Hard truths from my 2022 indie revenue

It’s tax season. Was doing up the sums and came to this figure for my indie * revenue in 2022:

~$6200

* indie means revenue that’s everything outside of consulting

That’s total revenue for the entire year of 2022, at about $510 average monthly (non-recurring) revenue. I believe most of it came from sales of Carrd plugins, about $1.2k from Lifelog subscriptions, the rest of about $200 from Buy Me A Coffee donations.

I remember right around the same time last year I did the same calculations for indie revenue in 2021 and I actually did around $11k!:

• Lifelog = $1200
• Plugins For Carrd = $900
• Sweet Jam Sites = $500
• Keto List Singapore = $1100
• Social impact patronage = $1300
• Others (random freelancing) = $6000

Sweet Jam Sites and Keto List had stopped earning since, and donations in 2021 were high due to a viral project. I also still did occasional web design freelancing back then that contributed to the indie revenue, which I no longer do. All these were stopped in 2022. I’d trimmed my portfolio a lot. So that explains the dip from last year.

But if I compared just year-on-year growth of only Lifelog + Plugins, it’s $2.1k vs $6.2k. Not too shabby, almost tripled. Which checks out with what I knew about the 3x growth of Plugins while Lifelog was stagnant.

So it’s $6.2k spread across 2 projects, across 12 months, after 3 years of being indie.

Not a great report card, if you ask me…

Frankly, $6.2k feels pretty insignificant in the bigger scheme of things, especially for the things I need to pay for to feed the family. That’s like maybe enough for 1 month… 1 year’s revenue just enough for 1 month! 😅 It’s not a great look if I’m seeking ramen profitability.

And I won’t sugarcoat this or try to find a positive glass-is-half-full angle. It’s nice to get $6.2k extra cash, and I still have my consulting as the main income stream to feed the fam, but realistically, objectively, $6.2k isn’t not even close to what I aspire to be. And at this rate, I won’t ever hit the bare minimum of my aspiration—to be able to survive on indie revenue, at least $5k/m—in a decade maybe.

Even if I do want to keep consulting in my portfolio, am I really okay to wait a decade to grow to ramen profitability? Not really. I’m not even sure I want to nor have the energy to keep going at consulting for another decade, well into my 50s.

There’s only questions now, no answers.

But one thing I know for sure – whatever I’m doing now isn’t enough.

Something has to change.