29 Best Side Hustles to Start From Home in 2024 (Graded)

Financial Freedom.
The dream everyone has.
And I'm no different.

If you're like me, you are always on the lookout for new ways to make more money.

In this article, I took the time to find the 29 Best Side Hustles to start from home in 2024.

I've also made sure to include the time it takes, how costly it is, and how difficult it is.

You might be surprised by what is out there.

1. Reselling Items

Time: 1/5

Difficulty: 2/5

Start Cost: 5/5

When I turned 18 this was the first official side hustle I started.

I went to Alibaba and found a product that I liked. back then it was E-Cigarettes.

I bought them in a bulk box for around 2 EUR / piece, then went to eBay and resold them for 10 EUR.

Back then I didn't know anything about SEO, market research, and the like, but was still raking in around 300EUR/month in profits.

This is a great side hustle to start from the comfort of your home. The only time you need to get out of the house is to bring the product to the post.

Pros:

Takes little time
Easy to get started

Cons:

Highly Competitive
Need Money to get started
Can get stuck with unsold product
Business License needed for bulk shopping

2. Writing on Medium

Time: 5/5

Difficulty: 4/5

Start Cost: 1/5

If you haven't heard about Medium yet, you are living under a rock.

Medium is a Blogging based Social Media Platform.

It allows you to publish articles on your profile. If your posts receive reads (30 seconds viewed or longer) you will get paid for it. But getting paid requires you to first join the partner program. This costs $5/month or $50/year.

I tried Medium for 2 months now and earned $100+ in my first, and $200+ in my second month on Medium. You are not only getting paid to write on Medium, but you also are building an audience at the same time.

Pros:

Building an Audience
Easy to get traffic to your articles

Cons:

Steep learning curve
Low earnings in the beginning
Needs a lot of time engaging with others

3. Filling in Captchas

Time: 5/5

Difficulty: 1/5

Start Cost: 0/5

Did you know that you can get paid for filling in captchas?

It's true! Some websites will pay you for filling in captchas. The amounts are usually parts of cents. If you are very accurate and fast, you can get a few $/hour.

I managed to get around $20 in a few hours.

It's not a side hustle I would recommend, but an honorable mention nonetheless.

Pros:

Easy to Start
No skill requirement

Cons:

The hourly rate is terrible
Only get paid while working

4. Creating Apps.

Time: 4/5

Difficulty: 5/5

Start Cost: 1/5

Do you have an idea for a cool app? Go create it!

Developers are making $millions by creating useful mobile applications.

You don't need to go to school to learn how to do this.

Luckily Google has a developer course that will take you from being a total beginner to an expert app developer for free

Pros:

Earn while you sleep
Unlimited Income Possibilities

Cons:

Steep learning curve
No guaranteed Payout

5. Coding Video Games.

Time: 4/5

Difficulty: 5/5

Start Cost: 0/5

Similar to creating apps, you can also learn and upload video games on platforms like Steam and Itch.

This takes a considerable amount of time and skill to be worth it. I've seen some people make a killing by creating different variations of the same endless runners and uploading them to the Google Play Store.

Pros:

Earn while you sleep
Limitless earning potential

Cons:

Steep learning curve
No guaranteed Payout

6. Creating Game Assets.

Time: 2/5

Difficulty: 3/5

Start Cost: 0/5

This is for the artsy people out there. You can create game assets for video game developers to use.

These include:

SFX
Music
Scripts
Pixelart
3D Models
Voiceovers
Animations
Illustrations

The best approach is to create bundles, that have enough diverse assets to finish a whole game with.

Pros:

Easy to get started
Earn while you sleep
Limitless Earning Potential

Cons:

Highly Competitive
Hard to get good at
No guaranteed Payout

7. Fiverr

Time: 3/5

Difficulty: 3/5

Start Cost: 0/5

This is the marketplace for all types of well-priced services.

From video editing, and custom designs to SEO, you can find any service on Fiverr.

You can advertise your skills as a service on Fiverr. With a bit of luck and a nice portfolio, this might become an income source for you.

Pros:

Free Organic Traffic
Choose who to work with

Cons:

Highly Competitive
Hard to sell high-ticket services
Hard to land clients without reviews

8. Print on Demand (PoD)

Time: 2/5

Difficulty: 1/5

Start Cost: 0/5

Print-on-demand (PoD) is a great business to start from home.

It works by creating designs and uploading them to PoD marketplaces like Redbubble. The PoD marketplace will then put your designs on prints.

