40 side business ideas you can build with AI

From vibe-coded apps to AI clipping agencies, discover 40 side business ideas you can build with AI, plus real examples, costs, and income estimates.

61% of small businesses now use AI in some part of how they operate (OnDeck/Ocrolus report). Most of these businesses use AI for marketing or automating just one piece of work, but still heavily rely on human input for the rest.

Then there's the other end of the spectrum. In April of 2026, Andon Labs signed a three-year retail lease in San Francisco, giving the whole business to an AI named Luna. Luna picked the products, set prices, designed the branding, and hired her own human staff (some of whom didn't even realize that they were talking to an AI).

Most side businesses exist somewhere between these two extremes. This guide is about the businesses you can build with AI. Some of these are products you build purely with AI (apps, templates, newsletters); others are services you run with AI doing the heavy lifting (audits, resumes, grant writing).

If you're after quicker, gig-style ways to earn instead of building out a product or ongoing service, check out Make money with AI: AI side hustle ideas.

Top AI side business quick picks for 2026

Want to jump right in? Here are the top 6 businesses you can start with AI.

40 side businesses you can build with AI

Micro-SaaS & AI app ideas

This first set of side business ideas is a little meta: using AI to build AI-powered apps and micro-SaaS products.

The app scene has exploded over the past two years, mostly thanks to vibe-coding platforms like Lovable, Replit, and Base44, which let anyone build a working app from plain-English prompts, not code.

And recent data shows this shift is massive: Stack Overflow finds that 84% of developers now use AI coding tools, while 13Labs found that 63% of vibe coders don't consider themselves to be devs.

The options really are unlimited here, but here are a few ideas to get you started, along with examples of people who have built profitable businesses in this niche.

1. Meal apps

Have a thing for food? Why not turn that into a side business by creating a meal-themed app?

There are so many opportunities here: apps that scan store-bought ingredients and tell you how 'clean' or 'whole' these foods are. Apps that generate a random meal selection based on the ingredients that you have in your household. Or, apps that use AI to track calorie intake, like Cal AI.

Zach Yadegari, the co-founder of Cal AI alongside Henry Langmack, started coding when he was 7 years old. He saw a problem that an app could fix (tedious calorie counting), and he used AI to build his own AI-powered app that takes the annoying part out of the equation. He grew it to over $30 million in annual revenue before MyFitnessPal acquired it, and the app is now projected to hit $50 million in revenue this year.

That's what it all comes down to: finding a problem and fixing it.

People will pay for convenience, and if your app takes away just a little of the annoying 'what shall I eat' or 'what can I eat' decision that we go through every single day, then you're onto a winner.

• Startup costs: $0-$100 a month. Free tools like ChatGPT can get you started; a no-code backend runs $25-$49 a month if you need one.
• How to make it: Build your app with a vibe coding tool like Lovable, Replit, or Cursor, then set up pricing with Whop CLI – a command-line tool that lets you create products, set pricing, and generate a checkout link right from Claude Code, Cursor, or your terminal.
• Time to launch: 1-4 weeks
• Estimated income: $200-$10,000+ a month

2. Apps for creators and solo founders

If there's one thing most creators and founders have in common, it's that they're always busy. And also, often, on the verge of burnout.

Needing to churn out relevant content or basically just keep your business running is tiring. Much like with the meal apps, if you can hit on a relevant pain point, you can strike it big with a vibe-coded app or SaaS tool for this particular audience.

Want an example? Creator Buddy and Trendfeed help turn your social posts into ready-made content ideas. 

Meanwhile, FounderPal generates marketing strategies, user personas, and positioning for solopreneurs. The two founders built the first version in three weeks on Xano, using a no-code backend, and it made $60,000 in the first six months.

You can make your tool even more specific, something along the lines of Spellbook – an AI contract review tool built specifically for lawyers, drafting and redlining directly inside Microsoft Word.

A little research will show you that there are a lot of solo-founder apps, but the market is far from being saturated. You just need to find your niche and, more importantly, find the right audience.

• Startup costs: $0-$200 a month. A no-code backend like Xano or Bubble runs $25 to $49 a month, but you can get this done with free tools like ChatGPT.
• How to make it: Build it in Lovable, Replit, Base44, or a tool of your choice, then create the product and price it with the Whop CLI.
• Time to launch: 2 weeks-2 months+
• Estimated income: $500 to $10,000+ a month

3. AI tools for small businesses

Small businesses run on software, but a lot of that software can be frustrating to use. Anyone who's ever spent two hours trying to get Excel formulas to cooperate will agree with this. 

So, small businesses will pay for tools that simplify software use. One example is Formula Bot (now Better Analyst), built by David Bressler, a data analyst who had to deal with this very problem all the time.

Bressler got tired of colleagues knocking on his door for help with Excel formulas, so he built an AI tool that turns plain English into an Excel formula that actually works. He launched it on X in 2022 with a simple post, saying:

I know @blakeaburge is known for simplifying Excel.

I also wanted to simplify Excel, so I built ExcelFormulaBot.com - an AI tool where users input a problem and it provides you with the Excel formula.

Bressler built it on Bubble, a no-code platform. By early 2026, Formula Bot had passed 1 million users.

Lunair, on the other hand, is a tool that generates explainer/marketing videos for small businesses. 

And Smart Headshots AI taps into another pain point: who has the time or resources to hire a professional photographer for each team member if their team is probably scattered around the globe? This tool lets you turn a selfie into a LinkedIn-worthy headshot.

The common link here is that these tools save businesses both time and money. People are willing to pay for that.

• Startup costs: $0-$200, depending on your vibe coding tool of choice
• How to make it: Make the app with something like Claude, Codex, or Cursor. Decide between a one-time payment and a subscription. Use Whop CLI to build the whole payment structure right into your product. If you're building something chatbot-based specifically, this walkthrough on building an AI chatbot SaaS with Next.js and Whop covers the whole stack end to end.
• Time to launch: 1-8 weeks
• Estimated income: $500 to $5,000+ a month

4. Dating apps

Online dating can be an absolute nightmare. While the market for dating apps is fairly saturated, you can still create useful apps that help people who are looking for their better half.

One super successful example is RizzGPT. The founder, Blake Anderson, created the app with the goal of helping people improve their 'rizz' (help them chat to prospective dates on dating apps).

“I started building RizzGPT when I graduated from school, senior year. I went to Tulane University and was torn between getting a normal full-time job, or trying to do something of my own.”
- Blake Anderson, founder of RizzGPT

Users can just upload a screenshot of their conversation to get useful tips from AI, keeping the conversation flowing.

RizzGPT led Blake to make $10 million just with ChatGPT.

PlugAI is another example of a similar type of app that's wildly successful, having surpassed 1.7 million downloads on Android alone. Turns out we don't just want to connect with people, we want to let AI talk to them for us, too.

No judgment, by the way.

Traditional dating apps along the lines of Hinge and Tinder are everywhere, but if you niche down, you can find some success here, too.

