49 side business ideas you can build (and run) with AI

From agent-run marketing agencies to vibe-coded apps and AI clipping services, discover 49 side business ideas you can build with AI, plus real examples, costs, and income estimates.

61% of small businesses now use AI in some part of how they operate (OnDeck/Ocrolus report). Most of these businesses use AI for marketing or automating just one piece of work, but still heavily rely on human input for the rest.

Then there's the other end of the spectrum. In April of 2026, Andon Labs signed a three-year retail lease in San Francisco, giving the whole business to an AI named Luna. Luna picked the products, set prices, designed the branding, and hired her own human staff (some of whom didn't even realize that they were talking to an AI).

This guide sits between those two points. Some of the businesses below you build once and sell. Others you run as an ongoing service. And for a growing number, AI doesn't stop at building the product or writing the content – it can run parts (or all) of the business itself, with agents that find leads, draft outreach, and handle delivery while you manage the system.

If you're after quicker, gig-style ways to earn instead of building out a product or ongoing service, check out Make money with AI: AI side hustle ideas.

Top AI side business quick picks for 2026

Want to jump right in? Here are the 6 businesses on this list with the clearest first customer, the shortest path to a first sale, and income ranges you can reasonably expect to hit.

49 side businesses you can build with AI

A quick note before you dive in: AI doesn't just help you build these businesses – for several of them, it can run day-to-day operations too, from finding leads to publishing ads.

For each business idea on the list, you'll see a callout marked Agentic opportunity, showing what handing that part off to an AI agent could look like. The first 14 ideas go further: they're built to be agent-run from day one, and each comes with a starter prompt.

I'll dig into how this actually works in full at the end.

Agent-run business ideas

Start here if you want a business that doesn't need you at the desk every day. In each of these 14, the daily grind is the agent's job: it pulls the leads, builds the thing the client is paying for, and in most cases delivers it and takes payment through your whop. What's left for you is the part an agent can't do well yet: picking a niche where people already pay for the result, setting a price, and saying yes or no to what goes out. That's also why these ideas have the fewest moving parts to learn. You don't need to be good at ad copy or video editing or phone manner; you need to recognize good work when you see it.

Each one ends with a prompt you can paste into your agent of choice. The prompts are a first draft, not a finished system, and every one of them keeps you in the approval loop on purpose: the agent proposes, you approve, and nothing reaches a client, a customer, or a platform without you seeing it. Loosen that only once you've watched enough output to know where it goes wrong.

1. AI influencer account built on remade viral clips

You make a character with AI that isn't a real person and post as it every day on Instagram or TikTok. What's working right now is taking clips that already went viral and remaking them with your character in them, though your own concept works too, and one of the first accounts to do this got 240,000 followers in under three weeks. Once the account has an audience there are multiple ways to monetize it, like a guide to how the videos are made or a meme coin.

You start by designing the character, and it should have a look people remember. Then you make a reference sheet of it with GPT Image or Nano Banana, which is basically one image of the character from a few angles, so it has the same face in every video. After that you run the same pipeline every day. A scraper on Apify pulls the week's most viral clips from the big repost pages in your niche, and a video model like Kling Omni or Seedance edits the original video and swaps its main character for yours. You post the result, and when the account has an audience, you sell the guide from a one-page Whop site.

Three of the real ones on Instagram, all started in late September:

• Jean Phil: 240,000 followers.
• Archibald Brown: 132,000 followers.
• Benjamin Stachio: 99,000 followers.

Here's a prompt to get started:

I want to build an AI influencer. Suggest 5 characters with a strange face and immaculate clothes, let me pick one, and make a reference sheet of it with GPT Image or Nano Banana.Every day, pull the last 4 days of clips from the big repost pages in [niche] with the scrapers on Apify, keep only single takes with one person on screen, and show me the top 3. Edit the one I pick with Kling 3.0 Omni or Seedance 2.5, replacing its main character with mine and keeping everything else the same. Give me the video and a caption. Never post anything yourself.Once the account passes [number] followers, set up a one-page Whop site that sells a guide to how the videos are made.

• Startup costs: Under 30 cents on Apify for the examples above, and roughly $3 to $10 per remade 10-second clip on Kling 3.0 Omni or Seedance 2.5.
• How to make it: Design the character and lock its reference sheet first, then post one remade clip a day for a month before you think about monetizing. Once the account has an audience, sell the how-it's-made guide through your whop.
• Agentic opportunity: The clip scraping, the character swap, and the caption are already the agent's job in the prompt above. Posting stays with you, both for platform-rules reasons and because the account's taste is the one thing the agent can't supply.
• Time to launch: 1-2 weeks
• Estimated income: $0-$5,000+ a month, almost all of it after the audience exists

2. Slopshipping: dropshipping sold with AI videos

Slopshipping is basically dropshipping where AI makes the videos that sell the product. You pick a product a supplier already has in stock, and AI makes short videos selling the product. When someone orders, the supplier ships it straight to them, so you never hold any stock. The videos do the selling, and they don't need a big account: for example, a video of a pot lid holder from an account with 818 followers got 4.2 million views with a TikTok Shop link on it.

The product must be something a supplier can ship today, so you start from what's already selling. TikTok's Creative Center has a free Top Products page that shows which products are trending in ads by country and category, and the TikTok scraper on Apify pulls the product videos getting the most views on a topic.

Once you have a product in mind, you look it up on a dropshipping supplier like CJdropshipping, where you can search the catalog by keyword or by image. Check what the supplier charges and how long delivery takes to your customer's country before you make any videos.

Take that lid holder. Suppliers list it from $1.09 and the best-selling listing has 800 orders. On Amazon the same product sells for $5.88 to $29.99, and the top listings show 100 to 900 bought in the past month.

Two more product videos from the last three months with a TikTok Shop product attached, both from small accounts:

• A portable pressure washer: 8 million views from an account with 1,656 followers.
• A vegetable slicer: 5.1 million views from an account with 15,700 followers.

For the videos, GPT Image or Nano Banana makes the product shots from the supplier's own photos, and Seedance or Kling turns them into short clips, so the product in the video is the same one that arrives. The store is a Whop site, with integrated payments.

For shipping, CJdropshipping has its own MCP server, which basically lets an AI agent search the catalog and place orders for you. So, when an order is paid on your store, the agent reads it and places the same order on CJ with the customer's address, and CJ ships it to them with a tracking number. You pay the supplier's price out of what the customer paid you and keep the difference. If you'd rather have your own design on something like a shirt or a mug, a print on demand supplier like Printful makes each one after it's ordered.

Here's a prompt to get started:

I want to sell a product with short AI videos and have the supplier ship every order. Pull the top product videos for [topic] with the TikTok scraper on Apify, tell me what the most shared ones have in common, and find 5 products like them in the CJdropshipping catalog through the CJ MCP server. For each one show me the supplier's price, the shipping cost and the delivery time to [country]. Let me pick one.Make the product shots with GPT Image or Nano Banana from the supplier's photos, so the product looks exactly like the one that ships, and make 5 short videos with Seedance or Kling. Don't reuse anyone's footage or invent a founder or a backstory.Set up the store on my Whop with a shipping address at checkout. When an order is paid, place it on CJ with the customer's address and send the customer the tracking number. Ask me for the price, make new videos weekly, and check with me before you post anything or place an order.

• Startup costs: Well under a dollar on Apify for the TikTok data. After that you pay for the image and video models, and the supplier only charges when an order comes in.
• How to make it: Pick one product from TikTok's Top Products page, confirm the supplier price and delivery time, then post AI product videos daily with your Whop store linked. Let the agent place supplier orders once you've checked the first few by hand.
• Agentic opportunity: Order fulfillment is the part worth automating first: the agent reads each paid order, places it on CJ through the MCP server, and sends the customer the tracking number, so you're only reviewing the weekly batch of new videos.
• Time to launch: 3-7 days
• Estimated income: $0-$10,000+ a month, depending entirely on whether a video takes off

3. Agent-run marketing agency for small businesses

Most small businesses don't have time to run ads. So, you offer to run their marketing for a monthly retainer, and a team of agents does the work a normal agency would hire people for. You find the clients and approve the work, and the agents handle the research, the ads, and the reports.

The ads run on Facebook and Instagram. The client adds you to their ad account with the Advertiser role, which lets you build and edit their ads, and they pay the retainer as a monthly subscription. If the client sells on Whop, you can run the ads through Whop Ads, and Whop also pays you 1% of their ad spend if they joined through your partner link.

How you set up the team depends on the AI agent you use. With Grok Bot you give one main agent the client and the goal, and it can spawn several agents with different roles and pass the work between them. You want these four roles:

• A researcher that pulls the competitors' ads with a Meta ad library scraper on Apify and writes down what they're running.
• A creative agent that makes the ad images with GPT Image or Nano Banana and writes the copy.
• A media buyer that builds the campaigns in the client's ad account and leaves them off until the client approves.
• A reporter that sends a report on what the ads cost and what they sold.

Here's a prompt to get started:

I want to run a marketing agency for small businesses, with a team of agents doing the work. Set up four agents: a researcher, a creative agent, a media buyer, and a reporter. If you can spawn agents yourself, spawn them and give each one its role. If you can't, write the instructions for each one so I can set them up.Suggest 5 types of small business whose ads go stale, let me pick one, and have the researcher find 20 of them with a Meta ad library scraper on Apify, with how long their current ad has run.For each client that adds me to their ad account, the researcher pulls the competitors' ads, the creative agent makes the ad images with GPT Image or Nano Banana and writes the copy, the media buyer builds the campaigns and leaves them off, and the reporter sends a Monday report.Set up a monthly subscription for the retainer on my Whop. Ask me for the price, and check with me before anything goes to a client or gets turned on.

• Startup costs: Under a dollar on Apify for the ad library pull. The clients pay their own ad spend.
• How to make it: Pick one type of business whose ads go stale, have the researcher agent pull 20 of them, and pitch each one with a rebuilt version of their current ad. Set the retainer up as a monthly subscription on your whop.
• Agentic opportunity: This is the fullest version of the idea: four agents owning research, creative, media buying, and reporting, with you approving every ad before it turns on. See the Brett Malinowski walkthrough at the end of this guide for what that looks like live.
• Time to launch: 1-2 weeks
• Estimated income: $1,000-$10,000+ a month

4. AI creative studio: product photo and video packs for online stores

Online stores need new product photos and video ads all the time, and they already pay freelancers for them. With an AI creative studio, you sell those as fixed-price packs, so a pack could be a set of product photos, or a few short video ads with an AI presenter. The store owner buys a pack and sends their product photos, and an agent makes the pack and sends it back.

Each pack gets its own checkout link on a landing page. When an order is paid, the agent makes the photos with GPT Image or Nano Banana from the customer's own shots and the videos with Seedance or Kling, and you approve the pack before it goes out.

There are two ways to find the stores. The first is Upwork, where stores already post paid jobs for this, and a lot of those jobs come with a fixed budget, and some ask for AI-made videos by name. Upwork has its own MCP server, which connects an agent to the marketplace from Claude or ChatGPT with a normal Upwork account, so the agent can read this month's creative jobs and tell you which packs people ask for most. Then you apply to those jobs with your packs.

The second is contacting the stores directly, because plenty of stores that need better photos never really post a job anywhere. A Meta ad library scraper on Apify shows you stores in a niche that are running ads with plain supplier photos. The agent makes one sample photo from a product on their site, and you send it to them with the link to your packs.

You can make each pack yourself with Claude, ChatGPT, Grok or whatever you use, or hand it to an AI agent (Hermes, OpenClaw, Grok Bot or OpenAI Dots) that finds the stores, makes each pack when an order is paid and delivers it, while you approve every pack.

Here's a prompt to get started:

I want to sell fixed-price packs of product photos and video ads to online stores. Connect to the Upwork MCP server, read the creative jobs posted in the last month, and suggest 5 packs from what people order most. Let me pick 3.Put the packs on a landing page on my Whop with a checkout link each. When an order is paid, make the photos with GPT Image or Nano Banana from the customer's product shots and the videos with Seedance or Kling. Label any AI presenter as AI-made, and don't copy another brand's ads.To find stores outside Upwork, pull stores in [niche] that are running ads with a Meta ad library scraper on Apify, pick 10 whose product photos look weak, and make one sample photo for each from a product on their site. Show me the samples and don't send anything yourself.Ask me for the prices, and show me every pack before it goes to the customer.

• Startup costs: The Upwork MCP server is free with an Upwork account, and an Apify pull costs well under a dollar. After that you pay for the image and video models per pack.
• How to make it: Let the agent read a month of Upwork creative jobs to pick your three packs, list each one with its own checkout link on your whop, then split your outreach between Upwork applications and sample photos sent to stores running weak ads.
• Agentic opportunity: Production runs on a trigger: a paid order starts the pack, the agent builds it from the customer's own product shots, and you approve before delivery. The same agent finds the next batch of stores to pitch while you're reviewing.
• Time to launch: 3-7 days
• Estimated income: $500-$5,000+ a month

5. AI phone agent for trades that miss calls

Local service businesses like plumbers and roofers miss calls all day because the owner is on a job site, and the customer just calls the next business on Google. You set up an AI agent on their phone line that picks up those calls, asks about the job, works out a quote from the owner's price list and texts it to the owner. The owner pays you a monthly fee.

Let's say a customer calls a plumber about a leaking tap while he's working. The agent picks up, says it's an AI assistant, and asks what the job is and when they need it done. It only quotes from the owner's price list, and it texts the owner about the caller's details and the quote. The owner can approve it or just call the customer back, and the quote only goes to the customer after he approves it.

You find the clients on Google Maps, because their own reviews tell you who is missing calls. The Google Maps scraper on Apify pulls a trade in a city, and you keep the businesses with reviews saying nobody answered or called back.

The agent runs on a voice agent service like ElevenLabs that gives you a phone number which can also send texts. For each client you give it the owner's price list and the questions to ask, and the business forwards the calls it can't pick up to that number.

Here's a prompt to get started:

I want to sell an AI phone agent to local service businesses. Suggest 5 trades that miss calls while they work, let me pick one, and pull 60 of them in [city] with the Google Maps scraper on Apify, keeping the ones with reviews saying nobody answered.For each client, build the agent on a voice agent service with a number that can text. It says it's an AI assistant, asks about the job, quotes only from the owner's price list, and texts the owner the details and the quote, which goes to the customer only after the owner approves. Only answer calls, never make them, and follow local rules on recording.Set up a monthly subscription on my Whop. Ask me for the price, and check with me before anything goes live.

• Startup costs: Under a dollar on Apify for the Google Maps pull. After that the voice agent service and the phone number are monthly costs the client's fee covers.
• How to make it: Pick one trade, pull the businesses whose reviews complain about unanswered calls, and pitch them with a demo number they can ring themselves. Bill it as a monthly subscription on your whop, priced against what one missed job costs them.
• Agentic opportunity: The product is the agent. Once the price list and questions are loaded, it answers every forwarded call without you, and your ongoing work is onboarding new clients and reviewing the quotes the owners reject.
• Time to launch: 1-2 weeks
• Estimated income: $500-$5,000+ a month

6. Animated launch videos for software companies

Software companies launch new products every day, and most of the launches that do well have an animated video posted. You can make that video for them with Claude, because it writes the whole video as code, including the 3D scenes, and renders it to a file, so you don't need any editing software. They pay for each video, and you can sell feature announcements and short explainers the same way.

You find the clients on Product Hunt, which lists upcoming products on coming soon pages, so the agent checks them every day and sends them a short sample made from their public screenshots. For each order, Claude Opus 5.5 or GPT-6 Astra studies launch videos in the client's style frame by frame and writes down what makes them work. Then it builds the video in code from the client's screenshots and brand colors, using GPT Image or Nano Banana for any picture and Seedance for any clip it needs. When the video is rendered, it checks it against the reference and fixes what's off.

Here's a prompt to get started:

I want to sell animated launch videos to software companies. Pull this week's upcoming launches from Product Hunt, suggest 5 worth a sample, let me pick one, and make a 10-second sample from their public screenshots and colors.For each paid order, collect 10 launch videos in the client's style, study them frame by frame, and write a reference of what makes them work. Build the video as code, with 3D scenes where they help, render it, check it against the reference and fix what's off. Use GPT Image or Nano Banana for any picture and Seedance for any clip.Set up a checkout link per video on my Whop. Ask me for the price and show me every video before it goes to the client.

• Startup costs: Well under a dollar on Apify for the Product Hunt pull. After that you pay for the model that writes the code and any image or video model a shot needs.
• How to make it: Make three sample videos for products you like before you pitch anyone, then let the agent watch Product Hunt's coming-soon pages and send a 10-second sample to each new launch. Sell per video through a checkout link on your whop.
• Agentic opportunity: Prospecting is daily and automatic (new Product Hunt listings in, sample videos out), and the build itself is a code-render-check loop the agent runs on its own. You review the finished file.
• Time to launch: 1-2 weeks
• Estimated income: $500-$6,000+ a month

7. Rent-an-AI-employee for one daily task

Small business owners spend part of every day on the same few jobs, like chasing unpaid invoices, reminding people about appointments, answering customer messages, or booking calls with new leads. So, you rent them an agent that does one of those jobs every day, and the business pays you monthly and gets a report every week.

The owner picks the job, and the agent only gets access to the one tool that job needs, like the inbox or the invoicing tool. The owner also sets the rules, so the agent knows what it's allowed to say and when to hand it over to a person. After that, it does the job every morning and sends the owner a report every week.

Owners describe these jobs all the time in communities like r/smallbusiness and r/Entrepreneur, so that's where you find the first clients. The Reddit scraper on Apify pulls the posts where an owner is complaining about one of these jobs, and that tells you which job to offer and who to offer it to.

You can run the first client yourself with Claude, ChatGPT, Grok or whatever you use, or hand each job to an AI agent (Hermes, OpenClaw, Grok Bot or OpenAI Dots) that does the task every day in the client's tool, writes the weekly report and bills the client.

Here's a prompt to get started:

I want to rent out an agent that does one job for a small business. Suggest 5 jobs that happen by email or text every day, let me pick one, and use the Reddit scraper on Apify to show me 10 owners in r/smallbusiness describing it.Connect only to the one tool the job needs and follow the owner's rules on when to follow up and what you may say. For invoices, check what's overdue every morning, send the reminder, and tell the owner who is still unpaid after the third one. Never send cold sales messages. Every Friday, send the owner a report.Set up a monthly subscription on my Whop. Ask me for the price, and show me every message before it goes out for the first two weeks.

• Startup costs: A dollar or two on Apify for the Reddit pull. After that you pay for the agent, and the client already has the tools.
• How to make it: Pick one job (overdue invoice chasing is the easiest to price, because the owner can see the money come in), find owners complaining about it on Reddit, and run the first client with every message approved by you for two weeks. Then bill monthly on your whop.
• Agentic opportunity: One agent, one tool, one job, every morning, with a Friday report. The scope is the selling point: the owner is handing over a single task, not their business.
• Time to launch: 3-7 days
• Estimated income: $300-$4,000+ a month

8. Decision agent that sorts a business's leads and messages

A landscaping company gets messages all day from its contact form, its email, and its Instagram, and the owner reads every one to work out which are real jobs. You set up an agent that reads everything the moment it comes in and makes that call: who it goes to, how urgent it is, whether it gets an automatic reply, or whether the owner needs to see it. The business pays you a monthly fee to run it.

This works now because there is a new kind of AI model built only for decisions. The main one is Jev, from TypeSafe. You give it the situation and a question, and it gives back a fixed answer your setup can act on. It's fast and cheap enough to read every single thing that comes in. It doesn't write anything, so when a reply is needed, a normal model like Claude, ChatGPT, or Grok writes it. OpenAI opened its own Decisions API in October, and others are following.

A new lead comes in, the agent scores how ready they are to buy, and hot leads go straight to the owner by text while the rest get a follow-up email. A customer message comes in, the agent decides whether it's a question, a complaint, or a refund request, and sends it to the right place. When the model isn't confident, the decision goes to the owner instead. The owner sets the rules and the list of options, and the agent never makes up a new one.

This is different from the AI employee, which does one task every day, and the phone agent, which handles calls. The decision agent reads everything and decides where each thing goes. To set it up, the agent (Hermes, Grok Bot, OpenClaw, or OpenAI Dots) connects to wherever things come in, like the inbox or the contact form, asks Jev for each decision, and acts on it or passes it on. You get Jev through TypeSafe. Before it goes live, you run it on the business's past messages and compare its answers with what the owner would have done.

Here's a prompt to get started:

I want to run a decision agent for small businesses that get more leads and messages than they can sort by hand. Suggest 5 types of business like that, let me pick one, and find 20 of them in [city] that are running ads with a Meta ad library scraper on Apify.For each client, write the owner's rules as questions with fixed options and let the owner approve them. Connect to their inbox, contact form, or order feed, send each new item to Jev with the rules, and act on the answer. Anything Jev isn't confident about goes to the owner, and never add an option the owner didn't give you. Before going live, run it on their last month of messages and show me where it disagrees with the owner. Send the owner a summary every Friday.Set up a monthly subscription on my Whop. Ask me for the price, and check with me before anything goes live.

• Startup costs: An agent subscription. Jev charges only for the text it reads, which makes each decision a fraction of a cent, and the client already has the inbox.
• How to make it: Target businesses that are already paying for ads (they have the lead volume), write the owner's rules as fixed-option questions, and prove it on a month of their past messages before it touches a live inbox. Bill monthly on your whop.
• Agentic opportunity: Every inbound item gets classified and routed without a human reading it, and anything below the confidence threshold lands with the owner. Your recurring job is tuning the rules from the Friday summary.
• Time to launch: 2-4 weeks
• Estimated income: $500-$5,000+ a month

9. ChatGPT plugins for local businesses

If a customer asks ChatGPT for a haircut, and the salon's plugin shows the open slots, the customer can book a slot without leaving the chat. ChatGPT has plugins now, with a directory people can search by name and a direct link for each one, and most small businesses don't have one and wouldn't know how to build one. You build and run the plugin for them with an agent, and charge a setup fee plus a monthly fee to keep it running.

Plugins are built on MCP, the same standard the agents use, so an agent like Claude can write one, and there is a Plugin Creator that helps you build one and a simpler way to submit it. ChatGPT can also suggest a plugin in the middle of a conversation, but OpenAI picks those based on how much a plugin is used, so a new plugin won't get that at launch. Customers find it because the business puts its link on its website, in its emails, and on its socials.

The clearest fits are a local service business, where the plugin quotes from the owner's price list and books a slot; an online store, where it shows matching products and sends the customer to the store's checkout; and a restaurant or salon, where it shows the menu or services and takes a booking. Paying inside ChatGPT is still limited to physical products, so for services the plugin quotes and books, and the business takes payment the way it already does.

You start by building one demo plugin for one type of business, so you have something to show working in ChatGPT. The Google Maps scraper on Apify pulls the salons, cleaners, or repair shops in a city, and you show each one the demo. For each client, the agent (Hermes, Grok Bot, OpenClaw, or OpenAI Dots) collects their services, prices, products, or booking calendar, builds the plugin with the Plugin Creator and MCP, and tests it. You check every plugin before it goes to OpenAI, and once it's approved you give the business the link to share and keep the plugin up to date.

