ghostapps

Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2017 – Show and tell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15148804

specifically this comment about Shopify Apps https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15149528

led me to build Simple Purchase Orders which I sold last year

Developer of Simple Purchase Orders here https://apps.shopify.com/simple-po

This is the best bit of developing for Shopify imo, this is the CEO reading the comments and taking them on board.

So here are some more!

Good - Partner support isn't great, however, if you can figure out how to get to a named employee, which is quite easy with their Slack for partners, they are super helpful. Just this week I am migrating to React and Polaris (mostly due to third party cookies being blocked by browsers and having to move to JWTs for auth). I had a niche problem that I dreaded going through support with, so I posted in the relevant Slack channel and a dev got in touch and fixed it for me in minutes.

Bad - 20% commission is starting to look expensive now Google and Apple have dropped their fees - They only pay out in dollars to PayPal which results in a 3% fee for non-US (and Canada?) devs since December - Python API is not kept up to date - There have been numerous copycat apps that the original devs have had to kick up a huge fuss to remove

Thanks to @donutdan and this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15149528 for originally introducing me to Shopify Apps nearly 4 years ago, its been fun

Thanks to a comment on this site under a post about profitable side projects (which I wish I could find again), which pointed me in the direction of Shopify and it's app store about 3 years ago. I created Simple Purchase Orders https://apps.shopify.com/simple-po and haven't looked back. Coming from developing apps for Google and Apple app stores, they are a lot better at engaging with developers, it's not all good though, I'm currently trying to get them to remove a fake review maliciously left by a developer of a rival app.