The average salary in the United States is just over $66,000 in 2025. But with the cost of living creeping upward, you might wonder how you can earn extra money—and you’re not alone.
If you’d like to join the more than 1.1 million Americans who already have a side hustle, you’re in the right place.
Here are 24 creative ways to make money in 2025, from providing pet care, home catering, and tour guide services to flipping furniture, selling vintage clothes, and more.
Want to make extra cash but unsure where to begin? Dive into dropshipping or explore the latest trending products in ecommerce. Then let Shopify take care of the rest.
24 creative ways to make money
You’ll find each creative way to make money broken down by:
- Effort: How much time, skill, or experience you’ll need.
- Leverage: How easy it is to earn. A low-leverage idea is a one-to-one trade of time for money. A high-leverage idea generates a higher return for effort and can lead to passive income.
- Startup costs: The upfront budget needed to launch the idea.
- Potential earnings: How much profit you could make from your side hustle.
Sell your photos
Effort: Medium
Leverage: Low
Startup costs (out of 5 💸): 💸
Potential earnings: On average, 35¢ per image; typically, 10¢ to $99.50 per (royalty-free) sale, or up to $500 for a photo sold under an extended license. Exact payouts depend on the platform—for instance, Shutterstock pays 15% to 40% of image revenue to photographers.
To successfully sell your photography, you need to target an audience of potential customers who want or need it. Start by considering your photography style and try to identify a niche, whether it’s landscapes, portraits, pet pics, or something else.
Once you’ve identified a niche, build a following on visual-heavy platforms like Instagram and Pinterest. Snap niche-specific photos, use a free photo editor to polish them, and then sell them on sites like Burst by Shopify, Adobe Stock, and Shutterstock. Monitor which style works best through the platform’s analytics.
Use your social media accounts to tease your paid content, targeting bloggers and business owners who always need stock photos. You can also pitch businesses directly.
Bear in mind that you’ll price your stock photos based on three factors: industry demand, competitor pricing, and your business costs.
If you’re shooting people, you need to pay them, and if you’re shooting locations, you may need to apply for permission or pay a fee. Consider equipment and software costs, too. Build it all into your pricing to ensure you earn more than you invest.
Print on demand
Effort: Low
Leverage: High
Startup costs: 💸💸
Potential earnings: Print-on-demand entrepreneurs can earn anywhere from a couple of hundred dollars a month to $118,000 a year.
It’s estimated that the global print-on-demand market will be worth $59.4 billion by 2033, with apparel currently representing the largest market segment.
Print on demand is a low-risk way to make money while leveraging more creativity than traditional dropshipping models.
Here’s how it works: You partner with a supplier to customize (or white label) products such as books, t-shirts, phone cases, or other merchandise. You add your designs to plain items, and the supplier prints and delivers them on a per-order basis. You don’t hold inventory, and you only pay for products after they’ve sold.
Shopify apps like Printful, Lulu Direct, and Printify take the lion’s share of logistics and operations off your plate so you can focus on designing, branding, and marketing your products.
Print on demand is an accessible business model, achievable alongside a full-time job. Get creative, or commission a freelance designer to help with patterns or full-blown product designs.
Print on demand is a superb model for creatives who want involvement with their products but don’t have time to commit to manufacturing. It lets you be expressive and build a distinct brand with fewer logistical considerations than other ecommerce models, making it a nice sandbox for earning extra cash.
Teach online classes
Effort: High
Leverage: Medium
Startup costs: 💸💸💸
Potential earnings: Variable. English as a second language teachers can expect to earn between $10 and $40 per hour, while niche class teachers charge upward of $3,000 per course.
Turning industry knowledge into an online course—as the creators behind Sugarlash PRO Academy did—is a smart way to earn extra money.
Start with a subject you know well. What can you talk about for hours on end? What do your family and friends ask for your advice on? The answer might be a great class idea. But remember, a huge part of any online course’s success is understanding your audience.