Here's a prompt to get started:

I want to build and run ChatGPT plugins for small businesses. Suggest 5 types of business whose customers already use ChatGPT, let me pick one, and build a demo plugin that quotes from a price list and books a slot. Then pull 30 of them in [city] with the Google Maps scraper on Apify so I can show them the demo.For each client, collect their services, prices, products, or booking calendar, build the plugin with the Plugin Creator and MCP, and test every answer it gives. For stores, send customers to the store's own checkout. For services, only quote and book, never take payment. Show me the plugin before it's submitted, and check it every month after.Set up a setup fee and a monthly subscription on my Whop. Ask me for the prices, and check with me before anything is submitted.

• Startup costs: A ChatGPT account and an agent subscription. Building each plugin costs only model usage.
• How to make it: Build one demo plugin for one business type and get it approved before you pitch, because a working demo inside ChatGPT is the whole sales pitch. Charge a setup fee plus a monthly subscription on your whop, and sell the link as something the business puts everywhere.
• Agentic opportunity: The agent collects each client's prices and calendar, builds and tests the plugin, and runs the monthly check that it still answers correctly. Your gate is the review before submission.
• Time to launch: 2-4 weeks
• Estimated income: $500-$6,000+ a month

10. Custom AI song gifts

Someone's parents have their fortieth anniversary next month, and instead of flowers they get a song about how they met, with their names and the inside jokes in it, played at the dinner. The buyer fills in a short form, an agent writes the lyrics, makes a full song with vocals, puts it into a simple lyric video with their photos, and sends it back. The buyer pays per song, and the big moments can be Christmas, Valentine's Day, and Mother's Day for example.

This became possible recently, when Google put Lyria in the Gemini API. You give it lyrics you wrote, with tags like [Verse] and [Chorus], and a style, and it sings them back as a full song a couple of minutes long. Suno makes great songs too but has no public API, so it's the option for doing it manually.

People already buy this as a gift on Etsy, where the top custom-song listings deliver an MP3 within days and the plaque sellers next to them put a photo and a scannable song code on acrylic, and those listings show which occasions sell, which styles people pick, and what sellers charge.

The offer is a simple page with a few example songs, the occasions you cover, and an order form for the person's name, the occasion, a few stories, the music style, and some photos. When an order comes in, the agent (Hermes, Grok Bot, OpenClaw, or OpenAI Dots) turns the form into lyrics and sends them with the style to Lyria for two or three versions, and builds a simple lyric video from the song and the buyer's photos. You pick the best version and the agent sends the song and the video to the buyer. As an add-on, a plaque with a photo and a code that plays the song can be made and shipped by a print-on-demand service like Printful after the order.

Here's a prompt to get started:

I want to sell custom songs as gifts. Suggest 5 occasions and 5 music styles to start with, let me pick, and make one example song for each occasion I choose.Build a simple page on my Whop with the examples, an order form for the person's name, the occasion, a few stories, the music style, and photos, and a checkout. When an order is paid, write the lyrics from the form, make 3 versions with Lyria through the Gemini API, and build a lyric video with the buyer's photos. Never imitate a real artist or use real song lyrics, and only use what the buyer sent. Show me the lyrics and the versions, and send the one I pick.Ask me for the price, and check with me before you publish anything, send a song, or spend money.

• Startup costs: About $0.08 per song on the paid Gemini API tier, plus your agent and model subscription. The plaque costs nothing upfront, because print on demand only makes it after someone orders.
• How to make it: Make one example song per occasion, put them on a one-page whop with the order form and checkout, and price against the Etsy listings already selling. Launch six weeks before a gifting holiday, not during it.
• Agentic opportunity: Form in, three sung versions and a lyric video out, with you picking the winner. The agent can also run the gifting-season ads and answer order questions.
• Time to launch: 2-5 days
• Estimated income: $100-$3,000 a month, heavily seasonal

11. Before-and-after renders for home service contractors

Roofers, landscapers, painters, pool builders, fence companies, and solar installers all sell a change to how a house looks. You sell them renders of real houses in the areas they work in, with the new roof or the new lawn already on, and they use them to get leads. The contractor pays per render or a monthly fee.

Here's how it works, with roofing as an example. A roofer tells you the areas they want jobs in. Home records are public, so the agent pulls the addresses in those areas and gets a satellite view and a street view of each house, plus anything else it can find, like the listing photos from when the house last sold.

GPT Image or Nano Banana takes all of that as input, so it has enough to know what the house looks like and renders it from a good angle with a new roof on, photorealistic, like a photo of a finished job. The render goes on a postcard with the roofer's name and a quote, and it lands in the homeowner's mailbox. They see their own house with a new roof, and the ones who were already thinking about it call the roofer. Swap the roof for a new lawn, a fresh coat of paint, a pool in the backyard, or panels on the roof, and the same flow works for every other trade.

The agent (Hermes, Grok Bot, OpenClaw, or OpenAI Dots) pulls the addresses, gathers the images, makes the renders, and prepares the postcards, and a print-and-mail service sends them. The contractor can also send renders to the leads they already have, from a photo the homeowner uploads through a form.

Here's a prompt to get started:

I want to sell before-and-after renders to home service contractors. Suggest 5 trades where the job changes how a house looks, let me pick one, and pull 40 of them in [city] with the Google Maps scraper on Apify. For each, render one house in their area with the finished job and send it to them as a sample.For each client, take the areas they want jobs in, pull the addresses, and get a satellite view, a street view, and any other photo you can find of each house. Render the finished job with GPT Image or Nano Banana, changing only the part of the house the job covers and nothing else, and put each render on a postcard with the contractor's details and a line that says it's a preview. Show me every render before anything is printed.Set up a per-render price and a monthly plan on my Whop. Ask me for the prices, and check with me before anything is mailed.

• Startup costs: Under a dollar on Apify for the Google Maps pull. After that the image model costs cents per render, and the print-and-mail service charges per card.
• How to make it: Pick one trade, render one real house per contractor as the pitch, and sell per render or as a monthly plan on your whop. The postcard is the contractor's cost, so price the render, not the mailing.
• Agentic opportunity: Address pull, image gathering, render, and postcard layout all run without you. The one check that matters is yours: the render changes only the part of the house the job covers.
• Time to launch: 1-2 weeks
• Estimated income: $300-$5,000+ a month

12. Virtual staging and listing videos for realtors

Realtors need photos and videos for every listing. Staging a home with real furniture costs a lot, so you stage the empty rooms in the listing photos with AI and turn the photos into a short video tour with the address and key details on screen, plus vertical cuts for Instagram and TikTok. The realtor pays per listing, or monthly for a set of listings.

The realtor uploads the photos and picks a style. GPT Image or Nano Banana adds the furniture and decor while leaving the walls, windows, and floors exactly as they are, Seedance or Kling turns the photos into the tour with music and text (if needed), and the agent (Hermes, Grok Bot, OpenClaw, or OpenAI Dots) cuts the vertical versions and delivers the package. You check every staged photo next to the original and watch the final video before approving.

Every staged photo should be labeled "virtually staged", and the realtor keeps the empty original in the listing next to it. Most listing databases require the label anyway, so the label is part of the product.

Here's a prompt to get started:

I want to sell virtual staging and video tours to realtors, priced per listing. Pull this week's new listings in [city] with a Zillow scraper on Apify, keep the ones with empty rooms, and stage one photo from each so I can send it to the listing agent.For each paid listing, stage the empty rooms with GPT Image or Nano Banana, adding only furniture and decor and never changing the room itself. Label every staged photo "virtually staged". Make a 30-second tour from the photos with Seedance or Kling, with the address and key details on screen, and cut vertical versions. Show me each staged photo next to the original before anything goes to the realtor.Set up a per-listing price and a monthly plan on my Whop. Ask me for the prices, and check with me before anything is sent.

• Startup costs: Under a dollar on Apify for the listings pull. After that you pay the image and video models per listing.
• How to make it: Stage one photo from each new empty listing in your city and send it to the listing agent as the pitch. Sell per listing on your whop, with a monthly plan for agents who list every week.
• Agentic opportunity: New listings trigger the prospecting, paid listings trigger the staging and tour build, and the agent delivers the full package. You do the side-by-side check on every staged photo.
• Time to launch: 3-7 days
• Estimated income: $300-$4,000+ a month

13. AI audits for local businesses (with the setup upsell)

Most local business owners have heard of AI but don't know which tools would actually help them. You sell them a 45-minute audit: a call to find the specific problems eating their time or losing them money, like missed calls, slow replies to leads, unpaid invoices, and no-shows, and a short report that says which fix handles each one and roughly what it saves. They pay a fixed price for the audit, then pay again to have the fixes set up.

Before the call, the agent (Hermes, Grok Bot, OpenClaw, or OpenAI Dots) researches the business: the website, the reviews, how fast an inquiry gets a reply, and what tools it seems to use. The call is recorded with the owner's permission and transcribed. After it, the agent turns the transcript and the research into the report: the biggest problems, the tool or agent that fixes each, what it would save, and what to set up first.

The report sells outcomes: more calls answered, faster replies, less admin. If the owner says yes, the setup is where the money is, and it connects to the other ideas here, like the phone agent, the AI employee, or the decision agent.

Here's a prompt to get started:

I want to sell a 45-minute AI audit to local businesses, with setup work after. Suggest 5 trades to start with, let me pick one, and pull 40 of them in [city] with the Google Maps scraper on Apify. For each, check the website, the reviews, and how fast they reply to an inquiry, and write me one line about what they're losing.Before each booked call, write a one-page research note. After the call, turn my transcript and the note into a short report: the biggest problems in plain words, the fix for each, what it saves, and what to set up first. Never promise a number you can't back up. If the owner says yes, build the setup and show me before it goes live.Set up a fixed price for the audit and a monthly plan for the setup on my Whop. Ask me for the prices, and check with me before anything goes to an owner.

• Startup costs: Under a dollar on Apify for the pull, a meeting recorder for the calls, and your agent subscription.
• How to make it: Pick one trade, have the agent write a one-line "what they're losing" note for 40 businesses, and use that line as the outreach. Sell the audit at a fixed price on your whop and the setup as a monthly plan; the audit is the lead magnet, the setup is the business.
• Agentic opportunity: Research before the call and the report after it are both the agent's. The call itself is yours, because the owner is buying a conversation with a person who then hands them a plan.
• Time to launch: 3-7 days
• Estimated income: $500-$5,000+ a month, most of it from setup work

14. Video editing component packs for YouTube niches

Every YouTube niche has its own graphics. For example, finance channels use charts and number counters; tech channels use interface callouts and side-by-side comparisons; business channels use quote cards and frameworks. You make a pack of ready-made components for one niche, in one consistent style, and the creators and editors in that niche, or their editing agents, drop them into any video. They buy a pack once, or pay monthly for new components.

Claude builds the components as code, so the text, colors, and logo can be swapped for each video. It starts by studying examples from popular videos in one niche, frame by frame, and writing down what makes them work, then builds each component, renders it, checks its own frames against the reference, and fixes what's off. That check loop is what makes the quality hold up. Each component ships as a transparent video that drops on top of any footage, plus an editable version for people who want to change the text themselves.

A couple of rules: never copy a creator's or brand's graphics, because the references are only for studying what works. Here's how to get the first buyers: pull the channels in a niche that post every week, and send each one a ten-second demo of the pack in their own style. The agent (Hermes, Grok Bot, OpenClaw, or OpenAI Dots) running Claude builds each batch and packages the exports.

