How to make money coding while studying?

4 min readSep 24, 2020

Recently I answered this question:

How can I make money with coding while I am in college?

I want to share my answer with you.

I made a lot of money when I was in college by coding. I assure you there are a lot of ways to make money by developing software. Let’s take a look at some options.

Internships

I started making money in college (in my freshman year) by getting into a company as a summer intern.

I knew some programming but got zero experience in the field that time. I had only coded hobby projects, samples and stuff for myself until that point.

That summer intern position paid really low, around $150 / month, but I was learning and building professional relationships with people.

Junior Positions in Startups

Startups, especially the ones started recently are looking for people who can code or learn to code to help them. They cannot attract top talents since they cannot pay a lot. (some live on ramen)

So they are more interested in students / inexperienced people who will accept working for them for a very low salary. (or maybe just for food)

I worked in a startup after this summer internship to learn more and I was getting paid the same amount of money. $150 / month. But this time I was not committing my full time since I was also attending to lectures, midterms and finals.

This was my breaking point. Because in this startup I was working closely with an Android Development Guru and learned so much useful stuff. After leaving this startup, I had already started to call myself an Android Developer.

Freelance Jobs

I started making cheap apps for people after I left that startup. This time I started charging $100 – $200 for a week’s work. It seemed like I was starting to make more money out of my new profession.

I realized that freelancing could pay you a lot more.

I started reaching out to software agencies randomly by email and stating that I can make Android applications and let them know that they can outsource some work to me.

In time, by references from friends and professional network, I started getting bigger gigs.

If a gig had a web app an an Android app I was accepting it and was trying to find a friend who can develop websites / web services to partner up.

After a while I saw that I am really good at estimating software budgets and times. I was also very good at hot sales, if somebody calls me or meet me they were eventually ending up starting to work with me.

The more happy customers, more reference, more money to come.

I reached to a point where I could get a $10.000 gig and delivered it with a team of three.

I learned how to create contract from a lawyer, built a website, created portfolios on freelancer websites.

Near-full-time Jobs

There were times where I got bored of dealing with customers or simply could not find any freelance work to do.

In those times I worked in companies near full-time. I was taking fewer courses in college and was grouping them in a day (or skipping some classes).

So I worked as a near-full-time Android developer but I made sure that I get paid a lot because now I was in a position to make prices. I worked in jobs where my salary was double of a new graduate computer engineer.

Publishing Apps on Market

Another way of making money by coding is to develop useful apps & tools and putting them in Google Play Store or App Store.

I also tried and could make some money out of that.

Teaching Others How to Code

This is not something I tried when I was in college but I attended paid classes of Android so if you are really good at what you’re doing then definitely you can make money.

Currently, I teach Android Development as a living.

Building SaaS Products

This is something I tried after graduating from college and failed. I got some paying users but it was not worth the effort.

However it was only my first attempt and I know that people are making good money by this. Check out indiehackers.com.

There are many ways to make money by coding. If you want to get started with Android Development (which I recommend to bunch of people) you can take a look at this other post of mine: