I've been putting a lot of my energy into side projects for the last five years, and while I've considered them all successful (i.e. they have filled a concrete need I had, and having addressed that need the workflow of my life has improved significantly), it's only this year that one of them has really started to take off financially.

I started selling commercial use licenses for one of my side projects in January, and in 3 months I've had more people sign up for license subscriptions than I've had people sign up to be sponsors on GitHub in 3 years.

I'm very cautiously optimistic that if I keep working at it, within a year or two I might be able to have enough license revenue to pick up part-time shift work somewhere that offers healthcare, and then spend the rest of my time in the blissful Zen of my good side project (will it still be a side project at that point??)