Here's a prompt to get started:

I want to sell packs of video editing components to YouTubers and editors. Suggest 5 niches, let me pick one, and pull 30 channels in it that post every week with the YouTube scraper on Apify. Collect 20 examples of the graphics they use and write a reference of what makes them work.Build a first pack of 12 components in one style with Claude: name labels, lower thirds, a counting chart, a logo reveal, a side-by-side comparison, a quote card, and section titles. Build each as code so text, colors, and logos can be swapped, render it, check it against the reference, and fix what's off. Export each one as a transparent video and an editable version. Never copy anyone's graphics, and use no real logos in the demos. Show me every component before it goes in the pack.Set up a one-time price for the pack and a monthly plan for new components on my Whop. Ask me for the prices, and check with me before anything is published.

• Startup costs: Under a dollar on Apify for the channel pull. After that you pay the model that writes the code, and the rendering runs on your own computer.
• How to make it: Build the first 12-component pack for one niche, then send a ten-second demo in each channel's own style to 30 channels that post weekly. Sell the pack one-time on your whop, with a monthly plan for new components.
• Agentic opportunity: Each new batch is a study-build-render-check loop the agent runs on its own, and it can watch the niche for new graphic styles and propose the next components. You approve what goes in the pack.
• Time to launch: 1-3 weeks
• Estimated income: $100-$3,000+ a month

Content, marketing & writing business ideas

Anyone can ask ChatGPT to write an article. Making it actually worth reading takes more than a prompt – that's where you come in.

Businesses and creators everywhere need good content, and knowing how to wield AI tools (and improve what they hand you) is the whole skill. These businesses run on providing an ongoing service, usually for a subscription or retainer (see how to build and sell AI services on Whop for the setup mechanics).

15. AI content agency

Most business owners have a vague idea of how to get Claude (or basically any AI chatbot) to spit out a blog post. But building a whole content strategy around that – running the calendar, writing blog posts, web copy, product descriptions – is a different job entirely.

You can offer your services to businesses and creators, offering not just a single article, but a whole package. Use AI to write the underlying content, then follow up with your own common sense and better judgment to make it actually worth reading.

Vaibhav Kishnani built Content-Whale with just $35 in starting capital, and it's since grown into a $514,000-a-year content agency serving clients like Quikr and The Boston Consulting Group. Content-Whale itself isn't AI-first, but it proves the niche pays, and AI now collapses the cost of building a lean version of the same thing yourself.

This is a very scalable business, as the actual content generation doesn't take too long, and you can use AI for anything from finding clients to communicating with them, too.

• Startup costs: $0-$100 a month. You might want tools like a Claude or Canva subscription, or LinkedIn Premium for outreach.
• How to make it: Advertise your business and reach out to clients. Create a portfolio of example work with AI first, then set up your pricing and packages with Whop CLI.
• Agentic opportunity: Once you've got a repeatable process down, hand the prospecting to an agent. Have it find leads in your niche every morning, draft personalized outreach, and follow up automatically, so new client conversations are waiting for you instead of something you have to go chase.
• Time to launch: 1 day
• Estimated income: $200-$4,000+ a month

16. Resume/LinkedIn writing service

If you want something more low-key, you can work with individual clients as a resume, cover letter, and LinkedIn specialist. 

People will reach out to you when they need someone to help them apply to jobs, create resumes, or to optimize their LinkedIn profile. This works at every level, too – Zenon Career Services sells an executive resume package on Whop tailored specifically for directors, VPs, and C-suite clients, priced at $625 per service.

AI will do a lot of heavy lifting for you here. You can basically run the entire process with just a Claude subscription: research jobs and job descriptions, write and optimize resumes, create tailored cover letters, and so on, then get an agent to find leads for you.

• Startup costs: $0-$50 a month, though you could also create this with free AI tools.
• How to make it: Advertise your services on platforms like Facebook, Reddit, or LinkedIn. Reach out to job seekers and show them your AI-generated resumes, then set up your pricing tiers with Whop CLI.
• Agentic opportunity: An agent can monitor job-posting sites and LinkedIn for people who've recently changed job status, then send a personalized outreach message offering your service before they've even started applying elsewhere.
• Time to launch: 1 day
• Estimated income: $100-$2,000 a month

17. Market research and competitor analysis reports

Vibe coding is great, but building a business based entirely on vibes is less so. Every business owner needs some hard data in order to succeed.

That's why you can make good money by offering AI-based market research and competitor analysis. 

You'll help answer the big questions: what the competitors are charging, where the gaps are, whether a new idea is even worth the time. Getting this information used to mean having to work with a five-figure agency on retainer, but now, you can replace that entire team with AI during the course of one afternoon.

You have to know what to look for. Once you do, prompt the AI, and it'll do the gathering and the synthesis. Tools with reliable web access, like Claude or Gemini, do well with these types of tasks.

• Startup costs: $0-$60 a month. Most free AI tools can do the trick, though a paid plan helps once you hit research limits.
• How to make it: Pick one industry and get to know it properly. Write two sample reports for real companies and use those to pitch. Sell the one-off report and the monthly monitoring as two separate products on your whop or through your own personal website.
• Agentic opportunity: Set up a recurring task that re-runs your competitor research on a schedule, weekly or monthly, and automatically refreshes the report for retainer clients, so the 'monitoring' product basically maintains itself.
• Time to launch: 1-3 days
• Estimated income: $300-$5,000+ a month 

18. AI email marketing service

How many spam emails do you get per day? Plenty, I'd assume. 

Email marketing is still one of the most effective channels out there: according to Litmus, it returns $36 to $42 for every $1 spent, beating paid search (~$2) and social advertising (~$2.80).

But small businesses and solopreneurs often don't know the first thing about email marketing, or understand what goes into creating a successful campaign. Basic research shows that you need at least a welcome sequence, a newsletter, and an abandoned cart flow, but how do you set that up?

You design the sequences and set the strategy, then AI takes it from there. It writes the emails, analyzes the product and market, and tracks open rates, click-through rates, and revenue per email so you always know what's working.

This type of gig screams for a retainer, and the retainer gets easier to hold onto the more of the day-to-day you hand off: once a campaign is live, there's no reason you need to be the one nudging subject lines or send times every week.

• Startup costs: $0-$100 a month. You'll usually work inside whatever platform the client already pays for, so you're mostly spending money on AI tools and Canva.
• How to make it: Build a sample welcome sequence for a brand you like and use it to pitch. Set the retainer up as a recurring subscription on Whop so that your clients can pay you easily.
• Agentic opportunity: An agent can watch a campaign's open and click-through rates and adjust subject lines, send times, or sequences on its own, so the retainer work becomes managing the agent's decisions rather than making every tweak yourself.
• Time to launch: 2-7 days
• Estimated income: $500-$6,000+ a month 

19. Ad creative generation and testing for DTC brands

DTC (direct-to-consumer) brands live or die on their ad creative. They need more ads per month than most people care to watch.

Before AI, creating these ads meant finding copywriters, video makers, photographers, a studio, and more. 

Today, AI can handle a lot of that work, but still, many businesses don't know how to achieve good results and stand out from the rest of the AI-generated crowd. After all, the ads still have to be high quality; they just want them to be both faster and cheaper.

That's your pitch: affordable ads at the pace the business needs, and increasingly, AI can carry the whole pipeline, not just the creative.

AdCrate, the agency run by Alex Cooper, works with eight- and nine-figure DTC brands like Huel, Licorice.com, and The Perfect Jean, leaning on tools like Arcads for AI-generated UGC video and ChatGPT to analyze reviews and competitors before a single ad gets made.

Keep in mind that Article 50 of the EU AI Act, in force since August 2026, requires AI-generated ad content to be clearly and machine-readably labeled as artificially generated wherever it applies. If you're working with brands selling into the EU, build that labeling into your workflow from the start rather than adding it in later.

• Startup costs: $50-$200 a month for image and video generation, plus an editing tool.
• How to make it: Make a spec reel for a brand you like and send it to them cold. Set up a portfolio website with Whop Blueprints to improve visibility and sell your service.
• Agentic opportunity: An agent can research a brand's competitors, generate ad creative using their real product catalog, and publish straight to Meta Ads Manager, cutting the entire loop from research to live ad down to minutes.
• Time to launch: 3-7 days
• Estimated income: $1,000-$10,000+ a month 

20. AI-generated ebooks, guides, printables

With this AI side business, you'll be generating whole books, guides, and PDFs, then putting them up for sale – either one by one or in bulk.

This type of side income is referred to as selling digital products, and the "passive" part of it all kicks in once you have a few digital downloads under your belt, up for sale. At that point, your existing catalog stays online, available to anyone, while you work on the next set of products. The more products you sell, the higher the income.

Let AI handle the writing, and once you're comfortable with the process, it can handle the rest of the pipeline too – designing the cover, uploading the file, and setting the price – so you're reviewing finished products instead of assembling each one by hand.

• Startup costs: $0-$50 a month. You need an AI tool and something to design the PDF, and Canva's free tier covers most of it.
• How to make it: Prepare at least 5-10 products to start with. Upload them to your whop, set a price, and you get a checkout link that delivers the file automatically. Bundle the lot together as a higher-priced product once you have a few.
• Agentic opportunity: An agent can generate a new ebook or guide on a schedule, design the cover, upload it to your whop, and set the price, so you go from 'one product every few days' to a catalog that keeps growing on autopilot.
• Time to launch: 1-3 days for your first one
• Estimated income: $100-$3,000+ a month

21. Business, SOP, and pitch deck templates

Templates are the same business model as ebooks, but you're not selling these to individual people in need of fun or guidance. 

In this instance, the buyer is a business, and the neat part is that businesses tend to have bigger budgets.

On the other hand, this is a more demanding sort of side business than making simple printables. You'll be making things like onboarding packs, pitch deck frameworks, hiring scorecards, client proposal templates, and more, all tailored to a specific field (and ideally, a specific business).

Like this one – an AI-generated builder budget and estimate spreadsheet. This cost nothing to create, and sells at $11.20, with over 300 sales so far.

Getting there starts with research: what does that industry already ask for on repeat, and what version of it doesn't exist yet? AI can help you find the gap, draft the document, and get it listed. You're mostly reviewing and refining rather than starting from a blank page.

• Startup costs: $0-$50 a month for an AI tool. Everything else you need is free.
• How to make it: Pick one industry you know. Build a bunch of useful documents and sell them in a bundle through Whop.
• Agentic opportunity: Get an agent to research a specific industry's common templates, draft each document, then create and price the product on your whop automatically.
• Time to launch: 1-5 days
• Estimated income: $200-$5,000+ a month

22. Custom AI prompt libraries for specific roles

You can use AI to create custom AI prompt libraries, and then sell them. The key is to distinguish between prompts that most people have no use for, and prompts that can be worth their weight in gold. 

A prompt that helps someone write a birthday message or a few jokes isn't really worth paying for; anyone can do that by themselves. But a prompt pack that helps a recruiter scan through dozens of applications or a realtor write copy for every listing they're looking after translates to monetary gains, and that's what makes it worth checking out.

PromptBase, the marketplace founded by Ben Stokes, proved there's real demand here: it passed 11,000 users in its first month alone, and today its top sellers pull in $500 to $3,000+ a month just from their prompt libraries.

Speaking to Fast Company on the story behind PromptBase, Stokes says that he came across a need for prompts when trying to build another project:

“I wanted to buy a battle-tested prompt that could basically, you know, correct handwriting mistakes”
- Ben Stokes

This is the same pattern we keep coming across: solving a problem that you have yourself. The trick here is to look for repetitive tasks. Think of things people in specific industries have to do time and time again, and then figure out how to reduce that time sink for them. 