• Startup costs: $0-$50; simple tools can be built with just ChatGPT
• How to make it: Make your app in your tool of choice, then set up a pricing model. Weekly subscriptions may work better than monthly here, since usage comes in bursts.
• Time to launch: 1-4 weeks
• Estimated income: $500 to $25,000+ a month

5. AI apps for creative uses

While some AI apps solve people's problems, others are just for fun.

Take 3D AI Studio, for example. It's an AI text/image-to-3D-model generator. Jan Hammer spent four months building a tool that turns text or an image into a 3D model, then went from zero to $300,000 ARR in just six months as a solopreneur. 

Gift My Book is like having your own personal writer and artist on tap. It generates the book you want, then lets you use print-on-demand to bring it to life.

And KTool is a useful tool that lets you send newsletters and web articles to your Kindle.

Three very different products with one common link: these ideas are pretty innovative.

• Startup costs: $0-$300 a month. Generation-heavy tools cost more per job than text ones.
• How to make it: Build your app with something like Lovable or Cursor. For AI generation tools, consider selling credit packs as well as a monthly sub. You can set that up with Whop.
• Time to launch: 1-4 weeks
• Estimated income: $500 to $25,000+ a month

6. AI app builders

Using AI to build AI apps to make money is meta. But using AI to build AI app builders so that other people can use them for building AI apps is … well, we've gone past meta. The movie Inception suddenly comes to mind.

Base44 is the most famous version. Maor Shlomo was wrestling with WordPress, trying to make a website for his girlfriend in late 2024. Deciding that the process was stupidly painful, he started building an alternative, and that's how Base44 came to be.

It only took him three weeks to hit $1 million ARR. By June, he had around 400,000 users (according to Lenny's Newsletter), and Wix bought it for $80 million.

And yes, AI wrote most of the code. 

Your best bet? Think of a niche and create a specialized app builder. General app builders already exist, but if you know a field well, you can optimize your tool to be perfect for that particular field.

• Startup costs: $100-$1,000 a month. Every generation a user runs costs you inference, so the costs can ramp up.
• How to make it: You'll want a strong tool for this, something like Cursor, Codex, or Claude Code instead of a no-code tool. Price it in credits and/or a monthly subscription.
• Time to launch: 3-6 months
• Estimated income: $0 to $50,000+ a month

7. Lifestyle apps

Have you ever seen an app or a product that made you think something along the lines of, "huh, I didn't know I needed that"?

Run with that and build something that fits that exact bill.

An AI-based service that identifies dog/pet breeds, for instance. An AI baby name generator (just be very careful to check the underlying code, as future parents may not appreciate joke names slipping through). AI outfit planner. AI room mockup generator.

You can even help people write their wedding speeches or vows with a simple vibe-coded app you make with ChatGPT – apps like Best Man Speech Generator AI already do exactly this, charging $0.99/month or a one-time $9.99 for lifetime access.

If there's a need, someone will find a way to fill it. You can be that person and make good money in the process.

• Startup costs: $0-$50 a month. As is the case with most tools on this list, you just need an AI tool to make this app for you.
• How to make it: Build your app with a vibe coding tool like Cursor, then monetize it with Whop CLI (or just make your own whop).
• Time to launch: 3 days-1 month
• Estimated income: $100-$3,000 a month

Content, marketing & writing business ideas

Anyone can ask ChatGPT to write them an article about anything. But to make that article actually worth reading? That takes more than just 10 minutes of prompting an AI.

That's where you come in.

Businesses and creators everywhere need good content, and you can provide it by knowing how to handle AI tools and improve whatever they give you. Unlike selling an app, these businesses run on providing an ongoing service, usually for a subscription or retainer – see how to build and sell AI services on Whop for the setup mechanics.

8. AI content agency

Most business owners have a vague idea of how to get Claude (or basically any AI chatbot) to spit out a blog post. But building a whole strategy around that – running the calendar, writing blog posts, web copy, product descriptions – is a different job entirely.

You can offer your services to businesses and creators, offering not just a single article, but a whole package. Use AI to write the underlying content, then follow up with your own common sense and better judgment to make it actually worth reading.

Vaibhav Kishnani built Content-Whale with just $35 in starting capital, and it's since grown into a $514,000-a-year content agency serving clients like Quikr and The Boston Consulting Group.

This is a very scalable business, as the actual content generation doesn't take too long, and you can use AI for anything from finding clients to communicating with them, too.

• Startup costs: $0-$100 a month. You might want tools like a Claude or Canva subscription, or LinkedIn Premium for outreach.
• How to make it: Advertise your business and reach out to clients. Create a portfolio of example work with AI first.
• Time to launch: 1 day
• Estimated income: $200-$4,000+ a month

9. Resume/LinkedIn writing service

If you want something more low-key, you can work with individual clients as a resume, cover letter, and LinkedIn specialist. 

People will reach out to you when they need someone to help them apply to jobs, create resumes, or to optimize their LinkedIn profile. This works at every level, too – Zenon Career Services sells an executive resume package on Whop tailored specifically for directors, VPs, and C-suite clients, priced at $625 per service.

AI will do a lot of heavy lifting for you here. You can basically run the entire process with just a Claude subscription: research jobs and job descriptions, write and optimize resumes, create tailored cover letters, and so on. 

For the best results, let AI do the work, but then go back in and humanize it while keeping it optimized for ATS (applicant tracking systems). 

• Startup costs: $0-$50 a month. You don't necessarily need a subscription; most free AI tools can do the trick.
• How to make it: Advertise your services on platforms like Facebook, Reddit, or LinkedIn. Reach out to job seekers and show them your AI-generated resumes.
• Time to launch: 1 day
• Estimated income: $100-$2,000 a month

10. Market research and competitor analysis reports

Vibe coding is great, but building a business based entirely on vibes is less so. Every business owner needs some hard data in order to succeed.

That's why you can make good money by offering AI-based market research and competitor analysis. 

You'll help answer the big questions: what the competitors are charging, where the gaps are, whether a new idea is even worth the time. Getting this information used to mean having to work with a five-figure agency on retainer, but now, you can replace that entire team with AI during the course of one afternoon.

You have to know what to look for. Once you do, prompt the AI, and it'll do the gathering and the synthesis. Tools with reliable web access, like Claude or Gemini, do well with these types of tasks.

Keep in mind: AI will 100% lie to you sometimes. It'll invent figures out of thin air or make up stories. The key is to verify every point before you present it as an absolute truth.

• Startup costs: $0-$60 a month. You don't necessarily need a subscription; most free AI tools can do the trick. A paid AI plan helps with research limits, but you can start without one.
• How to make it: Pick one industry and get to know it properly. Write two sample reports for real companies and use those to pitch. Sell the one-off report and the monthly monitoring as two separate products on your whop or through your own personal website.
• Time to launch: 1-3 days
• Estimated income: $300-$5,000+ a month 

11. AI email marketing service

How many spam emails do you get per day? Plenty, we'd guess. 

Email marketing is still one of the most effective channels out there: according to Litmus, it returns $36 to $42 for every $1 spent, beating paid search (~$2) and social advertising (~$2.80).