When a customer buys the product, you will receive a cut from the final sale.

Pros:

Earn while you sleep
Limitless Earning Potential
Designs can be printed on many products

Cons:

Designs have to be excellent
Takes hundreds of Designs to get traction

9. YouTube

Time: 4/5

Difficulty: 5/5

Start Cost: 0/5

One of the most underrated assets nowadays is a social media account.

It requires a long time and a lot of consistent action to get skilled enough to build traction.

You can only start earning with the YouTube Partner program once you reach:

1000 Subscribers
4000 Hours of Watch Time in the last 365 days

Once you reach this threshold, you can apply for the partner program and can expect an average CPM (Cost per Mille) of $2-$15 depending on what niche you occupy.

But more importantly, you are building an audience. The revenue generated from the partner program is low, but most big YouTubers make the largest chunk of money by selling products or courses to their audience.

Pros:

Grow an Audience
Cost Nothing to get Started
Great to teach skills you already know

Cons:

Steep Learning Curve
Video creation takes ages
Getting past the threshold is challenging

10. X

Time: 2/5

Difficulty: 4/5

Start Cost: 0/5

Another Social Media on the list.

X has multiple ways of monetization.

X Ads. To be Eligible you need:
- 500 Followers
- 5 Million Impressions in the last 90 days
- X Premium Subscription

Most people who make money on X do not fulfill these requirements. And I was told that the payout amount is also low for the number of impressions one gains. Approx $0.015 CPM.

Selling Products/Services with Cold/Warm Inbound/Outbound (more on that in a separate point)
Paid Repost.
Did you know that people will pay you good money to repost a tweet if you have a large follower account? The amounts vary, but from what I've seen a post with 50k impressions can go for $5-$20.

X has a lot of potential and shouldn't be missed out on.

Pros:

Build an audience
Making connections
Great for advertising products and services

Cons:

Takes time to get established
Need to stay consistently engaging

11. Freelancing

Time: 5/5

Difficulty: 4/5

Start Cost: 0/5

If you have a skill (writing, coding, marketing, video editing, design, etc.) you are ready to go.

But how do you get clients? There are multiple ways.

Cold/Warm Outreach: This is where X comes into play. You can message people through social media telling them that you have a service to offer and ask them if they want it. It usually takes a lot of messages to get a client, but eventually, you will get one. You can also send E-Mails instead.
Inbound: This works by having people see your social media profile or advertisement, and then click on it to learn more about your service.

Pros:

Work with whoever you want
Not bound by set working hours

Cons:

Dealing with Clients
Output bound to time spent

12. Tutoring

Time: 4/5

Difficulty: 3/5

Start Cost: 0/5

Many Digital Nomads tutor from their comfortable homes (if they have a home).

Anything skill can be taught.

School-related topics (English, Math, Physics, Test prep) do especially well.

It is important to sell the outcome of the tutoring, not the tutoring itself ("I'll help you improve your test score by 1 grade").

A great side hustle to do from home, the drawback is that your output is limited by your time.

Pros:

Solidify your learnings by teaching
Can teach multiple people at the same time
Earn money by teaching what you already know

Cons:

Income tied to time
Need to have expert-level knowledge

13. Creating Courses

Time: 2/5

Difficulty: 4/5

Start Cost: 0/5

This is the tutoring side hustle but without the limitation of time.

To create a course you need to package your knowledge. This can be done with apps like Notion. To publish your course you can use digital marketplaces like Gumroad.

Pros:

Earn while you sleep
Extremely high-profit margin

Cons:

Need an audience
Need expert-level knowledge

14. Dropshipping

Time: 2/5

Difficulty: 3/5

Start Cost: 0/5

This is one of the most common side hustles from home that you can find on the Internet.

Dropshipping works by listing items for sale through your website, amazon, eBay, or any other online marketplace. When a buyer purchases from you, you order from another supplier that sells the item for cheaper, straight to the customer's home.

This will leave you with a tiny amount of profit for every sale.

The great thing about it is that you don't have to stock any inventory. All you need is a website and some traffic.

Pros:

No product handling
Earn while you sleep

Cons:

Long shipping times
Small profit margins
Needs traffic to work

15. Digital Marketing

Time: 3/5

Difficulty: 5/5

Start Cost: 2/5

Digital Marketing is an applied form of generating traffic. It can be learned from home, and no degree is going to teach it better than doing it yourself. You can do digital marketing by...

Running Ads:
Pay Money to websites to display your advertisement.
Building a Brand:
Post Content and build an audience.
Running Ads for Brands:
Get paid for creating and posting ads for other businesses.

