9 Realistic Side Hustle Ideas in India for 2025 | Make Money Online

Have you ever felt the need to earn money online? earn a little extra money outside your full-time job? Or maybe you are still a student and need some extra pocket money for college?

Well let me tell you I have been in those same shoes. Not wanting to burden my parents during college for extra money and actually doing something on my own to be somewhat sustainable and make money without investment.

The term "earn without investment" has become very popular over the years. It's mostly a lie since your biggest investment is your time and no results are guaranteed.

Over the years I tried a bunch of things. A lot of them were ethical, but a few have also been unethical which I'm not very proud of. But in this post I will try my best to share each and every one of those "hustles" I did to become less dependent on someone.

Earn with Part-Time WordPress Development

You've probably seen those YouTubers saying you can make thousands building WordPress websites for clients. Well, they're not lying-except the 'thousands' are in rupees, not dollars. 😂

Anyways, that was my first ever income source. Building websites. I did a part time gig with a client that would pay me around 2500/- INR a month (yes literally for a month 😭). It was sad and exciting at the same time. Not only it was enough pocket money for me, it was a good learning experience while I was still in college and getting hands on experience since I was the only person working on the project.

From setting up the website to installing a theme and plugins, connecting a payment gateway. The hours were very flexible since it was permanent work from home back in 2018 (can you imagine WFH in 2018?).

Anyways, I was handling the client's website for roughly 2 years and after sometime my "payment" increased to 4000/- INR a month. Which is not very great I can agree but the hours also went down since there was not much to do once the website was up and running.

I learnt so much from this side hustle that eventually I got a full-time job doing more difficult stuff in the same way and today that full-time job is my biggest source of income.

Make Money Organizing Treks & Travel

In the summer of 2019, I thought it would be cool to start a little travel business and organize short camps and treks. I thought I could become one of those cool kids who travel and get paid for it. Little did I know it would become my most stressful hustle of all time.

I organized 3 treks in total, and one plan for my old friends group. 2 of those treks were a complete flop and we had to pay out of pocket to arrange them. We didn't reach the number of estimated people for both the treks and ended up making a loss. The 3rd trek was a success and it paid me roughly 10-15k INR/- which was great for a summer business for a 19 year old.

Finally because of the stress of doing the business and not finding enough people, I decided to end it for good and moved on.

Freelance by Helping Students with Assignments

This was most likely my 2nd most successful side hustle that I did for around 4 years. At some point this was my bread and butter and it started taking off due to COVID.

I was helping students from countries like USA, UK, Canada and Australia with their coding assignments.

Yes you heard it right. I was doing their assignments for them. Since I was studying software development and I was very good in academics in my college, these assignments were a piece of cake for me.

They required me to code a simple prototype website with dummy content and dummy payment gateway system. I was doing 5-6 exactly the same assignments every month and I would get around 3500/- per project which would take roughly 1 day to complete. Once I found my rhythm, I was able to do even 3 assignments a day because everyone was stuck in their homes and nothing much to do.

This was also the time when I dropped out of college due to many reasons which I would cover in a post sometime in the future.

Along this this hustle, my 1st side hustle was still going on and I was getting 4000/- from that as well.

Things were looking very good for me and since I had more time in my hands, I took on another part time work that was similar to the 1st side hustle, so I won't consider it as a unique side hustle. This lasted for like 3 months until the POC got toxic and made unrealistic deadlines for me, I quit that and got my happiness back. Even though it was decent money, I had to dump it for obvious reasons.

Start a Website Development Agency

During 2020, when everyone was stuck in their homes. E-commerce was getting a lot of attention and since I already had experience in building an online store from my first side hustle, I decided to start my own "agency" and build e-commerce websites for others.

"Finally, I'm a business man now", or so I thought. I bought the domain and setup a simple HTML website template, edited the contents and made it live. Surprisingly my first client was not looking for an e-commerce website 😂. They wanted to build a simple brochure website for their company to tell clients what they do.

This client was by far my biggest client and paying me around 38,000/- INR which equals to 400 USD at that time. It felt like I had made it. I completed the website in a couple of weeks and got billed. By the way, I still handle this client's website and they pay me a couple hundred dollars everytime their contract expires and they want to renew it.

Along with this I build my first e-commerce store for a protein brand for a friend from my school which didn't last for more than a month since he decided not to pay me. I got my initial payment and then the site was down.

If this experience taught me anything, it's that not every client will pay up, and not every project will be a success. Sometimes, you just have to take the loss and move on.

Over the years I occasionally built websites for a few more people here and there but I was never actively promoting this side hustle and I even closed down my "professional" agency. Even today if I get a client, I promote myself as the developer and not through some weird company name. I have found this to be the least stressful way of doing freelance work.

Earn by Writing Student Dissertations

Now this is an interesting one, I did this simultaneously with my agency business and the assignment writing work. This was similar to the assignment work, but it deserves it's own section in the list due to the nature of this work.

The work was to write a dissertation for a student. The topic was tech related that also included a little website of it's own to showcase the dissertation findings.

I never liked this myself since I was more of a practical guy and didn't want to do theoretical work.

It was messy and had too many revisions and feedbacks, even months later.

How ironic that a college dropout was writing a dissertation for a master's student along with a working demonstration.