One-off tasks won't have people clamoring to buy your AI prompts, but if it's a recurring net gain, the tables turn in your favor.

• Startup costs: $0-$50 a month for an AI tool. Paid versions are usually worth it here as you'll be working with robust prompts.
• How to make it: Focus on some industries you either already know or are willing to research, then brainstorm some recurring tasks your prompts could automate for them. Then, reach out to people directly or advertise your services in industry-related spaces, such as forums or Reddit.
• Agentic opportunity: An agent can monitor a niche's forums or subreddits for recurring complaints or repetitive tasks people mention, turn the best ones into new prompts, and add them to your existing pack.
• Time to launch: 1-5 days
• Estimated income: $100-$3,000+ a month

23. Flashcards and study tools for specific certifications

People studying for a certification are basically the ideal customer: they really want to succeed. If you can help them, they'll pay you.

Take the AWS Solutions Architect exam, for example. Students need to pay $150 to get certified, so passing the first time is important. If you can provide them with useful materials, from quiz banks to AI-powered study tools, you've got one foot in the door.

Jon Bonso built a business this way. Tutorials Dojo started as a side project on Udemy and now has over 280,000 enrollees preparing for AWS certifications through its practice exams and study materials. It predates today's AI tools, but it's proof the demand is real.

AI now makes building your own version of that practice-exam catalog dramatically faster. Feed it the official exam syllabus, and it'll generate hundreds of questions and resources for you to sift through. Pick the ones that are genuinely outstanding and sell them as a full-on certification bundle.

• Startup costs: $0-$50 a month. A subscription to something like Claude or ChatGPT should get you through most of it.
• How to make it: Study for and take the exam you want to sell materials for, then make a list of things you wish you had when you were taking that same exam. 
• Agentic opportunity: Have an agent watch for updates to an exam's official syllabus, regenerate the affected questions, and republish the bundle, so your material doesn't go stale the next time the certification body changes the test.
• Time to launch: 1-4 weeks
• Estimated income: $300-$5,000+ a month

Video, audio & content repurposing

In the early days of the ChatGPT boom, AI videos could give you nightmares. Uncanny valley doesn't even begin to cover the monstrosities we were all subjected to (check out this AI slop article for a recap on what I mean).

Now? AI video and audio are slowly becoming indistinguishable from the real thing. You probably see dozens of them each time you scroll through TikTok without even knowing.

This means you can make some serious money with this skill, provided you use the right tools and the best possible prompts. You can take this to the extreme level by creating a whole AI influencer and making money from it, but most people succeed with much less outlandish gigs.

24. Clipping/short-form repurposing service

Every content creator, be they a YouTuber, TikToker, Instagram star, or streamer, is sitting on hours upon hours of unedited footage that nobody's going to watch. 

Knowing how to find the right clips is a key skill that many people don't have (and it's incredibly time-consuming). Clipping content takes hours without the help of AI.

AI will find the right moments in content, cut the video to match a particular platform, add captions, and take the next step too: scheduling and posting the finished clips itself.

There are two ways to monetize this kind of skill: You either offer it as a service or do it yourself for your own gain. For the first, you take long-form content from various clients and cut it into viral-worthy clips, charging a retainer for your services. Do this yourself, or create a clipping agency and have others do the work for you.

And the second? You can use Content Rewards, where brands upload their source footage. You clip it, post it on your own accounts, and get paid on verified views. 

• Startup costs: $0-$100 a month. Plenty of clipping tools have free tiers, although you may get better results with a paid option.
• How to make it: Look up some creators you like and clip some of their content, then reach out to them and offer your services, showing those examples. Once they say yes, use Whop CLI to create the retainer product and get a checkout link to send them.
• Agentic opportunity: An agent can monitor a creator's new long-form uploads, pull the best moments, edit and caption the clips, and post them across TikTok, Reels, and Shorts on a schedule.
• Time to launch: 1-3 days
• Estimated income: $100-$5,000+ a month

25. Podcasting

Hosting a podcast used to mean a host or two, some guests, and an hour or two of conversation. And yes, doing that can bring good money once you build up enough of an audience, but not everyone has the skills or the will to make their own podcast.

ElevenLabs is perhaps the most popular tool that lets you generate an entire podcast just with AI. It can create voices that sound human without that eerie hint of robotic undertones that many chatbots still have.

The way this works is you can write a script for an episode (with AI) and then have the app read it out loud with voices that never existed.

If you prefer to keep it more personal, record yourself and let AI handle the cleanup and the editing instead.

• Startup costs: $5-$100 a month. ElevenLabs has a free tier, and paid plans start cheap. You can host your podcast on Whop for free.
• How to make it: Pick a topic that you're interested in. Record yourself or use ElevenLabs. Monetize it through Whop.
• Agentic opportunity: Once you've got a format down, an agent can research trending topics in your niche, draft the next episode's script, generate it with ElevenLabs, and queue it for your review.
• Time to launch: 1-2 weeks
• Estimated income: $100-$3,000+ a month

26. AI audio services

Tied to the above, you can build a business using AI to handle audio – and not just for podcasting.

Voiceovers and dubbing are in serious demand right now, and the right AI tool lets you offer this as a service without ever touching a microphone yourself. Most requests will be for short-form videos like TikToks or Reels, but long-form content is where the real money is: adding a voiceover to a 20-minute video is a hassle most creators would happily pay someone else to handle with AI.

The demand is real. Voices, one of the largest voice-talent marketplaces, reports that talent earnings on its platform are up 170% since 2023, largely driven by AI voice work, and says a single branded AI voice deal can pay up to 85x more than a traditional voiceover job.

Audio cleanup is another service you can build around the same skill. A typical video or podcast is full of "uhh," "umm," and awkward pauses. Cleaning that up used to mean hours of frankly boring manual work. Now, you can offer to strip it all out for clients using AI instead.

• Startup costs: $5-$100 a month. ElevenLabs and Adobe Podcast both have free tiers, and paid plans are cheap enough to cover with your first client.
• How to make it: Build a before-and-after reel, since this is a job people need to hear to understand. Decide on a per-minute rate, then use Whop CLI to create the product and send clients a checkout link once you land one. Offer retainers to regular creators to secure a monthly income.
• Agentic opportunity: An agent can watch a client's upload schedule, automatically pull new raw audio as it lands, run the cleanup pass, and deliver the finished file.
• Time to launch: 1-5 days
• Estimated income: $200-$4,000+ a month

Workflow automation & tools for businesses

Time is money, especially when you're running a business. And despite the AI boom, many businesses waste precious hours on tasks that could be automated. 

It's not that these businesses don't want to use AI. It's that they don't know how to. Service Direct's 2025 Small Business AI Report found that among small businesses that haven't adopted AI, 62% cite a simple reason: they don't understand what it could actually do for their business.

That's the opportunity. They're sitting on workflows they've grown used to, with no time or expertise to fix them – and that's your opportunity.

Two paths open up from here: build the tools and sell them (vibe code them if you like), or set the whole thing up for a business and charge a monthly subscription to keep it running.

27. Workflow templates sold as one-time products

All the AI tools and services in this section have one thing in common: you build something for someone else to save time. Creating workflow templates is a great example of this.

An n8n, Zapier, or Make workflow is essentially just a file you can export. They're some of the top products to sell right now.

A lead comes into the form, gets enriched, lands in the CRM, fires a Slack alert, and triggers a follow-up email. Build it once, you can sell it and adapt it for hundreds of new customers, too.

There's an obvious objection to tackle: n8n has free templates, some of which will do about the same as yours.

But paid templates are on n8n's own roadmap. The platform's Creator Hub, home to a 40,000+ global community, lists the ability to publish paid templates as a perk for verified creators, and n8n says it's already seen creators making solid money from their templates.

That's why you should test your own workflows and use AI to improve them, as well as tailor them to specific businesses or professionals. The more you know the core of the business, the better your template.

• Startup costs: $0-$50 a month. n8n is free to self-host, and Zapier and Make both have free tiers, so you may only need to pay for the AI tool.
• How to make it: Pick one industry and figure out what's a painful, long process that could be automated. Build it, find ways to break it, then fix it to make sure it's fail-proof.
• Agentic opportunity: An agent can monitor how your templates perform in the wild, flag the workflows that break most often, and draft a fix, so the maintenance side of a growing template catalog doesn't fall entirely on you.
• Time to launch: 1-2 weeks
• Estimated income: $200-$4,000+ a month

28. MCP servers for a business's existing tools

If you know your way around this topic, you could strike gold, but this one is fairly technical.

An MCP server exposes a piece of software's data and actions so an AI assistant like Claude, ChatGPT, or Cursor can use them directly. There's no training involved, it's just a standardized way for the AI to call the tools and pull the data it needs.

Suryansh Jaiswal, founder of 1ClickReport, learned this firsthand: he built his product's dashboard first and its MCP server second, connecting it to a business's Google Ads, Shopify, and Stripe accounts so an AI could surface wasted ad spend and revenue issues in plain English.

Six months in, he wrote that the MCP layer, not the dashboard he'd originally led with, had become the part of the product actually winning customers.

For you, the opportunity lies in building those connections for software that doesn't have one yet, then locking it behind a monthly paywall that makes sure those businesses keep coming back to you.

Claude Code or Cursor will write most of the actual code if you can describe what you need, which means you'll need a good understanding of the field to achieve good results.

• Startup costs: $20-$200 a month. Investing in a paid AI plan will pay off tremendously here.
• How to make it: Pick one piece of vertical software with an existing API and no MCP server. Build it, then gate it with Whop.
• Agentic opportunity: This one's already halfway there by design. Once the MCP server is live, an agent uses it continuously, checking a client's numbers on its own schedule and flagging problems before the client even asks.
• Time to launch: 2-6 weeks
• Estimated income: $500-$8,000+ a month

29. CRM setup bundles for local businesses

The days of writing dates down in a little notebook are so over. Plumbers, dentists, gyms, hair salons … all these businesses live or die by their CRM software. 

The problem is that many businesses don't have anyone who can set this up for them and help them if something backfires.

Building them a robust CRM can become a profitable AI side business that gets you paid every month (if you build it as a SaaS). Explore what that particular field needs and adjust the CRM to match, with basic features like missed-call text-back, automated booking reminders, review requests, or follow-ups.

There are white-label CRM and automation platforms built specifically for this: they bundle the CRM with the automations, and you rebrand the whole thing under your own name. The client never needs to know what's running underneath, they'll just see your own service.

• Startup costs: $97-$300 a month for an agency-tier plan on a white-label CRM platform.
• How to make it: Pick one trade and learn how it actually runs. Build a demo account for that industry and show it to people rather than describing it. Take the setup fee and the monthly retainer through Whop so the recurring side handles itself.
• Agentic opportunity: The CRM's automations are already agents in disguise: missed-call text-backs, review requests, and follow-ups all run without the business owner lifting a finger. Your job is picking which ones to turn on for each client.
• Time to launch: 2-4 weeks
• Estimated income: $500-$7,000+ a month

30. Website audit and optimization service

Many businesses have their own websites. But a lot of these websites are awfully unoptimized.

Images that aren't compressed may take ages to load. No meta descriptions can hurt a website's SEO. Broken links are off-putting to new clients.

No one's going to tell these businesses about this, as most people just close the site and go to a competitor. That's what makes this type of service so valuable: you can be the one to tell them, and to help them fix it. 

You can run a site through an SEO crawler like Screaming Frog to surface every technical issue – broken links, missing meta descriptions, slow-loading images – then feed those results into an AI like Claude or ChatGPT to turn them into an easy-to-follow report for the client.