If you're good at creating and running advertisements for brands, this can be a license to print internet money.

Pros:

Earn while you sleep
License to print money

Cons:

Steep learning Curve
Hard to get started without money/experience

16. Stock Photography

Time: 1/5

Difficulty: 1/5

Start Cost: 0/5

Do you like taking pictures, and creating designs?

There are a lot of websites that will pay you for high-quality pictures that you took from home. Providers are sites like istockphoto, adobestock, or Canva. These sites pay you depending on how many downloads your footage receives.

Pros:

Easy to get started
Earn while you sleep

Cons:

Highly Competitive
Takes a lot of images to get started

17. Amazon Ebooks

Time: 3/5

Difficulty: 3/5

Start Cost: 0/5

Writing stories, while being rolled into a blanket at home. Sounds like a dream come true?

Then this is for you.

Self-publishing books is simple today.

You can write a book about whatever you like and upload the written content to Amazon.

People can buy those books for their Kindle and you will get paid for it.

Pros:

Earn while you sleep
You only need a laptop
Organic Traffic

Cons:

Highly Competitive
Steep Learning Curve

18. Selling Digital Products.

Time: 2/5

Difficulty: 4/5

Start Cost: 0/5

While I mentioned a few digital products already, there are way more than that. You can package a lot of tools and knowledge into digital products and sell them on various sites.

My go-to site for uploading digital products is Gumroad(sadly not affiliated).

Gumroad lets you upload anything and everything (as long as within guidelines). I recommend creating Notion templates to get started. It also gives you the option to choose how much of the revenue you share with Gumroad (10-50%). If you choose a higher revenue share, your products will get ranked higher in the search results.

Pros:

Free to get started
Earn while you sleep

Cons:

Hard to gain traffic

19. Etsy

Time: 1/5

Difficulty: 4/5

Start Cost: 1/5

Etsy is another online marketplace in which you can sell digital and physical products.

Etsy is special because it focuses on artistic products. This is the website to sell designs, brushes, customized gifts, t-shirts, mugs, etc. on

You can combine PoD (Print-on-Demand) with Etsy. You can use the app Printify for this. Printify lets you integrate items with your designs into your store. Without the need to print or purchase them beforehand!

Think of dropshipping, but personalized and with faster delivery time.

Pros:

Sell anything
Organic Traffic
Earn while you are at home

Cons:

Highly Competitive

20. Affiliate Marketing

Time: 3/5

Difficulty: 4/5

Start Cost: 0/5

Affiliate marketing is advertising products and services of other people through your content. It's like advertising, but you get paid only for sales.

This is the reason why so many blogs have a lot of Amazon affiliate links. They always get a share of the revenue.

It's a great side hustle from home and a lot of people are making more money with affiliate marketing, than from any university degree.

Pros:

High profit margin
Choose what products to sell

Cons:

Hard to get traffic
Need to be accepted as an affiliate
Bad Affiliates can destroy your reputation

21. Blogging

Time: 4/5

Difficulty: 4/5

Start Cost: 0/5

Blogging is a great way to get some extra income. It allows you to write about anything from home. Then share the knowledge you acquired with the rest of the world.

But writing words alone will not get you paid.

First, of course, you will need an audience of readers, eager to read your stuff.

Then, you will need ways to monetize.

Here are some of them:

Run ads:
There are a lot of Ad providers out there, who are eager to pay you to let them advertise on your blog. One of these is Google AdSense, which I'm using for this blog.
Affiliate Links:
You will often see sites that review certain items and then add product links. This is a form of affiliate marketing. Every time a reader clicks on an affiliate link and purchases something through that link. You will get paid as an affiliate.
Sponsored Articles:
Sometimes brands will reach out to bloggers, paying them to talk about a product or the brand itself in a positive light. Those sponsored articles can rake in from a few $100 to many $1000. It all depends on what topic it is and how many people you can reach with your words.
Selling Guest Articles:
A guest article is when another blogger writes a post for your blog. The blogger wants to do that to add links to his own blog, thus increasing the Search Engine Rankings for himself. If you have a huge blog/website, then you can even charge the blogger to publish a guest article.
Selling Digital Products/Services:
Your blog is your content, and it's the perfect place to advertise your products and services! Add a CTA(Call-to-Action) to your articles to get your readers to purchase some of your stuff.

As you can see, there are a lot of ways to monetize a blog from home. Making it a side hustle to be reckoned with.

Just make sure that you enjoy the act of writing, and also learn how to write persuasively.