I got paid around 15,000 /- INR which was $200 back then. I decided I never want to do this again for someone else. I guess now you know which one was a little unethical job to do. But you will be surprised to know what more I did.

Get Paid Writing App Reviews

Without any B.S. I simply wrote google playstore reviews for an app that in future would be worth around 300 million USD. YES, 3 F*cking hundred million dollars worth company who purchased google play reviews for their app.

Actually it was for 2 apps made by the same company and the 2nd app no longer exists in the playstore. I will not reveal the app names for obvious reasons. But infact I still have the conversations from the CEO himself who asked me to give reviews on their app.

I may have left over 200 reviews on their app and they paid me roughly 20/- rupees per review.

I will suggest you to never do this kind of "gigs". It's simply not worth it.

Side Hustles in Intraday Trading & Crypto

Have you ever thought you'd earn money from stock trading? Yes, me too. I was one of those people who got into the stock market during the COVID crash. And I started doing intraday trading. I traded for around a month and made a profit of around 10k INR and called it off due to the immense pressure, anxiety and stress on red days. It's a full-time job in itself and should not be treated as a side hustle.

It takes time to learn the skill and the ability to not make it emotional on one particular stock. You could literally lose your entire capital within a couple of minutes of time.

Nope, trading wasn't for me. But I also dabbled in crypto, and let's just say... it was a wild ride. I made over $6,000 (yes, in USD) in meme coins, only to lose all of it because I got emotionally attached to a random token. Yes... lesson learned, in trading, emotions are expensive.

I still hold some of those meme coins and a very little amount of BTC but that's it. I don't care if I lose all of it. It's too much stress to handle.

Profitable Content Writing Opportunities

My most profitable and easy to do side hustle. One of my most favourite as well.

Now, before you ask me if you need any exceptional skills to do this hustle, please note that this was related to something I had been doing for free for many many years on the internet. It was only in 2024 that I found out I could get paid for doing this.

No, you don't need to be better than anyone else to do this work. You can use AI or you can write the stuff yourself. It does not matter.

I did my setup in February 2024 and in my first month I made less than a hundred USD. Doesn't sound like a lot. But it was easiest money I ever made and I never had to sit for hours in front of my computer. I could do it all on my phone.

I had to write the stuff in the Google Notes app or in a Google docs file and when I'm done just publish it and if someone would like to read it, they can pay for it.

Till March of 2025, I had made over 5600 USD in pure profit.

I feel like I was getting paid because I knew what to write and how to get people to actually pay for this stuff so I won't even bother sharing all the details because it's useless to talk about it. It is hard to repeat and most of all, when the economy slows down my earnings go down in the blink of an eye.

But still, my most fun side hustle of all time. When starting this in the first place I didn't expect it to work, and neither I wanted to do this for a long time. It was supposed to be a temp job since I stopped doing the assignment work and all the previous side hustles and I wanted to focus on my fitness and mental health.

In 2021 I got a full-time job building WordPress websites which is by far my biggest source of income. It allows me to work from the comfort of my home and flexible hours. I decided to quit all of the old side hustles because I finally found "my thing". A job that I liked and I was good at.

Over time my income grew and I started focusing on gym and mental health, it was a no brainer for me to quit the side hustles. And since the content writing thing fit perfectly in my routine, I decided to keep doing this till it pays me.

Trust me, as a developer I cringed on myself when I told to myself that I'll be doing content writing for sometime as a side hustle. But it turned out to be really good.

Create and Sell Ebooks for Passive Income

When working on the content writing hustle, I came across tons of videos on how to improve my writing and among them I came across another idea for a side hustle that would fit with the content writing gig and had potential to become big overtime.

It was to write ebooks and sell on Amazon KDP. No this isn't any promotional blog post about KDP. It is actually something I did. I won't lie, it was a little difficult than my content writing gig. Mainly because my content writing was a subscription based thing and ebooks are a one time payment thing.

I wrote around 8 ebooks in a particular niche. I used AI since I was not very good at writing long form contents spanning thousands of words. I still believe if I do this for fun and for a little longer, I can grow this to 50-100 USD pure passive income from this. But to be fair there is no such thing as pure passive income and I would have to keep writing new content and keep publishing new ebooks so KDP would promote my old books in the algorithm, it became too much work in the beginning.

I do plan to do this sometime in the future but for now it's on pause for me.

In it's entirety of 5 months of writing, I made around 150 USD.

My strategy was simple, write fiction. No need to back up claims with data, just create a world full of magic, throw in some wild adventures, and people will read it without questioning the logic. Perfect.

Key Takeaways from 9 Tried Side Hustles

And there you go, these were the 9 side hustles I had built overtime from 2018 to 2024. As of 2025 I haven't come up with anything that has made me any money, so it's not worth mentioning in this post.

I'll quickly list down all of these hustles from best to worst. This does not depend solely on money but is a combination of money plus the amount of stress you have to go through to earn that money.

• Content Writing
• Helping Students with Assignments
• Website Development Agency
• Part-Time WordPress Developer
• Writing and Selling Ebooks
• Intraday Trading and Crypto
• Writing Dissertations for Students
• Writing Reviews for Apps
• Organizing Treks and Travel Plans