But small businesses and solopreneurs often don't know the first thing about email marketing, or understand what goes into creating a successful campaign. Basic research shows that you need at least a welcome sequence, a newsletter, and an abandoned cart flow, but how do you set that up?

That's where you come in. You write the sequences, set up the automations, and keep the campaigns running while they get on with their actual job.

AI can automate most of the processes here. You don't just use it to write the emails, but also to analyze the product and the market. It'll help you optimize open and click-through rates, revenue per email, and all the other important data.

This type of gig screams for a retainer, which means money flowing in every month once you find clients.

• Startup costs: $0-$100 a month. You'll usually work inside whatever platform the client already pays for, so you're mostly spending money on AI tools and Canva.
• How to make it: Build a sample welcome sequence for a brand you like and use it to pitch. Set the retainer up as a recurring subscription on Whop so that your clients can pay you easily.
• Time to launch: 2-7 days
• Estimated income: $500-$6,000+ a month 

12. Ad creative generation and testing for DTC brands

DTC (direct-to-consumer) brands live or die on their ad creative. They need more ads per month than most people care to watch.

Before AI, creating these ads meant finding copywriters, video makers, photographers, a studio, and more. 

Today, AI can handle a lot of that work, but still, many businesses don't know how to achieve good results and stand out from the rest of the AI-generated crowd. After all, the ads still have to be high quality; they just want them to be both faster and cheaper.

That's your pitch: affordable ads at the pace the business needs.

AdCrate, the agency run by Alex Cooper, works with eight- and nine-figure DTC brands like Huel, Licorice.com, and The Perfect Jean, leaning on tools like Arcads for AI-generated UGC video and ChatGPT to analyze reviews and competitors before a single ad gets made.

Keep in mind that some platforms, especially in Europe, have certain guidelines about AI-generated content these days. Make sure you know all the rules so that you can be flexible with what your clients need.

• Startup costs: $50-$200 a month for image and video generation, plus an editing tool.
• How to make it: Make a spec reel for a brand you like and send it to them cold. Set up a portfolio website with Whop Blueprints to improve visibility and sell your service.
• Time to launch: 3-7 days
• Estimated income: $1,000-$10,000+ a month 

13. AI-generated ebooks, guides, printables

With this AI side business, you'll be generating whole books, guides, and PDFs, then putting them up for sale – either one by one or in bulk.

This type of side income is referred to as selling digital products, and the "passive" part of it all kicks in once you have a few digital downloads under your belt, up for sale. At that point, your existing catalog stays online, available to anyone, while you work on the next set of products. The more products you sell, the higher the income.

Let AI handle the writing, then put the marketing in your own hands. As author Jeremie Lander puts it:

"When it comes to marketing ebooks I do organic sales, meaning I don't run ads, I don't have any paid advertisement, I just use my following on social media whether it be YouTube, TikTok and Instagram, to drive sales directly to these books."

Getting AI to write you a book or guide is cheap (or free) and easy, but remember quality control. AI will happily make stuff up if it gets the job done, but your readers will be calling you out on that.

• Startup costs: $0-$50 a month. You need an AI tool and something to design the PDF, and Canva's free tier covers most of it.
• How to make it: Prepare at least 5-10 products to start with. Upload them to your whop, set a price, and you get a checkout link that delivers the file automatically. Bundle the lot together as a higher-priced product once you have a few.
• Time to launch: 1-3 days for your first one
• Estimated income: $100-$3,000+ a month

14. Business, SOP, and pitch deck templates

Templates are the same business model as ebooks, but you're not selling these to individual people in need of fun or guidance. 

In this instance, the buyer is a business, and the neat part is that businesses tend to have bigger budgets.

On the other hand, this is a more demanding sort of side business than making simple printables. You'll be making things like onboarding packs, pitch deck frameworks, hiring scorecards, client proposal templates, and more, all tailored to a specific field (and ideally, a specific business). Like this one – an AI generated builder budget and estimate spreadsheet. This cost nothing to create, and sells at $11.20, with over 300 sales so far.

While AI can create the product for you, you do need to have some knowledge of the industry you're writing for to be able to catch potential mistakes.

• Startup costs: $0-$50 a month for an AI tool. Everything else you need is free.
• How to make it: Pick one industry you know. Build a bunch of useful documents and sell them in a bundle through Whop.
• Time to launch: 1-5 days
• Estimated income: $200-$5,000+ a month

15. Custom AI prompt libraries for specific roles

We're back to being meta with this one. You can use AI to create custom AI prompt libraries, and then sell them.

The key is to distinguish between prompts that most people have no use for, and prompts that can be worth their weight in gold. 

A prompt that helps someone write a birthday message or a few jokes isn't really worth paying for; anyone can do that by themselves. But a prompt pack that helps a recruiter scan through dozens of applications or a realtor write copy for every listing they're looking after translates to monetary gains, and that's what makes it worth checking out.

PromptBase, the marketplace founded by Ben Stokes, proved there's real demand here: it rolled over 11,000 users in its first month alone, and today its top sellers pull in $500 to $3,000+ a month just from their prompt libraries.

Speaking to Fast Company on the story behind PromptBase, Stokes says that he came across a need for prompts when trying to build another project:

“I wanted to buy a battle-tested prompt that could basically, you know, correct handwriting mistakes,”
- Ben Stokes

This is the same pattern we keep coming across: solving a problem that you have yourself. The trick here is to look for repetitive tasks. Think of things people in specific industries have to do time and time again, and then figure out how to reduce that time sink for them. 

One-off tasks won't have people clamoring to buy your AI prompts, but if it's a recurring net gain, the tables turn in your favor.

• Startup costs: $0-$50 a month for an AI tool. Paid versions are usually worth it here as you'll be working with robust prompts.
• How to make it: Focus on some industries you either already know or are willing to research, then brainstorm some recurring tasks your prompts could automate for them. Then, reach out to people directly or advertise your services in industry-related spaces, such as forums or Reddit.
• Time to launch: 1-5 days
• Estimated income: $100-$3,000+ a month

16. Flashcards and study tools for specific certifications

People studying for a certification are basically the ideal customer: they really want to succeed. If you can help them, they'll pay you.

Take the AWS Solutions Architect exam, for example. Students need to pay $150 to get certified, so passing the first time is important. If you can provide them with useful materials, from quiz banks to AI-powered study tools, you've got one foot in the door.

Jon Bonso built a business this way. Tutorials Dojo started as a side project on Udemy and now has over 280,000 enrollees preparing for AWS certifications through its practice exams and study materials.

AI makes building these systems fast. Feed it the official exam syllabus, and it'll generate hundreds of questions and resources for you to sift through. Pick the ones that are genuinely outstanding and sell them as a full-on certificate bundle.

In 2026, it's best to steer clear of generic "study tools" without focusing on one particular niche. There are lots of productivity apps and general study helpers; you want to pick a couple of exams and own them, then build a name for yourself.