What would take dozens of hours to do manually now takes minutes, and since a website never stays fixed for long, there's a natural upsell in running that same audit again every month instead of treating it as a one-time job.

• Startup costs: $0-$500, depending on how many tools you actually sign up for. A lot of this can be done for free on a smaller scale.
• How to make it: Start by setting up a high-quality website with Whop Blueprints or Claude Code. Pick an area and an industry, then have AI find some small businesses for you to audit. Audit them for free, reach out with a sample, and offer to fix their problems.
• Agentic opportunity: An agent can re-crawl a client's site every month, compare it against the last audit, and draft an updated report automatically, meaning a one-off audit becomes a recurring product without recurring manual work.
• Time to launch: 2-5 days
• Estimated income: $300-$5,000+ a month

31. AI decks and investor updates for small businesses

If there's one thing AI is great at, it's data, and data is precious to small businesses. 

Many of them have investors, and those investors don't usually love waiting for weeks to receive a poorly made Excel spreadsheet with updates on how the business is doing. 

Automating this with AI lets you help founders who already have too much on their plate. Lucid Financials built an entire business on this idea: an AI-powered accounting service for startups that turns bookkeeping into one-click board reports and investor updates, with founders crediting it for cutting hours of manual reporting into minutes.

You'll use AI to pull the numbers, analyze them, and create optimized decks, emails, sheets, and graphs that make the data look appealing.

Make money by getting your clients to sign up for a monthly or quarterly subscription. You'll keep tabs on everything and deliver ready-made reports for them; they'll pay you a good sum of money for the peace of mind.

One thing that's somewhat unique to this AI side business: Have an NDA ready. You'll be privy to some of the most valuable information about these businesses.

• Startup costs: $0-$50 a month. A paid AI plan helps a lot, but you can get by with cheap or free tiers.
• How to make it: Use AI to make up some data for a sample company in an industry you want to pitch to, then create example decks/presentations and send them out.
• Agentic opportunity: Set up an agent to pull the latest numbers on a schedule tied to your client's reporting cadence, and draft the updated deck before the deadline.
• Time to launch: 2-10 days
• Estimated income: $200-$3,000 a month

32. Reusable brand design systems

Every new business, or even just one in need of a change, needs the same set of things.

Logos, website layouts, color palettes, fonts that work together, social templates … everything needs to follow that same branding for it to work well together. Typically, this type of work is handed off to a designer, but some clever prompts and the right tools get you good results much quicker. Depthlogix sells this range on Whop, with logo design, t-shirt design, and UX design all as separate products clients can pick from.

Preparing brand design systems means designing the complete kit, with various logo variations, type pairings, Canva templates, and social post layouts, plus a short guide explaining how to use them. 

AI can do a huge chunk of this job for you, making up palettes that work well together and turning them into brand assets. For logos, use your own creativity combined with AI to make some eye-catching options.

If you niche down, this side business has legs: you need to know the trends in your field instead of just going by what you think looks nice. Once you've built that eye, you can hand the ongoing trend-watching to AI, letting it flag shifts in a niche's visual style and draft a new kit variation whenever one's worth acting on.

• Startup costs: $0-$50 a month. Canva and Figma both have usable free tiers, and a paid AI plan is optional.
• How to make it: Pick one industry and build three complete kits for it. Sell exclusive and non-exclusive licenses as separate products on your whop.
• Agentic opportunity: Get an agent to track what's trending in a niche's visual style, generate a new kit variation to match, and list it as a fresh product, so your catalog keeps pace with a niche's changing look.
• Time to launch: 1-7 days
• Estimated income: $50-$2,000 a month

33. AI-enhanced virtual assistant (VA) service

You can make decent money as a VA, but you can make even more money as a VA who's fluent in all things AI. According to a 2026 analysis of over 8,700 VA job postings, small businesses now search for AI help 24 times more often than they search to hire a virtual assistant, yet only 0.2% of VA job postings actually mention AI tool proficiency as a requirement. Meaning, the demand is there, but almost nobody's positioning themselves to meet it.

The best way to make serious money here is, unsurprisingly, going a bit more niche than just a "jack of all trades." A VA with some understanding of the industry, be it a law firm or a plumbing business, can truly step in and carry some serious weight.

Want something more hands-off? Instead of being the VA yourself, you can run one. Handle the client relationship and the judgment calls, and let an agent handle the emails, the calendar, the meeting notes, and the follow-ups underneath you. Meaning, you're not doing fewer hours of VA work, you're doing zero hours of it, and managing the system that does instead.

• Startup costs: $0-$50 a month for an AI plan and a password manager.
• How to make it: Start with low rates to build up some experience and references.
• Agentic opportunity: Have an agent handle the emails, the calendar, the meeting notes, and the follow-ups, while you're the person managing it and stepping in when judgment calls come up.
• Time to launch: 0-3 days
• Estimated income: $200-$2,000+ a month

34. SOP and documentation service

You know how programmers and developers always talk about needing good documentation? They're not wrong.

If you have a tool or a process within a company, and nobody knows that process from A to Z, that's risky. According to McKinsey, the average knowledge worker loses 1.8 hours a day – a full workday a week – just searching for information that a proper document would have already had.

Fortunately, you can make good money getting businesses out of that pickle with the help of AI.

Gather what the business already has on its existing procedures, and if anything's missing, learn the process yourself. Feed all of that to an AI and let it turn it into a clear, in-depth process doc that guides anyone through it.

This is more often done as a one-off, but some businesses need recurring documentation, so offer packages that work for both types of clients.

• Startup costs: $0-$50 a month. All you really need is a paid AI plan (not necessary) and a transcription tool (depending on the gig).
• How to make it: Reach out to businesses via LinkedIn and advertise yourself on platforms like Reddit or Whop Discover, as it's hard to guess which business might need this service. Set up payments on a per-project basis.
• Agentic opportunity: For recurring clients, an agent can watch for signs a process has changed (a new tool, an updated form, a different workflow step) and flag or draft the doc update itself.
• Time to launch: 2-5 days
• Estimated income: $500-$6,000+ a month

Life admin, niche personal & local business ideas

New side business owners often worry about niching down too much. Yes, it narrows your customer base, but that's often the point.

For most of the ideas on this list, picking a niche is what makes you the obvious choice instead of just another option in a sea of people doing the same thing with AI.

Most people, even your elderly relatives, can use ChatGPT to some extent. To make your AI business stand out, you need to tailor it to specific people or businesses; that gives you an edge that translates to higher rates.

35. Digital legacy and memoir services

Do you have a box of memories in your house somewhere? Photos, maybe a few old home videos, some jewelry or letters … Stuff you don't want to throw out, but don't know what to do with.

You do? Well, so do most people. And many of us also have a "digital box" with more of the same thing, including voice recordings or emails (that usually costs us a lot of money in cloud storage to keep online). 

AI lets you make sense of all those disconnected pieces and turn them into something real – a proper book, ready to print. The Life Before Me runs on this model: family members purchase a memoir as a gift, the storyteller records voice conversations answering guided prompts, and a multi-stage AI pipeline turns those recordings into a professionally designed hardcover book, no typing required.

This is a fairly intimate sort of service that requires a lot of empathy and people skills, and AI can't replace that, but it'll help you with all the tedious legwork that goes into putting the memoir together.

• Startup costs: $0-$50: all you really need is an AI plan and a transcription service.
• How to make it: Start by making a couple of these for your own family first, then share parts of them as your portfolio. Set up social media profiles to advertise your services.
• Agentic opportunity: An agent can run the ads targeting people around common gifting moments (Mother's Day, a parent's milestone birthday), handle inbound inquiries, and book the first call.
• Time to launch: 1-7 days
• Estimated income: $100-$1,000 a month

36. AI-assisted genealogy research and family history books

Following from the previous one, you can do more than just help people piece together old memories: You can help them uncover their past.

This role is more of a detective, but it still requires great people skills. You'll be working backwards through records, and AI can do a lot of the heavy lifting in the research required for that. 

DNA test services are pretty widespread, so you may sometimes be hit with what feels like a hopeless case of tracing family back through the entire globe. You'll need to be patient, but most of all, proficient in AI research. There's no shortage of people to help – AncestryDNA alone has over 30 million people in its network, and the global ancestry testing market is worth $2.89 billion this year, which means millions of people are sitting on DNA results and family trees they don't have the time or skill to fully make sense of.

• Startup costs: $20-$200 a month. For optimal results, a paid subscription to something like ChatGPT or Claude is needed. You can also subscribe to various archives.
• How to make it: Specialize in one region or diaspora rather than generic genealogy. Buy access to a couple of relevant archives, then build a free sample tree for a volunteer family as your portfolio piece. Price per generation researched, since the search gets harder the further back you go.
• Agentic opportunity: Once you've specialized in a region, an agent can run the first pass on a new client's records, searching the archives you've bought access to and drafting a preliminary tree.
• Time to launch: 1-7 days
• Estimated income: $100-$1,000 a month

37. Hyper-specific comparison sites

This AI side business lets you take the idea of "going niche" to the next level. Say that someone out there is trying to figure out which dog DNA test is worth buying, or which wrist brace brings the greatest pain relief. 

These people will turn to search, and will find some thin AI-generated insights based on a random Reddit thread from a decade ago. But if you were to set up a comparison site in an underserved niche, they could be finding your website instead.

Brandon Saltalamacchia built Retro Dodo around one hyper-specific niche – retro gaming console reviews – and grew it into roughly $8,000 a month in affiliate income, hitting $55,000 in a single month three years after launch. It took Brandon years of manual reviews and writing to get there; the underlying appetite for hyper-niche comparison content hasn't changed, but AI now cuts that build time down to weeks.

It'll take time for the money to start rolling in, so your best bet is to set up multiple sites and treat them as semi-passive income. For more on making that work long-term, see how to generate passive income with AI.

• Startup costs: $10-$50 a month for hosting and a domain, plus whatever AI plan you use to code the site.
• How to make it: Make your own website with Whop Blueprints, then generate comparisons with AI. Invest in real-world videos and images to improve the site's credibility. Run the whole thing through Whop CLI: create and price your own products alongside the affiliate links, launch ad campaigns to drive traffic, and pull your stats to see which pages are converting.
• Agentic opportunity: Prices, stock, and reviews on the products you're comparing change constantly. An agent can re-check them on a schedule and update your pages automatically, so a "which dog DNA test is best" page from six months ago doesn't quietly go stale and start recommending something that's no longer the best option.
• Time to launch: 1-2 weeks to build, but up to a year to start earning
• Estimated income: $0-$2,000 a month

38. Non-dating matchmaking tools

Forget Tinder; who's going to help you match with a roommate who doesn't make you want to move to a farm and live like a hermit? 

Non-dating matchmaking tools can be vibe-coded in a couple of days, and you might be able to charge decent money if you solve people's actual problems. Bunky proves the model works. It's a roommate-matching app for college students that's grown to over 120,000 users across 700+ campuses, using a mutual match system so nobody gets stuck with unwanted contact.

Bunky wasn't AI-built, but it's evidence the demand for non-dating matchmaking is real, and vibe-coding tools now make an app like it buildable in days instead of months.

You could create an app for someone who needs a mentor in a new skill, or someone to start a new business with. You could also help people find new players for D&D nights or someone to play tennis with. 

You get it: the possibilities are endless. 

For starters, set up the app, and advertise it inside a community that actually has an interest in the niche you're matchmaking for. Offer people free keys to beta test it for you and advertise it in relevant spaces.

