---
title: 'Top 5 Passive Income Streams for Developers'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=qIOoX85v7vs'
video_id: 'qIOoX85v7vs'
date: 2026-06-30
duration_sec: 727
---

# Top 5 Passive Income Streams for Developers

> Source: [Top 5 Passive Income Streams for Developers](https://youtube.com/watch?v=qIOoX85v7vs)

## Summary



## Transcript

If you know how to write code then you can make money from that and in this video I'm going to prove it to you by breaking down five passive income streams for software developers. Now the main thing that I want you to take away from this video is that you have unlimited
options. There's so many things you can do as a developer and this is a fantastic skill that allows you to work not just in a normal job but as an entrepreneur. It's very important to reshape the way that you think and start transitioning into an entrepreneurial mindset and start operating
like a business rather than just an employee or a software engineer. So I'm going to touch on that in this video with these different topics but I also have a free guy that I'll send to you if you sign up for my newsletter that breaks this down much more in depth. You can do that from the
link in the description. Anyways let's get into it with passive income idea number one. Now this is to sell digital products. This can be themes, templates, tools, plugins. As a developer you can make
so many different interesting things and you can sell those online for a very high margin. The great thing about digital products is they typically don't take a massive amount of time to make. They don't require a ton of advertising or a ton of upfront cost and as long as you get even a few
people to buy you just have instant profit and instant margin. So let me give you some real world examples of things that you can start making today that you can sell online as a digital product. So if you're a web developer then you can consider selling things like WordPress themes or website
templates. These are typically lower ticket items but still if you can sell a few hundred of these you can make a lot of money. Now for people that are just more general software developers you can sell things like plugins, libraries or SDKs and you'd be surprised how much people will pay for these if
they're really specific to a particular niche. Next we have obviously things like tools so productivity scripts, Chrome extensions, automation tools. I had a friend who ran a startup recently where he was selling kind of a desktop manager for organizing your windows specifically for things like coding.
He was selling this on a subscription basis about $10 per month. He got maybe 50, 60 people to buy it and there you go. That's some passive income immediately. He doesn't need to do anything now and just collects the subscription revenue every single month. To give you another great example,
I have a different friend. He built a piece of software that allows you to track the link clicks for any links that are in your YouTube descriptions and he built a Chrome tool that automatically goes in and changes all of the links to be UTM links so you can track them and he's selling this again
as a subscription service every single month. People are paying tons of money for it because they need this service and even though other things exist for free, they just want the convenience and they want all of their link tracking in one single place. So there are so many different options here. You can
really get creative and when it comes to actually selling these, let me give you some platforms that you should check out. So first you can look at something like gum road. You can also look at code canyon, things like theme forest, obviously things like Shopify and then things like the Google
Play Store or wherever you sell those Chrome extensions. Now the next idea I have for you is one that I'm very familiar with and this is by selling courses or making online tutorials. Now whether this be through YouTube and collecting something like AdSense, whether this is your own platform,
your own skillshare, you to me, all of the other sites out there, even if you're not an expert programmer or have a massive audience like I do, you can still make a lot of money selling these types of resources. Now my biggest advice when it comes to this specific area is to be extremely niche specific.
You don't want to go out there and try to compete with hundreds of other people, including myself, when it comes to teaching Python or JavaScript or React or these huge frameworks or more general languages. You want to be a niche expert and teach something extremely specific that doesn't have much
competition. To give you an example, when I started my YouTube channel, I really broke into the space by teaching Pi game. This was not really showcased a lot online. Now you see a bunch of other channels doing it mostly because I started with it and this allowed me to get a bunch of freelance
clients and to get a lot of people watching my channel because I was one of the only good resources when it came to making games in Python. So pick something that's very specific, maybe a new module, something that not a lot of people are talking about and make a course on that. This allows you to charge
more to stand out in the market and to get a lot of other more unique opportunities rather than simply relying on course revenue. Obviously, if you want to go for a bit of a longer pack, you can make ever green tutorials like I did when I was just starting out. You can collect small amounts of ad revenue
every single month. And again, this is a great way to make money, but it does take a long time to build up to and don't expect to become a millionaire overnight. Now when it comes to selling these courses, you have a lot of different options. You can use Skillshare, you can use you to me, you can use
teachable, you can make your own website and sell it on there, you can even go on platforms like Fiverr and offer one-on-one teaching or selling your course as a part of a package. You have a lot of different options and really I'll leave it to you. Now this next method is obvious and this is to
start a business. Now many businesses can become passive over time depending on how you set them up, but obviously it's easier said than done to just spin up a business and you need a good idea. And that's why I'm going to share with you a fantastic free resource here that contains over 50 business
ideas that actually work. Now this resource comes from HubSpot in collaboration with the MyFirst Million Podcast which is one of my favorite YouTube channels and you can check it out from the link in the description. Now these business ideas span across industries from AI to events to wellness
and contain unique and actionable insights to guide you towards your next business. I've left a link to it in the description where you can check it out completely for free. Now personally, my favorite part of this guide is that these ideas actually work and they have entire videos dedicated to
breaking them down with examples of people that have already had success trying them out. There's over 57 business ideas in this guide and there's definitely something that will resonate with you. So a massive thank you to our video sponsor HubSpot for providing this guide and tons of others
