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Is my side hustle paying me for the time and money I put in?
$30
This week: write down the hours you can actually spare, then compare this rate with your job's hourly pay.
How many hours can you dedicate weekly?
How long do you plan to run this side hustle?
Write articles, blog posts, and marketing content for businesses
Promote products and earn commissions on sales
Teach students online in your area of expertise
Design and sell custom products like t-shirts, mugs, and posters
Revenue scales down when the hours entered are fewer than the hustle expects
Revenue, expenses, and break-even time for each hustle are sample figures, not market data
Most new channels, stores, and courses earn far less than these presets, and many earn nothing. Read each preset as a best case, not a typical result.
Self-employment income is taxed, and estimated tax is due quarterly. The profit shown is before that tax
Written by Elizabeth Stein
With the calculator's own defaults, freelance writing needs 15 hours a week but you set 10 available. Time-scaling cuts its $2,000 monthly revenue potential to about $1,333, and after $50 in monthly expenses that's roughly $1,283 in monthly profit, about $15,400 a year. Against a $100 startup cost, that's a 15,400% ROI, which the lab shows as 154x, and a payback period of about three days. The number is real, but it's inflated by how small the $100 startup cost is, not by how much money you'd actually make. The $1,283 monthly profit and the roughly $30-an-hour rate it works out to are the figures worth comparing against a different idea with a bigger startup cost.
Finance Quest is educational. It is not financial advice, and no calculator here knows your full situation.
ROI percentage rewards a tiny startup cost, which is why a $100 idea can outscore a $1,000 idea even when the $1,000 idea pays you more per hour and more in absolute dollars. If your actual constraint is hours in the week, not startup cash, sort by hourly rate or monthly profit instead. The idea with the flashiest ROI number is often just the idea that cost the least to start, which is a different question than which idea is worth your limited time.
Only if startup cost is genuinely your binding constraint. If your real limit is hours per week, compare hourly rate and monthly profit instead, since ROI percentage is calculated against startup cost and can make a cheap idea look better than a more time-efficient one.
No. Every profit, hourly rate, and ROI figure here is pre-tax. Self-employment income is also subject to self-employment tax on top of ordinary income tax, so the actual amount you keep will be meaningfully lower. Self-employment tax is 15.3% of 92.35% of net profit, about 14% of profit, so on $15,400 of profit it is about $2,180 before income tax. You can deduct half of it when you figure income tax than the profit shown.
Each idea's revenue potential assumes you can put in its listed weekly hours. If you have fewer hours than that, the calculator scales revenue down in the same proportion, on the assumption that half the hours produces roughly half the output. Real results depend on the specific hustle, some scale with hours more directly than others.
It varies enormously by skill and niche, and it's usually lowest in the first few months before you've built a client base, an audience, or a process. Comparing the hourly rate this calculator estimates against what you currently earn per hour at your main job is a reasonable sanity check on whether a given hustle is worth the time.