• Startup costs: $0-$100 a month, depending on the AI plan you're using.
• How to make it: Pick a specific niche, research it into oblivion, and vibe code an app that fits it. Advertise it in relevant spaces. Run it through Whop CLI: create the product, price your matching tiers, launch ads to the community you're targeting, and track which channels actually bring in signups.
• Agentic opportunity: An agent can research where a niche's community actually hangs out (a specific subreddit, Discord, or forum), generate ad creative that speaks their language, and run targeted ads to that exact audience.
• Time to launch: 1-3 weeks
• Estimated income: $200-$4,000 a month

39. Paid niche newsletters

If you want a newsletter talking about AI or some popular hobby, you'll find millions of them. If you're stuck on an angle, this listicle of newsletter ideas is a good place to start browsing.

But starting a newsletter in a niche that's oversaturated is almost impossible at this point. Instead, try to think of something that's genuinely useful to people, such as scraped/synthesized public data. 

This type of data gives insights that most people tend to miss, and you can just use AI to find it, clean it, and make a weekly newsletter out of it. The Bear Cave, run by Edwin Dorsey, digs through SEC filings and financial data to expose corporate misconduct: pure data-mining turned into a subscription product with around 1,300 paid subscribers. It proved valuable enough that Hunterbrook Media acquired it in June 2026.

Dorsey did the filing research manually for years: the same digging is now something AI can do in a single afternoon.

Next step: advertising said newsletter in relevant spaces, such as Reddit. You should also try to build yourself/the newsletter itself a social media presence.

• Startup costs: $20-$100 a month for an AI subscription and any data sources you need, such as Statista. Whop is free to start.
• How to make it: You can start a Substack or run your newsletter through something like beehiiv. Build up your socials, send free samples, and then open a monetized tier with Whop.
• Agentic opportunity: Have an agent monitor your data source (SEC filings, public records, whatever your niche's raw material is) on a schedule, flag the entries worth writing about, and draft the first pass of each issue.
• Time to launch: 1-7 days, but you probably won't earn much for the first few months
• Estimated income: $50-$3,000+ a month

40. AI-designed goods for a specific subculture

If you have any sort of less-common hobby, you've probably gone through the painful experience of seeing a brand try to make a comment or a joke around your subculture, and have it fall flat completely. 

That's because people outside of these niche subcultures don't get the vibe at all, and researching won't really let you be "part of the club." It's just stuff you learn and pick up along the way as you immerse yourself in a particular niche.

This is a good way to monetize a niche hobby. You can make tattoo flash sheets, menu design for specialty coffee shops, zines, patches for cycling clubs, album art, posters for local gigs – those are just some ideas. One Fiverr freelancer generates tattoo flash sheet concepts with Midjourney for $5 a design, giving clients a few AI-generated variations to pick from.

• Startup costs: $0-$50 for AI image tools. Using print-on-demand services means you don't have to pay for inventory space.
• How to make it: Join relevant groups on Reddit or WhatsApp, then share your designs and advertise them. Be careful, because some groups have very strong anti-AI policies – this isn't a business to automate the outreach for.
• Agentic opportunity: Keep this one on the production side, not the outreach: an agent can generate a batch of new design variations on a theme overnight, so you've got a fresh set to choose from each morning instead of starting from a blank prompt every time.
• Time to launch: 1-3 days
• Estimated income: $100-$1,500+ a month

41. AI room and interior design service

Do you have a good eye for interior design and decoration? You could be making some serious money with AI, and even then, it'd still be a good deal for your clients. Hiring an actual interior designer costs thousands.

AI has made the visual part of this super easy: you just upload a photo of a room and generate the same space in any layout you have in mind. Move furniture, add something new, knock down a wall.

Interior AI, built by well-known indie developer Pieter Levels (@levelsio), lets anyone upload a photo of a room and get a redesigned version in seconds – proof this service works as a lean, one-person business built almost entirely on AI image generation.

Present the designs to your clients along with a shopping list. Be careful and make sure that any new furniture actually exists and can be bought, as that's the thing that still trips AI up, so that cool new rug might not even be real.

• Startup costs: $0-$60 a month for reliable AI image generation. 
• How to make it: Do some rooms for free for friends and family to get actual photos of results, then post them on your socials or your website (easily made with Whop Blueprints). Advertise widely. Sell fixed-price packages on Whop.
• Agentic opportunity: An agent can pull the redesign and check every item against a real retailer's catalog before it goes in the shopping list.
• Time to launch: 3-7 days
• Estimated income: $100-$2,000 a month

42. Menu engineering reports for restaurants and cafes

Many restaurants run on a shoestring budget, and the margins are paper thin. Beyond that, those businesses are often passion projects, so they're run by people who genuinely love cooking but may not have any time left at the end of the day to consider how profitable each dish is.

You guessed it: that's where you come in.

Menu engineering is the practice of working that out and then redesigning the menu so the profitable things get ordered more. When Alias Creative, a hospitality consultancy, ran a menu engineering pass for The Brasserie, revenue per table rose 15% and profit margins improved 12% - from repositioning and repricing existing dishes, no new equipment or overhaul required.

AI will help you decide which dishes add up if you feed it the menu, sales data, and ingredient costs. Then, you can use that same AI to create helpful graphs that actually help the restaurant turn a profit.

• Startup costs: $0-$50 a month for an AI subscription (optional).
• How to make it: Starting locally might be the easiest. Pick a restaurant, analyze the menu with whatever data is available to you, and present it with that partial analysis as a teaser. The more tailored your pitch, the higher chances of scoring a client.
• Agentic opportunity: Ingredient costs shift constantly. An agent can re-run the analysis every month as new sales and cost data come in, flagging when a dish's margin has dropped below where it should be.
• Time to launch: 3-10 days
• Estimated income: $200-$2,000 a month

43. Localization/translation service for small businesses

If writers are struggling in this economy, translators are struggling even more. Even basic Google Translate can manage a whole bunch of different content, and using free ChatGPT basically removes the need for proper translation services.

… or so people think.

The reality is that, unless you're writing the simplest stuff in the world, proper localization will always be better than just AI translation. Electrolux found this out with its slogan "Nothing sucks like an Electrolux" – a straightforward claim about suction in British English, but "sucks" reads as slang for "is terrible" in the US, turning a confident pitch into an accidental joke.

Sure, you can use the AI for translating everything, but localization makes sure everything else adds up, like currencies, payment methods, or even jokes.

Use AI as a translator and a fact-checker, then give it your own, thorough look, and send it off to help small businesses thrive in other markets.

• Startup costs: $20-$200 a month for an AI plan. If you hire native checkers for countries you're not familiar with, that's an added flat fee on top.
• How to make it: Pick one language to start with, then reach out to businesses and advertise yourself on socials. 
• Agentic opportunity: An agent can produce the first-pass translation and flag anything culturally risky (slang, idioms, brand names that mean something different elsewhere) for you to double-check.
• Time to launch: 3-10 days
• Estimated income: $300-$3,000 a month

44. Plain language and accessibility rewriting

Staring at legalese or medical documentation can leave you scratching your head, because what does any of this stuff really mean? A lot of these documents don't just use specialized language, they sound as if they were written to be as confusing as possible.

Unsurprisingly, AI does a good job of detangling this and translating it into plain language. 

Your job will be to prompt the AI in such a way that you end up with proper plain English, but also to make sure it didn't bury some important facts in the process.

Your buyers will, 99% of the time, be companies rather than people. They'll have masses of documents that need this "plain English" treatment. You can charge them per project or per hour.

• Startup costs: $0-$20 per month for an AI plan
• How to make it: Rewrite one real public document as a sample, with the original and your version side by side. Approach public sector organizations or charities and try your luck. The ultimate goal is scoring a retainer, which is the best way for freelancers to get paid.
• Agentic opportunity: An agent can find the leads for you – flagging public sector bodies and charities with notoriously dense public documents (a benefits form, a policy explainer) and drafting the outreach – while, on delivery, a separate agent produces the first plain-language draft and flags anything it dropped or softened, so you're checking specific lines instead of proofreading the entire doc.
• Time to launch: 1-3 days
• Estimated income: $100-$2,000+ a month

45. Contract and lease question-flagging

In a similar vein to the gig above, this is for all the lazy (and sane) people who don't want to spend three hours trying to read an important contract. 

We've all signed contracts we didn't fully get, and accepted terms and conditions we didn't read at all. You can help people out by getting AI to draw all the important insights and flag any potential issues.

goHeather has proven the demand is real. This is a lawyer-trained AI contract review tool with thousands of business and law firm customers across the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia, priced well below the custom-quote enterprise tools most of that market used to be locked out of. You could make something similar.

Be mindful of doing this for legal reasons, though. You can't offer legal advice without being an actual lawyer, at least not everywhere. Your job is just to scan the contract and return insights that then need to be discussed with someone else.

• Startup costs: $20-$60 for an AI plan. For this, it's best to use paid plans at high capacity.
• How to make it: This is niche enough that you might have to start by establishing a social media presence. Build a website with Whop Blueprints, set up some socials and post your results regularly; people will reach out when they need this service.
• Agentic opportunity: Rather than waiting for people to find you, an agent can find them first, by monitoring forums and subreddits where people post about a confusing lease or contract they just signed, and reaching out to offer your service while the problem's still fresh in their mind.
• Time to launch: 1-7 days
• Estimated income: $50-$1,000 a month

46. Grant writing service for nonprofits

Nonprofits are constantly bogged down by needing extra funds. There are people whose actual full-time job is to write on social media, trying to get funding.

Grant applications are miserable to write, too, but AI can do well with them, especially if you go back in for another pass and make it sound more human and more effective.

AI will help you with research, too. If you're writing the grants, you might as well figure out where to send them out to, and then offer that as an added service. Nonprofits often don't have much money to spare, but hiring you will be way cheaper than a full-time employee.

• Startup costs: $0-$50 a month for an AI subscription. Some funder databases charge, too, but many are free.
• How to make it: Start by volunteering your time and your skills for a charity you're passionate about. Once they see results, you can use them as a reference for paying gigs. 
• Agentic opportunity: Have an agent monitor grant databases for new funding opportunities that match a client's mission and eligibility, and flag the ones worth applying to before the deadline creeps up.
• Time to launch: 1-2 weeks
• Estimated income: $300-$2,000 a month

47. Consumer letter-writing service

We've all lost some money during the course of our lives, simply due to sheer laziness. Maybe a flight was delayed, and you never claimed for it, or maybe you missed an event due to illness and didn't bother checking whether you could get a refund anyway. 

It's hardly ever a life-changing sum of money, but it adds up. You could offer to handle the whole process for people, from finding whom to email and where, to writing the email, to handling the entire correspondence, all with AI.

People are basically paying you for the effort that they don't need to put into it themselves. 

The important thing here is to stick with consumer complaints. AI is pretty good at handling legal stuff, but you want to avoid charging money for something you may not be able to do with full confidence. So, unless you're a lawyer, stick to things that are easily verifiable on your end.

• Startup costs: $0-$50, all you really need is an AI plan, but probably not even that.
• How to make it: Pick some complaint types, learn their rules, and look for people who might need your help. Advertise yourself on Facebook Marketplace or Reddit, but also scour groups for people who have been wronged and offer to do this for them.
• Agentic opportunity: An agent can monitor Reddit and Facebook groups for people venting about a delayed flight, a missed refund, or a botched order, and reach out to offer your service while they're still annoyed enough to want it handled for them.
• Time to launch: 1-2 days
• Estimated income: $50-$1,000 a month

Micro-SaaS & AI app ideas

This last set of side business ideas is a little meta: using AI to build AI-powered apps and micro-SaaS products.

48. Build a consumer app

The app scene has exploded over the past two years, mostly thanks to vibe-coding platforms like Lovable, Replit, and Base44, which let anyone build a working app from plain-English prompts, not code. Stack Overflow finds that 84% of developers now use AI coding tools, while 13Labs found that 63% of vibe coders don't consider themselves to be devs.