• Startup costs: $0-$50 a month. A subscription to something like Claude or ChatGPT should get you through most of it.
• How to make it: Study for and take the exam you want to sell materials for, then make a list of things you wish you had when you were taking that same exam. 
• Time to launch: 1-4 weeks
• Estimated income: $300-$5,000+ a month

Video, audio & content repurposing

In the early days of the ChatGPT boom, AI videos could give you nightmares. Uncanny valley doesn't even begin to cover the monstrosities we were all subjected to (check out this AI slop article for a recap on what we mean).

Now? AI video and audio are slowly becoming indistinguishable from the real thing. You probably see dozens of them each time you scroll through TikTok without even knowing.

This means you can make some serious money with this skill, provided you use the right tools and the best possible prompts. You can take this to the extreme level by creating a whole AI influencer and making money from it, but most people succeed with much less outlandish gigs.

17. Clipping/short-form repurposing service

Every content creator, be they a YouTuber, TikToker, Instagram star, or streamer, is sitting on hours upon hours of unedited footage that nobody's going to watch. 

Knowing how to find the right clips is a key skill that many people don't have (and it's incredibly time-consuming). Clipping content takes hours without the help of AI.

AI will find the right moments in content, cut the video to match a particular platform, and even add captions. 

There are two ways to monetize this kind of skill: You either offer it as a service or do it yourself for your own gain. For the first, you take long-form content from various clients and clip it into viral-worthy clips, sharing a retainer for your services. Do this yourself, or create a clipping agency and have others do the work for you.

And the second? You can use Content Rewards, where brands upload their source footage. You clip it, post it on your own accounts, and get paid on verified views. 

• Startup costs: $0-$100 a month. Plenty of clipping tools have free tiers, although you may get better results with a paid option.
• How to make it: Look up some creators you like and clip some of their content, then reach out to them and offer your services, showing those examples.
• Time to launch: 1-3 days
• Estimated income: $100-$5,000+ a month

18. Podcasting

Hosting a podcast used to mean a host or two, some guests, and an hour or two of conversation. And yes, doing that can bring good money once you build up enough of an audience, but not everyone has the skills or the will to make their own podcast.

ElevenLabs is perhaps the most popular tool that lets you generate an entire podcast just with AI. It can create voices that sound human without that eerie hint of robotic undertones that many chatbots still have.

The way this works is you can write a script for an episode (with AI) and then have the app read it out loud with voices that never existed.

If you prefer to keep it more personal, record yourself and let AI handle the cleanup and the editing instead.

• Startup costs: $5-$100 a month. ElevenLabs has a free tier, and paid plans start cheap. You can host your podcast on Whop for free.
• How to make it: Pick a topic that you're interested in. Record yourself or use ElevenLabs. Monetize it through Whop.
• Time to launch: 1-2 weeks
• Estimated income: $100-$3,000+ a month

19. AI audio services

Tied to the above, you can build a business using AI to handle audio – and not just for podcasting.

Voiceovers and dubbing are in serious demand right now, and the right AI tool lets you offer this as a service without ever touching a microphone yourself. Most requests will be for short-form videos like TikToks or Reels, but long-form content is where the real money is: adding a voiceover to a 20-minute video is a hassle most creators would happily pay someone else to handle with AI.

The demand is real. Voices, one of the largest voice-talent marketplaces, reports that talent earnings on its platform are up 170% since 2023, largely driven by AI voice work, and says a single branded AI voice deal can pay up to 85x more than a traditional voiceover job.

Audio cleanup is another service you can build around the same skill. A typical video or podcast is full of "uhh," "umm," and awkward pauses. Cleaning that up used to mean hours of frankly boring manual work. Now, you can offer to strip it all out for clients using AI instead.

Just be careful, since AI can get trigger-happy and cut something out that shouldn't have been cut.

• Startup costs: $5-$100 a month. ElevenLabs and Adobe Podcast both have free tiers, and paid plans are cheap enough to cover with your first client.
• How to make it: Build a before-and-after reel, since this is a job people need to hear to understand. Charge per minute of finished audio. Offer retainers to regular creators to secure a monthly income.
• Time to launch: 1-5 days
• Estimated income: $200-$4,000+ a month

Workflow automation & tools for businesses

Time is money, especially when you're running a business. And despite the AI boom, many businesses waste precious hours on tasks that could be automated. 

It's not that these businesses don't want to use AI. It's that they don't know how to. Service Direct's 2025 Small Business AI Report found that among small businesses that haven't adopted AI, 62% cite a simple reason: they don't understand what it could actually do for their business.

That's the opportunity here. Small businesses may not realize they could be automating some workflow they've grown used to, and they don't have the time or expertise to figure it out themselves.

You can be that open-minded AI pro for these companies.

Two paths await: either build the tools and sell them (vibe code them if you like), or set the whole thing up for the business and charge a monthly subscription to keep it running.

20. Workflow templates sold as one-time products

All the AI tools and services in this section have one thing in common: you build something for someone else to save time. Creating workflow templates is a great example of this.

An n8n, Zapier, or Make workflow is essentially just a file you can export. They're some of the top products to sell right now.

Lead comes into the form, gets enriched, lands in the CRM, fires a Slack alert, and triggers a follow-up email. Once you build it once, you can sell it and adapt it for hundreds of new customers, too.

There's an obvious objection to tackle: n8n has free templates, some of which will do about the same as yours.

But paid templates are on n8n's own roadmap. The platform's Creator Hub, home to a 40,000+ global community, lists the ability to publish paid templates as a perk for verified creators, and n8n says it's already seen creators making solid money from their templates.

That's why you should test your own workflows and use AI to improve them, as well as tailor them to specific businesses or professionals. The more you know the core of the business, the better your template.

• Startup costs: $0-$50 a month. n8n is free to self-host, and Zapier and Make both have free tiers, so you may only need to pay for the AI tool.
• How to make it: Pick one industry and figure out what's a painful, long process that could be automated. Build it, find ways to break it, then fix it to make sure it's fail-proof.
• Time to launch: 1-2 weeks
• Estimated income: $200-$4,000+ a month

21. MCP servers for a business's existing tools

If you know your way around this topic, you could strike gold, but this one is fairly technical.

An MCP server exposes a piece of software's data and actions so an AI assistant like Claude, ChatGPT, or Cursor can use them directly. There's no training involved, it's just a standardized way for the AI to call the tools and pull the data it needs.

Suryansh Jaiswal, founder of 1ClickReport, learned this firsthand: he built his product's dashboard first and its MCP server second, connecting it to a business's Google Ads, Shopify, and Stripe accounts so an AI could surface wasted ad spend and revenue issues in plain English.

Six months in, he wrote that the MCP layer, not the dashboard he'd originally led with, had become the part of the product actually winning customers.

For you, the opportunity lies in building those connections for software that doesn't have one yet, then locking it behind a monthly paywall that makes sure those businesses keep coming back to you.

AI is huge here. Claude Code or Cursor will write most of the actual code if you can describe what you need, which means you'll need a good understanding of the field to achieve good results.