Holding attention is key.

Pros:

License to print money
Earn while you sleep at home
Write about whatever the hell you want

Cons:

Hard to stand out
Steep learning curve
Difficult to generate traffic

22. Discord Moderator

Time: 2/5

Difficulty: 1/5

Start Cost: 0/5

There are 6.7 million Discord servers out there.

And a lot of these servers (especially the larger ones) are in dire need of moderators, who make sure that people adhere to the guidelines of the server.

If you love hanging around on Discord at home, this is the side hustle for you.

The pay rate may vary depending on the server. Private Servers will usually pay better.

With the ranges being between $0-$80k/year.

Pros:

Talking to people

Cons:

Talking to people

23. Content Creation

Time: 4/5

Difficulty: 4/5

Start Cost: 0/5

Did you know some brands will pay you to create video content? Especially if you already have a following, you can get paid on sites like TikTok or Inzspire for creating content.

It can be difficult to get started if you don't have a following yet.

Pros:

Payrate can be high
Highly Creative Work

Cons:

Need a large Audience

24. Streaming

Time: 2/5

Difficulty: 4/5

Start Cost: 2/5

This is the way to go if you love gaming. There are heaps of gamers who turned their passion into a full-blown career through sites like Twitch.

Twitch has multiple ways of paying its creators.

Donations:
You can set up donations so that your viewers can donate cash to you.
Channel Subscriptions:
You can set up subscription tiers for your channel. Viewers can then subscribe to your channel and you will get paid for every user that is subscribed to you.
Product Placement:
You can partner up with Brands, and get paid to promote their products.

Pros:

Loyal Fanbase
Get Paid in Multiple Ways

Cons:

Highly Competitive
Income is tied to time
Need to be good on camera

25. Ingame Moderator

Time: 3/5

Difficulty: 1/5

Start Cost: 0/5

Similar to a discord moderator, video game companies like to hire moderators who make sure that players do not exploit game mechanics or abuse the chat system.

Pros:

Play Video Games while Moderating

Cons:

Deal with Toxic People
Need to be online 24/7

26. Elo Boosting

Time: 5/5

Difficulty: 2/5

Start Cost: 0/5

If you're great at playing competitive video games you might want to consider Elo Boosting.

Elo boosting describes a highly-ranked player, playing the game through the account of a lower-ranked player. The goal is to rank up the lower-ranking account.

Elo boosting works great in combination with Streaming.

Pros:

Earn while playing video games

Cons:

Pay rate is low
Takes a lot of time
Need to be highly skilled

27. Ghost Writing

Time: 4/5

Difficulty: 4/5

Start Cost: 0/5

Do you love writing persuasive stories?

Ghostwriting might just be the thing for you.

As a ghostwriter, you create written content for brands. This could be scripts, blog articles, x posts, or even books.

Pros:

Pay rate can be exceedingly high

Cons:

Hard to get started
Persuasive Writing Knowledge required

28. Building Paid Communities

Time: 3/5

Difficulty: 4/5

Start Cost: 0/5

That's correct. Building paid communities is a valid way of making money from home.

The goal is to sell access to an exclusive community. Platforms like Discord or Skool allow you to do so.

This is a difficult side hustle to get into. If you don't have an audience, you can message influencers that already have a community, and offer to build one for them. You can then take a cut of the profits.

Pros:

Work with people

Cons:

Hard to get started

29. Paid Newsletter

Time: 5/5

Difficulty: 4/5

Start Cost: 0/5

Sites like Substack and Gumroad allow you to create paid Newsletters. You will have to publish them frequently, and you will get paid for every subscribed member.

Pros:

Get paid every month
Earnings are limited to subscribers

Cons:

Difficult to gain subscribers
Need to publish high-quality articles

Bonus: Combinations.

The art of making the best side hustle from home is by combining them.

Let's face it: a lot of side hustles are variations of the same principle:

Selling a product or service.

This is why I created a few examples of combined side hustles for you.

You can repurpose your work into multiple income streams.

For example, I often take ideas and content that I upload on Medium or X, and then turn it into a YouTube video if they perform well.

This blog post "29 Best Side Hustles to Start From Home in 2024" is going to be repurposed as a Medium article.

Work smarter, not harder.

This article should have given you an overview of the possibilities out there. No matter if you're still working 9-5 or not, you can start building your side hustles from home today.

What other side hustles do you recommend doing from home?

What is the most profitable one that you have encountered yet?

I would love to hear your take!

ItsMalkas