you master a subject, you need to know how to sell yourself, and find your first clients, that's the whole challenge!

When you sell your expertise, you're also selling your acquired skills, your past assignments, and all the experience you've gained so far... That's why you bring value that can't simply be calculated based on time spent!

#3 - Creating a project

Website, application, product or SaaS

Creating a product, or a service (SaaS), and selling it is often categorized as being "passive" income...

In reality, it depends a lot on the project, its success and the vision you have for it.

What is certain, is that the potential income generated is also equivalent to the strong probability that your product (or service) will never take off.

But if you're lucky, then you might be able to draw substantial income from it!

Just like selling your expertise requires sales skills, creating and generating revenue through a product requires basic knowledge of: communication, marketing, design, UI, UX, accounting,...

Creating a product isn't just about programming, but rather about entrepreneurship!

If this method interests you, there's a lot of resources on the internet produced by people who have become experts at it, including a podcast: The Mature Developer

#4 - Finding sponsors/donors

For open-source projects

Now we're entering a rather particular category, that of funding open-source projects. If you subscribe to the philosophy of open-source and/or free software, know that it's often difficult to earn income from it, but not impossible!

If the tool you're developing is useful to a large number of people (and therefore projects), there's a good chance that all these people will want (and need) your project to stay alive and continue to evolve over time.

These people (and these companies) can decide to sponsor you so that you're able to continue working on your project.

Be careful, quite few open-source creators manage to make a decent living from it, this is actually a really important topic in the field!

If you want to know how an open-source project is funded through donors/sponsors, we talk about it in this article!

#5 - Providing support

For open-source projects

In the same vein as open-source projects, some people have decided to find a hybrid compromise: developing a project and releasing it as open-source, while creating a for-profit company to offer support (technical, usage,...) to the project's clients.

For this method to work, the project first needs to be used massively by companies, but once it's in place, it can truly become viable in the long term!

More info on open-source business models in this article: https://keygen.sh/blog/how-to-get-paid-for-open-source-software/

#6 - Finding bugs/vulnerabilities

"Bug Bounty"

This activity is rather reserved for cybersecurity specialists than for devs strictly speaking, but there are special cases!

This method is what's called "Bug Bounty", it involves finding companies that offer rewards for certain bugs and/or security vulnerabilities found on their site/software/app.

Generally, these assignments require strong skills in computer security, but automating these techniques also requires programming skills!

Discover the bug bounty platform: Hacker One