Some niches are less profitable than others, so check whether there’s high demand for your course topic before creating it. Generally speaking, seek audiences who are willing to pay. Passionate hobbyists or professionals who will invest in their craft are prime examples.
Next, plan the flow of your course. Consider the topics you want to cover and create content for each section to sell as one-off lessons or combine into a course curriculum.
You’ll need to promote your course as long as it’s running, but once you’ve invested time creating the content, your biggest investment is basically done. To put it another way, upfront costs occupy most of the time and money—you’ll only fork out marginal costs on marketing and content updates.
You can host and distribute your content on platforms like Shopify, Udemy, Teachable, Skillshare, or LinkedIn Learning, all of which allow creators to monetize their courses.
Recommend your favorite products
Effort: Low
Leverage: Medium
Startup costs: 💸
Potential earnings: Successful affiliate marketers can earn between $71,000 and $130,000 per year, with the average affiliate marketer making $8,038 a month.
The affiliate marketing model works by recommending products to your network and receiving a bonus—usually a percentage of the sale price in commission or gift cards—as a reward. Most companies, including Amazon and eBay, offer refer-a-friend incentives.
You could take things further by recommending your favorite products to a bigger audience through blogging or posting on social media. Ecocult regularly promotes sustainable products via affiliate links in its editorial content.
Reviews on sites like Wirecutter aren’t spammy—there’s no pushy feeling that forces you into making a purchase just because the writers will receive a commission. Their reviews are in-depth, unbiased, and genuinely make it easier for you to find the right product. That’s the basic idea of great affiliate marketing: providing education and context that can be challenging for the official company to present in a genuine way.
It’s relatively easy to get started with affiliate marketing, but to see significant income, you need to have a large online following. To take your first steps toward affiliate marketing, search your favorite brands’ websites to see if they offer a refer-a-friend program. (If they don’t, you can always email to enquire.) Ask friends to use your link or code when they purchase from that brand, and you’ll typically both be rewarded.
Rent your unused space
Effort: Low
Leverage: Medium
Startup costs: 💸
Potential earnings: Up to $450 per month for a parking space and $14,000 on average per year for renting on Airbnb.
If you have extra space in your home, office, garage, or parking lot, you might be able to make money renting it out.
One example is your backyard. You can treat it as a side-hustle opportunity by listing it on sites like Hipcamp and charging people to pitch their tent there. Create boundaries with the people you open your camping space to, like whether they’re allowed to use your indoor toilet, access your home, or light barbecues on your grass.
Similarly, for a small monthly fee, you could rent the parking space that comes with your home or apartment to family, friends, or one of the many drivers looking for a parking spot—a huge source of frustration for commuters. This is one of the most creative ways to make money if you use the car space at night but aren’t at home during the day.
Use sites like Parkopedia or Craigslist to check out your competition. Find what people in your location charge for their parking spaces, then price your spot competitively. Pop into local offices and ask if staff are interested in renting your spot.
Sell your services
Effort: High
Leverage: Low
Startup costs: 💸
Potential earnings: Variable depending on service and experience.
The gig economy is here to stay, with more than 75 million freelancers in the US.
To get involved, think about your skills and interests. There’s probably a company looking to employ someone like you on a project basis, as opposed to a full-time contract.
You might need to spend a while creating your portfolio—a collection of work that proves you’re good at the service you’re selling—before you can demand higher rates. Gain experience through gigs on sites like Upwork, TaskRabbit, and Fiverr.
Be wary that other freelancers, especially those who don’t know how to position their services, might charge pennies for similar work and that there’s a risk of pricing yourself too low to beat them. Understanding average hourly rates for specific professions in your country can help you set reasonable fees. The average hourly rate for a marketer in the US, for example, is $37.
Service-based businesses are high margin and can be profitable. But the downside is they’re usually harder to scale. Since you are your business, you need to be on hand to do the work—or at least to oversee it.
Create niche products
Effort: High
Leverage: High
Startup costs: 💸💸💸
Potential earnings: Variable, depending on product type, target customers, and market conditions.
