Making money on the internet with software

I've been working as an software engineer for about 8 years now and some quick napkin math shows me I've earned roughly $750,000 in that time as a salaried engineer. You can probably add another $10,000 to that for freelance work I have done during that time.

Here's a screenshot from my stripe dashboard for the past 12 months.

I built a discord bot that didn't make any money in the first 2 - 3 years and then just started making money this past year. I have no idea where the popularity came from. The bot is a simple wordle discord bot that tracks users score via the share snippet.

Getting that stripe notification for either $1, $10 or $29.99 has been better than any paycheck I have ever received (except maybe my very first paycheck).

My point is I got more joy out of making a couple of bucks from something I thought of, I built and I shipped all by myself. No manager, no designer, no product manager. Just me and my laptop.

While it's not a lot of money, It shows a more realistic view of how these things work. How you can find success and that it's not all 10k MRR.

Just something I've been thinking about watching these users of my bot paying for the software I wrote.