Every one of these solved the same kind of problem: a small, recurring, annoying decision someone was tired of making.

Zach Yadegari and his co-founder Henry Langmack built Cal AI to fix tedious calorie counting, coding it together through their high school classrooms. They grew it to $30M+ in revenue, and MyFitnessPal later acquired it (it's projected to hit $50M this year).

RizzGPT took the same approach to dating-app messaging, helping people respond to matches, and made its founder $10M running on nothing but ChatGPT.

PlugAI did something similar and has surpassed 1.7 million downloads on Android alone.

On the more playful end, 3D AI Studio turns text or images into 3D models and went from zero to $300K ARR in six months as a solopreneur project, and apps solving smaller everyday annoyances – a dog breed identifier, a baby name generator, an AI outfit planner – regularly find an audience the same way.

I'm building one of these myself right now: Dyfal, a word-count and writing-goal tracker for writers, built entirely in Replit. So far I've paid $20 for a Replit Core plan and my app is almost publishy ready, after just five hours of building using plain-language prompts.

It's the same playbook as every example above: pick a problem you personally understand (in this case, staying motivated through a long writing project), and use a vibe-coding tool to build the version of it you wish already existed.

People will pay for convenience. If your app takes away even a small, recurring, annoying decision, you're onto something.

• Startup costs: $0-$300/month, depending on the tool and how generation-heavy the app is.
• How to make it: Build it in Lovable, Replit, Base44, or a tool of your choice. Then run the business side through Whop CLI: create the product, set your pricing, launch the ad campaign to acquire your first users, and pull stats to see what's converting.
• Agentic opportunity: Building the app is only step one: an agent can research your competitors' App Store reviews for common complaints, generate ad creative aimed at the gap you found, and run the campaign.
• Time to launch: 1-4 weeks
• Estimated income: $500-$25,000+ a month

49. Build a micro-SaaS or tool

This is the same idea, aimed at a narrower, more specific audience instead of consumers generally – usually creators, founders, or small businesses with one recurring pain point.

FounderPal generates marketing strategies, personas, and positioning for solopreneurs. The two founders built the first version in three weeks on a no-code base and made $60,000 in the first six months.

Formula Bot (now Better Analyst) fixed one specific frustration: Bressler got tired of colleagues knocking on his door for help with Excel formulas, so he built an AI tool that turns plain English into an Excel formula that actually works. He built it on Bubble, a no-code platform. By early 2026, Formula Bot had passed 1 million users.

Spellbook does the same for lawyers specifically, offering AI contract review built for their exact workflow.

And Base44 took the idea a level further: instead of building one app, Maor Shlomo built a tool for building apps, hitting $1M ARR in three weeks and eventually selling to Wix in a deal now reported above $150 million in total consideration.

The common thread: don't build for 'everyone.' Pick an audience you understand, and build the one tool that removes their most annoying recurring task.

• Startup costs: $0-$1,000/month, depending on how technical the build is.
• How to make it: Build it with Claude Code, Cursor, or a no-code tool like Xano or Bubble. Then run it with Whop CLI: create the product, price it, set up recurring billing for subscribers, and issue promo codes for your first wave of customers.
• Agentic opportunity: Recall 1ClickReport's founder from earlier – he built his product's dashboard first and its MCP server second, and found that the MCP layer, not the dashboard, became the part actually winning customers. The same principle applies here: build the core tool, then let an agent handle onboarding new users, checking in on inactive ones, and surfacing feature requests, so the product keeps improving itself between releases.
• Time to launch: 2 weeks-6 months
• Estimated income: $0-$50,000+ a month

How to launch and monetize your AI-built side business

We've covered ideas from dog DNA tracking to making SaaS apps for founders, but the one common thread for all of these AI side businesses is that they need a tool in order to come to life.

Lovable, Replit, Base44, Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, n8n, ElevenLabs, and all the other tools we've mentioned are built on AI – knowing how to use them well is what gets you from idea to launch.

AI speeds up all the annoying parts founders had to deal with just five years ago. But once the building is done, you're left with the harder question: how do you actually turn this into money? Three things decide that: which idea fits you, how you launch it, and how you get paid.

First, pick a side business idea

With 49 ideas on the table, the right choice for you comes down to three things about you, not the ideas themselves.

• Start with your technical comfort level. No-code and vibe-coding tools like Lovable, Replit, and Base44 mean you don't need to write a line of code, but if you already think in systems, ideas like MCP servers or AI app builders will reward that background far more than a from-scratch beginner could pull off.
• Be honest about your hours. Content and service-based work (writing resumes, VA gigs, grant writing) slots into a few spare hours a week. SaaS apps and platforms are a different commitment: weeks of building before launch, then months of maintaining and marketing after.
• Know your budget. Most of these ideas cost less than $50 a month to start, which is part of what makes AI-built businesses so appealing in the first place. A handful, though – CRM setup bundles, MCP servers – need $100 to $300 a month in tooling before you've made a cent back, so go in with that runway already accounted for.

A rough rule of thumb: if you can only spare a few hours a week and want money in the first week, look at the service ideas. If you've got a free month and some patience, an app or SaaS tool has the higher ceiling.

Three types of businesses, three different ways to launch

Each of the businesses we've discussed sorts into one of three groups: services, downloadables, and apps or platforms.

Each has a completely different path toward launch.

Services

If you're selling services, you need a website and a social media presence. Build the site with Whop Blueprints, no code required. Socials can be automated with AI, but go easy: platforms flag it fast, and customers can tell. You don't need to show your face, but you do need a lead pipeline: a specific problem, and proof you can fix it.

Downloadables

The passive income makers. They're made once and then need to sit where people will see them and buy them. You front-load the work and then reap your rewards, but only if you list them on a good marketplace or have a great lead magnet driving people straight to them.

Apps and platforms

Apps and platforms are the hardest to launch, but have the biggest ceiling. You'll build for weeks before anyone sees it, and once it is built, you can market it agentically, with an agent handling the ad research, creative, and outreach. Offer free beta access or a discount to your first users in exchange for a review; those first few reviews are what everything after depends on.

Discovery: how people actually find you

Putting products online can feel like screaming into a void: you're competing with other people and millions of bots pretending to be people.

Make your product as discoverable as possible. Product Hunt still works for tools. Reddit works too, but only if you're already a real member of the community – most subreddits are allergic to self-promotion from strangers.

Cold outreach works for services, but expect a lot of silence. Use AI to tailor every pitch instead of sending the same message on repeat (or have AI handle outreach on your behalf).

And if organic discovery is too slow for your liking, you don't have to run ads yourself either – you can hand an agent a budget and let it run the campaign.

I'm currently doing exactly this for my own SaaS app, managing my Whop Ads is through the Whop CLI, so I just check in on how it's performing from the terminal, or from Grok Bot if I'm already on X.

The common thread: payments

It doesn't matter which of the three subcategories your product belongs to. It still needs to make you money, and that requires a secure, trustworthy payment infrastructure. Most people stall here: finding a platform is easy, integrating it cleanly is the hard part.

Downloadables and apps run on one-off payments; services, especially SaaS, need recurring billing. You need one system for both, because the moment someone decides to buy is when you're most likely to lose them. Baymard Institute puts the average cart abandonment rate at 70.22%, often over something as small as a declined card or a missing payment method.

Whop handles payments for you, whatever you're selling.

Running a service? Skip building a whole checkout flow: send a simple payment link, use tap to pay, or send an invoice for a one-off project.

Selling downloadables or an app? Whop's embedded payments drop straight into your product or site, so customers pay without ever leaving your experience.

Running a marketplace where multiple people get paid out? Whop handles that too. Embedded payments sit alongside payouts and split payments, so everyone gets their cut automatically without you playing middleman.

One system covers one-off payments, subscriptions, installment plans, cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and a growing list of international payment methods.

Beyond building: letting agents run the business

We've touched on how these businesses can be run agentically, not just built with AI. Here's what that looks like in practice.

Whop's Brett Malinowski built an entire local ad agency in under 45 minutes, hands-off.

Brett's AI agent researched competitor car dealership ads across dozens of Meta ad libraries, built a brand style guide, generated ad creative using a real dealership's actual inventory and pricing, then logged into Meta Ads Manager itself and set the campaign live.

The same agent then found 20 nearby dealerships and sent each one a personalized outreach message pitching the exact service it had just built.

And if you're worried about handing over sensitive data, there's no need to be. Brett says:

I do not give this AI agent any access to my accounts, I do not let it log in. I do not use any APIs, and I do not give it any sensitive data. This AI agent simply uses my browser, sees what I'm already looking at, and it starts taking control of the screen, and knows what to do.

Here's what a smaller, everyday version of this looks like, using the content agency idea from earlier in this guide as an example:

• Trigger: every morning at 9am, a scheduled task fires automatically.
• Tools: an AI agent with browser access, a lead-tracking sheet, and your outreach messaging skill (a saved set of instructions on how you want the pitch worded).
• What the agent does: finds 25 new leads matching your niche, adds them to the tracking sheet with contact info, and sends each one a personalized outreach message an hour later.
• What you review: replies. The agent doesn't close the deal or negotiate pricing, it gets the conversation started and hands you a warm lead with context already gathered.
• What it costs: roughly $20-$50/month for the AI plan running the agent, on top of whatever tools you're already paying for.

That's what you can do with just one day. Integrate AI into your everyday processes and you can run a small team of agents, each owning a piece of the business: one finding leads, one managing client check-ins, one drafting SEO content, one launching ad creative, each on its own schedule.

Whop CLI is built for this: an agent can pull your sales stats, issue a promo code, or set up pricing through plain-language commands instead of a dashboard.

How Whop CLI and Whop Blueprints help you run your business

That's the foundation: products, checkout, payments, currencies, all handled. But Whop doesn't stop at payments. It also gives you two ways to build the rest of the business around it, depending on how you like to work.

Whop CLI

If you're building an app, you don't have to leave your code editor to set up your actual product. Whop CLI does it for you.

All you have to do is install it, and from Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex, prompt it to 'create a product.' Specify the bare minimum: what it's called and how it's going to be priced. Ask for a checkout link.

Done. Whop CLI runs the actual commands and hands you a live, shareable checkout link without ever making you interact with any dashboard.

That's perhaps the best part. You can type your own commands, but you can also explain to your tool of choice what you want to achieve, and it'll translate it into commands for Whop CLI to use. It can run completely agentically.

Whop CLI also lets you run your entire business from one terminal. It's not just creating products, it also lets you set up ad campaigns, pull stats, deploy apps, issue promo codes, and more. 

Avid X user? You can also use the Whop connector in Grok which extends the Whop CLI, giving business operators and their AI agents full access to Whop's API through natural-language commands.

Whop Blueprints

There's no easier way to set up your own business and your own website than Whop Blueprints. 

These blueprints are businesses that are already running, and you can make them yours with one click. You can also create your own just by describing it to Whop, and the Whop AI will build it for you. 

Alternatively, if you already have your own site, just paste its URL into Blueprints and let it be rebuilt, fully optimized and ready to go. You get the full benefit of Whop's entire toolkit, including tracking visitors, traffic, ads, and revenue.

And if you don't feel like doing any of that stuff, you can still publish your own blueprint for businesses to use, then get paid every time it's used.

Turn your side business idea into income with Whop

Whop exists to help you build the business and get paid for it, whatever idea you pick from this list.

Build your entire product with Whop and let it handle everything from checkout to payouts, start to finish. Whop CLI and Whop Blueprints make it easy, whether you're typing the commands yourself or handing that job to an agent.

It's never been easier to start a business.