Is my side project profitable?

The number you are looking at is gross

Your Stripe dashboard shows money arriving. That is cash in, and it is only half of the question. A product earning $210.00 a month is not profitable if it costs $250.00 to run.

The word that matters is net. Cash in minus cash out for one product in one month. Nothing else answers the question.

Count per product, not per company

This is where the usual method breaks. Someone running four small things adds up all the money from everywhere. The total looks fine, so they carry on.

Inside that total one product is usually funding the others. It earns and the rest only spend. You cannot see it until you split every line by product.

So the unit is the product. Not the company and not the payment processor.

The costs people leave out

Cash in is easy to find. Cash out is scattered across a dozen places. These are the ones that go missing:

• Processor fees

  Stripe, Gumroad and Lemon Squeezy take a cut before the payout lands.

• Refunds and chargebacks

  They arrive weeks later and belong to the month they hit.

• Hosting and domains

  Small and annual, so they hide from a monthly view.

• Model and API credits

  The cost that climbs with use and nobody budgets.

• The $9.00 subscriptions

  An email tool and an analytics tool and a form builder.

• Payouts you never took

  Money sitting in a balance is not money you netted.

Your own time is not on that list on purpose. Add it and every small product looks like a loss. Answer the cash question first.

A method you can run in an hour

1. 1Pick one month that has finished. A closed month has all its refunds.
2. 2Export a payout file from every source that paid you that month.
3. 3Export the card statement or bank lines that paid for your tools.
4. 4Tag every single line with one product name. A shared cost gets split.
5. 5Add cash in. Add cash out. Subtract. Do this once per product.
6. 6Write the result down. Next month the change is the useful part.

This works. The problem is that it works once. By week three of the next month the spreadsheet is stale again.

What to do with the answer

A product that nets cash gets more of your attention. A product that nets nothing and costs $46.00 a month gets a decision. Keep it or kill it.

Killing one is cheaper than people expect. Cancel its tools and let the domain lapse. The saving shows up in next month's net.

One dead product often carries several live subscriptions. Finding that is the whole reason to do this.