• Startup costs: $20-$200 a month. Investing in a paid AI plan will pay off tremendously here.
• How to make it: Pick one piece of vertical software with an existing API and no MCP server. Build it, then gate it with Whop.
• Time to launch: 2-6 weeks
• Estimated income: $500-$8,000+ a month

22. CRM setup bundles for local businesses

The days of writing dates down in a little notebook are so over. Plumbers, dentists, gyms, hair salons … all these businesses live or die by their CRM software. 

The problem is that many businesses don't have anyone who can set this up for them and help them if something backfires.

Building them a robust CRM can become a profitable AI side business that gets you paid every month (if you build it as a SaaS). Explore what that particular field needs and adjust the CRM to match, with basic features like missed-call text-back, automated booking reminders, review requests, or follow-ups.

There are white-label CRM and automation platforms built specifically for this: they bundle the CRM with the automations, and you rebrand the whole thing under your own name. The client never needs to know what's running underneath, they'll just see your own service.

• Startup costs: $97-$300 a month for an agency-tier plan on a white-label CRM platform.
• How to make it: Pick one trade and learn how it actually runs. Build a demo account for that industry and show it to people rather than describing it. Take the setup fee and the monthly retainer through Whop so the recurring side handles itself.
• Time to launch: 2-4 weeks
• Estimated income: $500-$7,000+ a month

23. Website audit and optimization service

Many businesses have their own websites. But a lot of these websites are awfully unoptimized.

Images that aren't compressed may take ages to load. No meta descriptions can hurt a website's SEO. Broken links are off-putting to new clients.

No one's going to tell these businesses about this, as most people just close the site and go to a competitor. That's what makes this type of service so valuable: you can be the one to tell them, and to help them fix it. 

You can run a site through an SEO crawler like Screaming Frog to surface every technical issue – broken links, missing meta descriptions, slow-loading images – then feed those results into an AI like Claude or ChatGPT to turn them into an easy-to-follow report for the client.

Doing this with AI makes it so much faster and more scalable for you, too. What would take dozens of hours to do manually can be done in minutes.

• Startup costs: $0-$500, depending on how many tools you actually sign up for. A lot of this can be done for free on a smaller scale.
• How to make it: Start by setting up a high-quality website with Whop Blueprints or Claude Code. Pick an area and an industry, then have AI find some small businesses for you to audit. Audit them for free, reach out with a sample, and offer to fix their problems.
• Time to launch: 2-5 days
• Estimated income: $300-$5,000+ a month

24. AI decks and investor updates for small businesses

If there's one thing AI is great at, it's data, and data is precious to small businesses. 

Many of them have investors, and those investors don't usually love waiting for weeks to receive a poorly made Excel spreadsheet with updates on how the business is doing. 

Automating this with AI lets you help founders who already have too much on their plate. Lucid Financials built an entire business on this idea: an AI-powered accounting service for startups that turns bookkeeping into one-click board reports and investor updates, with founders crediting it for cutting hours of manual reporting into minutes.

You'll use AI to pull the numbers, analyze them, optimize them, and create optimized decks, emails, sheets, and graphs that make the data look appealing.

Make money by getting your clients to sign up for a monthly or quarterly subscription. You'll keep tabs on everything and deliver ready-made reports for them; they'll pay you a good sum of money for the peace of mind.

One thing that's somewhat unique to this AI side business: Have an NDA ready. You'll be privy to some of the most valuable information about these businesses.

• Startup costs: $0-$50 a month. A paid AI plan helps a lot, but you can get by with cheap or free tiers.
• How to make it: Use AI to make up some data for a sample company in an industry you want to pitch to, then create example decks/presentations and send them out. You can automate this with AI, too.
• Time to launch: 2-10 days
• Estimated income: $200-$3,000 a month

25. Reusable brand design systems

Every new business, or even just one in need of a change, needs the same set of things.

Logos, website layouts, color palettes, fonts that work together, social templates … everything needs to follow that same branding for it to work well together. Typically, this type of work is handed off to a designer, but some clever prompts and the right tools get you good results much quicker. Depthlogix sells this range on Whop, with logo design, t-shirt design, and UX design all as separate products clients can pick from.

Preparing brand design systems means designing the complete kit, with various logo variations, type pairings, Canva templates, and social post layouts, plus a short guide explaining how to use them. 

AI can do a huge chunk of this job for you, making up palettes that work well together and turning them into brand assets. For logos, use your own creativity combined with AI to make some eye-catching options.

If you niche down, this side business has legs: you need to know the trends in your field instead of just going by what you think looks nice.

• Startup costs: $0-$50 a month. Canva and Figma both have usable free tiers, and a paid AI plan is optional.
• How to make it: Pick one industry and build three complete kits for it. Sell exclusive and non-exclusive licenses as separate products on your whop.
• Time to launch: 1-7 days
• Estimated income: $50-$2,000 a month

26. AI-enhanced virtual assistant (VA) service

You can make decent money as a VA, but you can make even more money as a VA who's fluent in all things AI – according to VA Masters' 2026 industry analysis, AI-proficient VAs are commanding 20-40% higher rates than their non-AI peers while delivering 2-3x the output.

The opportunity is wide open, too. According to a 2026 analysis of over 8,700 VA job postings, small businesses now search for AI help 24 times more often than they search to hire a virtual assistant, yet only 0.2% of VA job postings actually mention AI tool proficiency as a requirement. Meaning, the demand is there, but almost nobody's positioning themselves to meet it.

The best way to make serious money here is, unsurprisingly, going a bit more niche than just a "jack of all trades." A VA with some understanding of the industry, be it a law firm or a plumbing business, can truly step in and carry some serious weight.

• Startup costs: $0-$50 a month for an AI plan and a password manager.
• How to make it: Start with low expectations to build up some experience and some references. Sign up on Whop to handle payments safely.
• Time to launch: 0-3 days
• Estimated income: $200-$2,000+ a month

27. SOP and documentation service

You know how programmers and developers always talk about needing good documentation? They're not wrong.

If you have a tool or a process within a company, and nobody knows that process from A to Z, that's risky. According to McKinsey, the average knowledge worker loses 1.8 hours a day – nearly a full workday a week – just searching for information that a proper document would have already had.

Fortunately, you can make good money getting businesses out of that pickle with the help of AI.

You'll gather everything the business is able to muster about their existing procedures. In some cases, you may be asked to explore the process yourself to learn it properly. Then, feed all of that data to an AI and let it prepare in-depth process docs that guide users through whatever it is they needed help with in the first place.

This is more often done as a one-off, but some businesses need recurring documentation, so offer packages that work for both types of clients.

• Startup costs: $0-$50 a month. All you really need is a paid AI plan (not necessary) and a transcription tool (depending on the gig).
• How to make it: Reach out to businesses via LinkedIn and advertise yourself on platforms like Reddit or Whop Discover, as it's hard to guess which business might need this service. Set up payments on a per-project basis.
• Time to launch: 2-5 days
• Estimated income: $500-$6,000+ a month

Life admin, niche personal & local business ideas

New side business owners often worry about niching down too much. Yes, it narrows your customer base, but that's often the point.

For most of the ideas on this list, picking a niche is what makes you the obvious choice instead of just another option in a sea of people doing the same thing with AI.

Most people, even your elderly relatives, can use ChatGPT to some extent. To make your AI business stand out, you need to tailor it to specific people or businesses; that gives you an edge that translates to higher rates.

28. Digital legacy and memoir services

Do you have a box of memories in your house somewhere? Photos, maybe a few old home videos, some jewelry or letters … Stuff you don't want to throw out, but don't know what to do with.

You do? Well, so do most people. And many of us also have a "digital box" with more of the same thing, including voice recordings or emails (that usually costs us a lot of money in cloud storage to keep online). 

AI lets you make sense of all those disconnected pieces and turn them into something real – a proper book, ready to print. The Life Before Me runs on this model: family members purchase a memoir as a gift, the storyteller records voice conversations answering guided prompts, and a multi-stage AI pipeline turns those recordings into a professionally designed hardcover book, no typing required.

This is a fairly intimate sort of service that requires a lot of empathy and people skills, and AI can't replace that, but it'll help you with all the tedious legwork that goes into putting the memoir together.

• Startup costs: $0-$50: all you really need is an AI plan and a transcription service.
• How to make it: Start by making a couple of these for your own family first, then share parts of them as your portfolio. Set up social media profiles to advertise your services.
• Time to launch: 1-7 days
• Estimated income: $100-$1,000 a month

29. AI-assisted genealogy research and family history books

Following from the previous one, you can do more than just help people piece together old memories: You can help them uncover their past.

This role is more of a detective, but it still requires great people skills. You'll be working backwards through records, and AI can do a lot of the heavy lifting in the research required for that. 

DNA test services are pretty widespread, so you may sometimes be hit with what feels like a hopeless case of tracing family back through the entire globe. You'll need to be patient, but most of all, proficient in AI research. There's no shortage of people to help – AncestryDNA alone has over 30 million people in its network, and the global ancestry testing market is worth $2.89 billion this year, which means millions of people are sitting on DNA results and family trees they don't have the time or skill to fully make sense of.

• Startup costs: $20-$200 a month. For optimal results, a paid subscription to something like ChatGPT or Claude is needed. You can also subscribe to various archives.
• How to make it: Specialize in one region or diaspora rather than generic genealogy. Buy access to a couple of relevant archives, then build a free sample tree for a volunteer family as your portfolio piece. Price per generation researched, since the search gets harder the further back you go.
• Time to launch: 1-7 days
• Estimated income: $100-$1,000 a month

30. Hyper-specific comparison sites

This AI side business lets you take the idea of "going niche" to the next level. Say that someone out there is trying to figure out which dog DNA test is worth buying, or which wrist brace brings the greatest pain relief. 

These people will turn to search, and will find some thin AI-generated insights based on a random Reddit thread from a decade ago. But if you were to set up a comparison site in an underserved niche, they could be finding your website instead.

Brandon Saltalamacchia built Retro Dodo around one hyper-specific niche – retro gaming console reviews – and grew it into roughly $8,000 a month in affiliate income, hitting $55,000 in a single month three years after launch.

It'll take time for the money to start rolling in, so your best bet is to set up multiple sites and treat them as semi-passive income. For more on making that work long-term, see how to generate passive income with AI.

• Startup costs: $10-$50 a month for hosting and a domain, plus whatever AI plan you use to code the site.
• How to make it: Make your own website with Whop Blueprints, then generate comparisons with AI. Invest in real-world videos and images to improve the site's credibility.
• Time to launch: 1-2 weeks to build, but up to a year to start earning
• Estimated income: $0-$2,000 a month

31. Non-dating matchmaking tools

Forget Tinder; who's going to help you match with a roommate who doesn't make you want to move to a farm and live like a hermit? 

Non-dating matchmaking tools can be vibe coded in a couple of days, and you might be able to charge decent money if you solve people's actual problems. Bunky proves the model works. It's a roommate-matching app for college students that's grown to over 120,000 users across 700+ campuses, using a mutual match system so nobody gets stuck with unwanted contact.

Maybe they need a roommate, or maybe they need a mentor in a new skill, or someone to start a new business with. You could also help people find new players for D&D nights or someone to play tennis with. 

You get it: the possibilities are endless. 

For starters, set up the app, and advertise it inside a community that actually has an interest in the niche you're matchmaking for. Offer people free keys to beta test it for you and advertise it in relevant spaces.

• Startup costs: $0-$100 a month, depending on the AI plan you're using.
• How to make it: Pick a specific niche, research it into oblivion, and vibe code an app that fits it. Advertise it in relevant spaces. Use Whop CLI to make money.
• Time to launch: 1-3 weeks
• Estimated income: $200-$4,000 a month

32. Paid niche newsletters

If you want a newsletter talking about AI or some popular hobby, you'll find millions of them. If you're stuck on an angle, this listicle of newsletter ideas is a good place to start browsing.

But starting a newsletter in a niche that's oversaturated is almost impossible at this point. Instead, try to think of something that's genuinely useful to people, such as scraped/synthesized public data. 

This type of data gives insights that most people tend to miss, and you can just use AI to find it, clean it, and make a weekly newsletter out of it. The Bear Cave, run by Edwin Dorsey, digs through SEC filings and financial data to expose corporate misconduct: pure data-mining turned into a subscription product. Back in 2023, it had around 1,300 paid subscribers at $64/month generating roughly $550,000 a year, with rates that climbed from $34 to $64 a month as the business grew. The newsletter was acquired by Hunterbrook Media in 2026.

Next step: advertising said newsletter in relevant spaces, such as Reddit. You should also try to build yourself/the newsletter itself a social media presence.

• Startup costs: $20-$100 a month for an AI subscription and any data sources you need, such as Statista. Whop is free to start.
• How to make it: You can start a Substack or run your newsletter through something like beehiiv. Build up your socials, send free samples, and then open a monetized tier with Whop.
• Time to launch: 1-7 days, but you probably won't earn much for the first few months
• Estimated income: $50-$3,000+ a month

33. AI-designed goods for a specific subculture

If you have any sort of less-common hobby, you've probably gone through the painful experience of seeing a brand try to make a comment or a joke around your subculture, and have it fall flat completely. 

That's because people outside of these niche subcultures don't get the vibe at all, and researching won't really let you be "part of the club." It's just stuff you learn and pick up along the way as you immerse yourself in a particular niche.

This is a good way to monetize a niche hobby. You can make tattoo flash sheets, menu design for specialty coffee shops, zines, patches for cycling clubs, album art, posters for local gigs—those are just some ideas. One Fiverr freelancer generates tattoo flash sheet concepts with Midjourney for $5 a design, giving clients a few AI-generated variations to pick from.

• Startup costs: $0-$50 for AI image tools. Using PoD services means you don't have to pay for inventory space.
• How to make it: Join relevant groups on Reddit or WhatsApp, then share your designs and advertise them. Be careful, because some groups have very strong anti-AI policies.
• Time to launch: 1-3 days
• Estimated income: $100-$1,500+ a month

34. AI room and interior design service

Do you have a good eye for interior design and decoration? You could be making some serious money with AI, and even then, it'd still be a good deal for your clients. Hiring an actual interior designer costs thousands.

