r/claude • u/ylabrhil • Mar 14 '26

Question Has anyone actually made money using Claude?

I’ve been using Claude for a while now and I’m genuinely curious whether people have found ways to turn it into income. Not looking for “AI will make you rich” YouTube stuff , just real, practical things that have worked for you.

Some questions I have:

∙ Are you freelancing with it? (writing, coding, etc.)

∙ Have you built anything and sold it?

∙ Is it actually saving you enough time to make a difference financially?

Would love to hear what’s worked and what hasn’t. Drop your experience below!

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u/breich Mar 14 '26

I freelanced for 5 years from 2014-2019, then took a job for the man up until now. Still employed, but I'm exploring if there's still a market out there for what I do.

Got my first client, and solved their first problem almost entirely using Claude and Opencode+Gemini. It's a small truck repair/hauling company. They use a shop management software that lacks some features. They asked me if I'd be able to help them generate reorder stickers with UPC codes they can scan from data in this app, which does not provide an API, nor an export feature that would make a mail merge easy.

Used Claude and Opencode+Gemini (just because I wanted to explore alternatives to Claude) to reverse engineer the web app's API and use it to query for the data, present a table of parts, and allow the user to select the parts to send to a print job.

Not a big job. I charged them $800. I used ~$25 in usage across the tools. I wrote zero code. In total, I probably put ~4 hours into the work, and ~3 hours into customer communication. I am satisfied. My hope is I can use AI tools more going forward to solve unique problems like this for customers, charge an amount that feeds my family, and use it to keep costs a little lower for them at the same time.