What’s missing in your current work life? Is there a product that could fix a common daily problem that you constantly find yourself wishing for? Market gaps like this are opportunities waiting to happen!
Take the example of Dustin Lee. He noticed that graphic designers were always looking for add-ons to their standard tools, such as paintbrushes, design elements, Photoshop templates, and clip art. So, he created RetroSupply to sell those products directly to other designers.
Cassidy Caulk did something similar. The Kindred Label founder identified a gap in the market for high-quality, foldable footwear that didn’t sacrifice style or durability. She embarked on a four-year journey to develop the Catherine Slide, a luxury shoe combining the elegance of traditional footwear with the convenience of foldable designs.
To succeed in your niche product venture, you must understand your clients and peers. You might need to land a few freelance gigs first before spotting a gap in the market, but that’s a silver lining. Business ideas are easier to spot when you’re in the weeds and living with the problems yourself.
Host tours in your city
Effort: High
Leverage: Medium
Startup costs: 💸
Potential earnings: Tour guides earn about $22 per hour—plus tips—in the US. Independent operators can set their own rates, potentially earning more per tour.
If you live in a tourist city, there’s an opportunity to host tours for visitors.
Niche tours, like exploring little-known historical sites, or activity-specific ones, like bicycle, food, or alcohol tours, are opportunities to apply your knowledge and interests.
Once you’ve identified a niche, consider how people will find you. Keyword research can help you create a website based on words tourists search, such as:
- “Walking tours in [your city]”
- “Bike tours in [your city]”
- “Cheap [your city] tours”
You may also need to create a script or fact sheet to explain areas of your city to your attendees.
To start immediately, join a tour hosting platform like Showaround, Get Your Guide, and The Tourpreneur. These platforms let you host tours in your city to make money—and friends—by entertaining tourists passing through.
Test websites and apps
Effort: Low
Leverage: Low
Startup costs: 💸
Potential earnings: $10 or more per test.
Companies need feedback on their websites, and you could get paid for sharing your thoughts on web design, content, and usability.
Testing is an easy, creative way to make money in your spare time. Sites like UserTesting pay $10 per 20-minute test; do one every lunch break and you’ll find it soon adds up.
Since so much online life happens on mobile devices, you’ll need a working phone or tablet. Software Testing Help offers tips for getting mobile testing jobs, plus links to mobile testing job portals.
Similarly, you can volunteer to take part in focus groups. Designers, copywriters, product teams, and marketers are always looking for fresh feedback on their ideas, campaigns, or user experiences. Your input helps them shape better products and messaging, and in return, you might get a small incentive like a gift card, cash reward, or early access to something cool.
There are plenty of websites that connect everyday people with companies running focus groups. Sites like User Interviews, Respondent, and TestingTime regularly post paid opportunities for participants from all walks of life. You’ll typically answer a few screening questions to see if you’re a good fit, then hop on a call or Zoom session to share your thoughts.
To identify companies that might need feedback, look for early stage startups, agencies testing new creative, or businesses launching new products. Keep an eye on startup directories like Product Hunt, or sign up for newsletters like BetaList or Startup Digest, which spotlight companies in launch mode.
Sell your art
Effort: High
Leverage: High
Startup costs: 💸💸💸
Potential earnings: From $0 to $20,000 per month. This artist makes $22,000 a month selling her art online, while this one earns $2,300 to $66,000.
If you’re artistic, selling your creations is a simple way to make money from your hobby—especially when you combine it with the print-on-demand model. Use software to model your illustrations on products such as t-shirts and mugs, then create an online store for your items. You’ll need to put time in, but you won’t have to pay for items until you sell them.
Still developing your craft? Sites like Buy Me a Coffee let people donate the cost of a coffee in return for your custom work, so you can earn while you’re still building a following.
Talented artists can also offer made-to-order illustrations for businesses or consumers through sites like Etsy or Fiverr.
Amber Fossey sells her charming illustrations on Instagram under the brand name Zeppelinmoon.