AI has made the visual part of this super easy: you just upload a photo of a room and generate the same space in any layout you have in mind. Move furniture, add something new, knock down a wall.

Interior AI, built by well-known indie developer Pieter Levels (@levelsio), lets anyone upload a photo of a room and get a redesigned version in seconds – proof this service works as a lean, one-person business built almost entirely on AI image generation.

Present the designs to your clients along with a shopping list. Be careful and make sure that any new furniture actually exists and can be bought, as that's the thing that still trips AI up, so that cool new rug might not even be real.

• Startup costs: $0-$60 a month for reliable AI image generation. 
• How to make it: Do some rooms for free for friends and family to get actual photos of results, then post them on your socials or your website (easily made with Whop Blueprints). Advertise widely. Sell fixed-price packages on Whop.
• Time to launch: 3-7 days
• Estimated income: $100-$2,000 a month

35. Menu engineering reports for restaurants and cafes

Many restaurants run on a shoestring budget, and the margins are paper thin. Beyond that, those businesses are often passion projects, so they're run by people who genuinely love cooking but may not have any time left at the end of the day to consider how profitable each dish is.

You guessed it: that's where you come in.

Menu engineering is the practice of working that out and then redesigning the menu so the profitable things get ordered more. When consultants ran a menu engineering pass for The Brasserie, revenue per table rose 15%, profit margins improved 12%, and inventory costs dropped 9% – all from repositioning and repricing existing dishes, no new equipment or menu overhaul required.

AI will help you decide which dishes add up if you feed it the menu, sales data, and ingredient costs. Then, you can use that same AI to create helpful graphs that actually help the restaurant turn a profit.

• Startup costs: $0-$50 a month for an AI subscription (optional).
• How to make it: Starting locally might be the easiest. Pick a restaurant, analyze the menu with whatever data is available to you, and present it with that partial analysis as a teaser. The more tailored your pitch, the higher chances of scoring a client.
• Time to launch: 3-10 days
• Estimated income: $200-$2,000 a month

36. Localization/translation service for small businesses

If writers are struggling in this economy, translators are struggling even more. Even basic Google Translate can manage a whole bunch of different content, and using free ChatGPT basically removes the need for proper translation services.

… or so people think.

The reality is that, unless you're writing the simplest stuff in the world, proper localization will always be better than just AI translation. Electrolux found this out the hard way when a literal translation of its slogan for the US market came out as "Nothing sucks like an Electrolux" – technically accurate, but not exactly the message they meant to send (and this was much before AI translation was a thing).

Sure, you can use the AI for translating everything, but localization makes sure everything else adds up, like currencies, payment methods, or even jokes.

Use AI as a translator and a fact-checker, then give it your own, thorough look, and send it off to help small businesses thrive in other markets.

• Startup costs: $20-$200 a month for an AI plan. If you hire native checkers for countries you're not familiar with, that's an added flat fee on top.
• How to make it: Pick one language to start with, then reach out to businesses and advertise yourself on socials. 
• Time to launch: 3-10 days
• Estimated income: $300-$3,000 a month

37. Plain language and accessibility rewriting

Staring at legalese or medical documentation can leave you scratching your head, because what does any of this stuff really mean? A lot of these documents don't just use specialized language, they sound as if they were written to be as confusing as possible.

Unsurprisingly, AI does a good job of detangling this and translating it into plain language. 

Your job will be to prompt the AI in such a way that you end up with proper plain English, but also to make sure it didn't bury some important facts in the process.

Your buyers will, 99% of the time, be companies rather than people. They'll have masses of documents that need this "plain English" treatment. You can charge them per project or per hour.

• Startup costs: $0-$20 per month for an AI plan
• How to make it: Rewrite one real public document as a sample, with the original and your version side by side. Approach public sector organizations or charities and try your luck. The ultimate goal is scoring a retainer, which is the best way for freelancers to get paid.
• Time to launch: 1-3 days
• Estimated income: $100-$2,000+ a month

38. Contract and lease question-flagging

In a similar vein to the gig above, this is for all the lazy (and sane) people who don't want to spend three hours trying to read an important contract. 

We've all signed contracts we didn't fully get, and accepted terms and conditions we didn't read at all. You can help people out by getting AI to draw all the important insights and flag any potential issues.

goHeather has proven the demand is real. This is a lawyer-trained AI contract review tool with thousands of business and law firm customers across the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia, priced well below the custom-quote enterprise tools most of that market used to be locked out of. You could make something similar.

Be mindful of doing this for legal reasons, though. You can't offer legal advice without being an actual lawyer, at least not everywhere. Your job is just to scan the contract and return insights that then need to be discussed with someone else.

• Startup costs: $20-$60 for an AI plan. For this, it's best to use paid plans at high capacity.
• How to make it: This is niche enough that you might have to start by establishing a social media presence. Build a website with Whop Blueprints, set up some socials and post your results regularly; people will reach out when they need this service.
• Time to launch: 1-7 days
• Estimated income: $50-$1,000 a month

39. Grant writing service for nonprofits

Nonprofits are constantly bogged down by needing extra funds. There are people whose actual full-time job is to write on social media, trying to get funding.

Grant applications are miserable to write, too, but AI can do well with them, especially if you go back in for another pass and make it sound more human and more effective.

AI will help you with research, too. If you're writing the grants, you might as well figure out where to send them out to, and then offer that as an added service. Nonprofits often don't have much money to spare, but hiring you will be way cheaper than a full-time employee.

• Startup costs: $0-$50 a month for an AI subscription. Some funder databases charge, too, but many are free.
• How to make it: Start by volunteering your time and your skills for a charity you're passionate about. Once they see results, you can use them as a reference for paying gigs. 
• Time to launch: 1-2 weeks
• Estimated income: $300-$2,000 a month

40. Consumer letter-writing service

We've all lost some money during the course of lives, simply due to sheer laziness. Maybe a flight was delayed, and you never claimed for it, or maybe you missed an event due to illness and didn't bother checking whether you could get a refund anyway. 

It's hardly ever a life-changing sum of money, but it adds up. You could offer to handle the whole process for people, from finding whom to email and where, to writing the email, to handling the entire correspondence, all with AI.

People are basically paying you for the effort that they don't need to put into it themselves. 

The important thing here is to stick with consumer complaints. AI is pretty good at handling legal stuff, but you want to avoid charging money for something you may not be able to do with full confidence. So, unless you're a lawyer, stick to things that are easily verifiable on your end.

• Startup costs: $0-$50, all you really need is an AI plan, but probably not even that.
• How to make it: Pick some complaint types, learn their rules, and look for people who might need your help. Advertise yourself on Facebook Marketplace or Reddit, but also scour groups for people who have been wronged and offer to do this for them.
• Time to launch: 1-2 days
• Estimated income: $50-$1,000 a month

How to launch and monetize your AI-built side business

We've covered ideas from dog DNA tracking to making SaaS apps for founders, but the one common thread for all of these AI side businesses is that they need a tool in order to come to life.

