When You Make Your First Bucks Online

Every dev who's ever deployed their first monetized side project knows this pain. You spend 300 hours building a SaaS app, celebrate making your first $20, and suddenly your entire family thinks you're the next Zuckerberg. Meanwhile, you're hiding in the attic calculating that your hourly rate works out to about 6 cents, wondering if you should mention the $200 you spent on AWS credits. The classic "ramen profitable" stage where the only thing more fragile than your codebase is your ego.