completely for free so make sure to check it out from the link below. Now the next idea I have for you is to license your code or your APIs. Now this is obviously passive in nature because once you make some type of API or code you can simply sell a license whether to one person or to multiple people
and then collect revenue whether that's on a kind of a royalty basis or usage basis or one time flat fee. And let me give you a few examples of specific things you can build that would fit within this model. So you can build some SaaS APIs for things like image or video recognition as well as things
like data validation. This is especially big in the AI machine learning space right now. Next you can build entire libraries or SDKs for very niche specific industries, things like robotics, space
exploration. We have things like medicine, right? And especially in these fields, if you build something that's extremely useful people will pay a ton of money for it. I want to give you a real world example. Now back when I was in elementary school, probably when I was 13 or 14 and just getting into
programming, I remember one of my friends' fathers telling me this story of how he licensed software to NASA. Yes, I know, sounds kind of crazy, but this is a true story. So he was a computer programmer, he was extremely smart, he was also a rocket scientist, and he ended up developing this very advanced
software that was used for some kind of space exploration mission for NASA. Now as part of developing that software, he sold a proprietary exclusive license to NASA so that they had kind of the full rights to use it, and I believe it was just a one-time fee where they paid him multiple millions of dollars
to own the rights to that software. So this is an example of something you definitely can do. Obviously that's an extreme situation, but I'll even give you one more. When I worked at Microsoft, I actually worked on the Python extension for Visual Studio Code. Now this extension was open source, it still
is open source, and it was built by someone in the community many years ago. The person who built this was actually my mentor at Microsoft, and what happened is he was working on this independently, it was like millions of lines of code, and then Microsoft approached him and offered to buy the extension
off of him and then hire him to run the extension at Microsoft. So they paid him again, multiple millions of dollars, I don't know the exact figure, they retained the license and everything for that software, they kept it open source, but they kind of have the rights to do what they want with it,
and then they hired him at a multiple six figure per year salary to actually work and continue maintaining the extension. So there you go, a few examples of people that hit it really big in this area. So the next method I have for you is blogging, affiliate marketing, and newsletters. I'm kind
of combining these all together because they're more written content as opposed to video content, courses, etc. Now even if you don't have a massive following, you can make money doing this, and a lot of people find this a better avenue because they don't need to get in front of the computer,
and it's a little bit more relaxing to write something like a blog post or a review rather than kind of getting on camera and talking like I do every single day. Anyways, the point is you can start a newsletter, you can start your own personal blog, you can go on medium and you can write tutorials,
you can write reviews for brand new AI tools or monitors or hardware or tech or really anything that you want, and you can get paid whether that's through affiliate links, which you can start right now, you don't need to have any kind of partnership through things like sponsorships, through things like ad
revenue on the different posts that you're making, and you don't need to be a massive creator to do this. Some of the largest sites when it comes to reviews, when it comes to blogging, when it comes to tutorials, don't have any one individual person or face behind them. There may be an entire company
or a team where it's one person who started it, who's completely anonymous, who's raking in all of the money. So here's a few examples of specific things you can do to get started right now in this niche. So obviously you can do tutorials, I did this way back in the day, a lot of you don't know this,
but I have over 200 written tutorials on my website, techwithtim.net, and back in the day, I made a good amount of money from those because they were SEO'd, and I would make kind of ad revenue, I would have sponsors on the website, and this is back when I had a few thousand subscribers
on YouTube, so I wasn't, you know, millions of subscribers, and I was still making money through written content. You can do things like talk about IDEs, different developer tools, you can do news if you're talking about something like a newsletter, so you kind of inform people of new technology
that's coming out. You can do things like product reviews, whether that's reviewing IDEs, or monitors, or a mouse, or a keyboard. There's really unlimited options here, and where I recommend always is to stick with a particular niche, really dig into that niche, and once you're a niche authority,
then you can start expanding out. It's always easier to start with something extremely specific, and then once you gain an audience, and you have a following in that niche, you can start branching out because people actually know who you are. Now in terms of monetization techniques, affiliate
links is a great one, especially if you're doing something like product reviews, but you can also just team up with sponsors. Even my newsletter right now, which you can sign up for in the link in the description, I have sponsors that want to sponsor it, and want to have their links on the newsletter
for a few hundred dollars per email. Even though I only have 3000 subscribers on that newsletter, there's a lot of different opportunities here, and it's just a good way to kind of build up your reputation and even brand image if you want to continue further down this path as kind of a content
creator, blogger, etc. So this next method is definitely the hardest to break into on this list, but this is to build apps or games. So whether this is an iPhone app, a utility app, something that manages your notes or your calendar, you have a lot of different options here,
but obviously you have millions of users that you can potentially reach and platforms like the app store or the Google Play store, or even we can throw in things like Chrome extensions or Steam games into this category. If you can make a successful game or app, and you can sell it to tons of people
or have some kind of in-game currency system, you can make a lot of money. Personally, I do have some experience in this area because I did build a mobile app for about two years. When we did go to sell it, we had some people buy it, but it was very low volume, and to be honest, I lost a lot of money,
so there's probably better people out there on the internet to give you advice in this specific niche. But nevertheless, it is an area where you can definitely earn some passive income, so I thought I'd mention it. Anyways, with that said guys, I'm going to wrap it up here. If you enjoyed the video,
make sure you leave a like, subscribe to the channel, and I will see you in the next one.