Anyone ever thought about selling a side project instead of letting it sit unused?
I've got a couple of MVPs I built and never launched, and started wondering if there's a real market for that, people buying a working starting point instead of building from scratch.
If you've got shelved projects: have you considered selling one? What stopped you, not knowing where to list it, not confident it'd sell, or something else entirely?
Trying to figure out if this is a real gap or just a me-thing.
This is highly relatable. As a solo dev, we often build to test our own limits or experiment with minimalist architectures. I recently launched a 100% free tool (mybusinesscard.digital) built entirely in pure PHP and vanilla JS just to see how light I could keep the server footprint (under 0.8MB per user). Sometimes the satisfaction comes from the technical challenge itself, even if it stays free or sits unused later. Documenting the code cleanly definitely helps if you ever want to hand it over."
A side project becomes sellable when the buyer can understand revenue, users, maintenance burden, ownership of the code and data, and how cleanly operations can transfer. Even without revenue, documented traffic, a defined audience, and a credible handoff can create value beyond the code itself.
There’s an interesting distinction between a project being technically reusable and being valuable to someone else. A shelved MVP can look like a shortcut from the builder’s side while representing uncertainty from the buyer’s side. That gap seems more revealing than the existence of unused projects itself.