Lovable, Replit, Base44, Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, n8n, ElevenLabs, and all the other tools we've mentioned are built on AI – knowing how to use them well is what actually gets you from idea to launch.

AI speeds up all the annoying parts founders had to deal with just five years ago. But once the building is done, you're left with the harder question: how do you actually turn this into money? The answer looks different depending on what you've built.

First, pick a side business idea

With 40 ideas on the table, the right choice for you comes down to three things about you, not the ideas themselves.

• Start with your technical comfort level. If you can't tell a database from a spreadsheet, that's fine – no-code and vibe-coding tools like Lovable, Replit, and Base44 exist so you don't need to write a line of code. But if you already think in systems, ideas like MCP servers or AI app builders will reward that background far more than a from-scratch beginner could pull off.
• Be honest about your hours. Content and service-based work (writing resumes, VA gigs, grant writing) can slot into a few spare hours a week without much friction. But SaaS apps and platforms are a different commitment entirely: you'll be building for weeks before launch, then maintaining and marketing for months after.
• Know your budget. Most of these ideas cost less than $50 a month to start, which is part of what makes AI-built businesses so appealing in the first place. A handful, though – CRM setup bundles, MCP servers – need $100 to $300 a month in tooling before you've made a cent back, so go in with that runway already accounted for.

Once you've chosen an idea, it's time to launch it.

Three types of businesses, three different ways to launch

Each of the businesses we've discussed sorts into one of three groups: services, downloadables, and apps or platforms.

Each has a completely different path toward launch.

Services

If you're selling services, you need a website and a social media presence. Those two things (or five, depending on how many socials you commit to) help people find you. 

This doesn't have to be anything extreme, and you can easily build your own website with Whop Blueprints without any need to code. Socials can largely be automated with AI, but watch out, as some platforms flag that really quickly (and many customers don't like it).

You don't need to show your face, but you do need a lead pipeline, identifying problems that people have and demonstrating how you can fix them.

Downloadables

The passive income makers. They're made once and then need to sit where people will see them and buy them. You front-load the work and then reap your rewards, but only if you list them on a good marketplace or have a great lead magnet driving people straight to them.

Apps and platforms

Apps and platforms may be the hardest to launch, but they can be mind-blowing moneymakers. You'll build them for weeks before anyone sees them, but that might still be the easy half when you'll have to market them, too.

Market them all over your socials, but more importantly, in places where people can actually use them. Offer free beta access or gift cards for people who try them. Get your first reviews and it'll go from there.

Discovery: how people actually find you

Putting products onto the internet can feel like screaming into a void sometimes. We're not just competing with other people, but also with millions of bots (all busy pretending to be people).

That's why you should make your product as discoverable as possible. Product Hunt still works for tools. Reddit works, but mostly if you're a real member of the community, too; a lot of subreddits are kind of allergic to self-promo if you don't engage with them beforehand.

Cold outreach works for services, but be prepared to deal with many unanswered emails. Use AI to tailor every pitch to your recipient.

Optimizing for AI is a new route that's incredibly successful for some people. Referred to as GEO or AEO, this strategy will have you posting on LinkedIn, Medium, and your own site to create product mentions.

And if organic discovery is too slow for your liking, Whop Ads lets you put money behind it directly from your dashboard. There are no setup fees and no minimum spend, and it's smart enough to seed your targeting from your existing Whop sales data instead of starting cold.

The common thread: payments

It doesn't matter which of the three subcategories your product belongs to. It still needs to make you money, and that requires a secure, trustworthy payment infrastructure. 

This is where most people stall out. Finding a payment platform is easy; integrating it cleanly, without losing customers at checkout, is the hard part.

Downloadables and apps tend to run on one-off payments, while services – especially SaaS – need recurring billing. You need one system that handles both, because the moment someone decides to buy is exactly when you're most likely to lose them: Baymard Institute puts the average cart abandonment rate at 70.22% based on 50 separate studies, meaning seven in ten people who want to buy something walk away before finishing.

Payment friction is one of the most common reasons why: a declined card, a checkout that looks untrustworthy, or a missing payment method the customer wanted to use.

Whop fixes this by handling payments for you, whatever you're selling.

Running a service? Skip building a whole checkout flow: send a simple payment link, use tap to pay, or send an invoice for a one-off project.

Selling downloadables or an app? Whop's embedded payments drop straight into your product or site, so customers pay without ever leaving your experience.

Running a marketplace where multiple people get paid out? Whop handles that too. Embedded payments sit alongside payouts and split payments, so everyone gets their cut automatically without you playing middleman.

Across all of it, Whop supports one-off payments, subscriptions, and installment plans out of the box, accepts cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and a growing list of local and international payment methods, and gives you a checkout that's built to convert instead of leak customers.

You don't need to use multiple separate tools for accepting money, managing billing, and building a checkout page yourself – Whop provides all of it in one.

How Whop CLI and Whop Blueprints help you run your business

That's the foundation: products, checkout, payments, currencies, all handled. But Whop doesn't stop at payments. It also gives you two ways to build the rest of the business around it, depending on how you like to work.

Whop CLI

If you're building an app, you don't have to leave your code editor to set up your actual product. Whop CLI does it for you.

All you have to do is install it, and from Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex, prompt it to 'create a product.' Specify the bare minimum: what it's called and how it's going to be priced. Ask for a checkout link.

Done. Whop CLI runs the actual commands and hands you a live, shareable checkout link without ever making you interact with any dashboard.

That's perhaps the best part. You can type your own commands, but you can also explain to your tool of choice what you want to achieve, and it'll translate it into commands for Whop CLI to use. It can run completely agentically.

Whop CLI also lets you run your entire business from one terminal. It's not just creating products, it also lets you set up ad campaigns, pull stats, deploy apps, issue promo codes, and more. 

Avid X user? You can also use the Whop connector in Grok which extends the Whop CLI, giving business operators and their AI agents full access to Whop's API through natural-language commands.

Whop Blueprints

There's no easier way to set up your own business and your own website than Whop Blueprints. 

These blueprints are businesses that are already running, and you can make them yours with one click. You can also create your own just by describing it to Whop, and the Whop AI will build it for you. 

Alternatively, if you already have your own site, just paste its URL into Blueprints and let it be rebuilt, fully optimized and ready to go. You get the full benefit of Whop's entire toolkit, including tracking visitors, traffic, ads, and revenue.

And if you don't feel like doing any of that stuff, you can still publish your own blueprint for businesses to use, then get paid every time it's used.

Start your AI-powered side business with Whop

Whop exists to help you build the business and get paid for it, whatever idea you pick from this list.

Already have an app or website? Build Whop into it and never worry about payments again.

Starting from scratch? Build your entire product on Whop and let it handle everything from checkout to payouts, start to finish. Whop CLI and Whop Blueprints make either path easier than ever.

You can build Whop into your existing app or website, and then you never have to worry about payments.

Your time is priceless, so spend it building the thing. We'll take care of getting you paid for it.

Turn your side business idea into income with Whop.