$12,000/month after taxes is $144,000/year for a single founder company. U.S. median family income was $45,018/year before taxes in 2003. Even for programmers working in Silicon Valley, $144,000/year after taxes is pretty decent.
For comparison purposes, if you sold your company for $3.6 million, invested the money at 4% above inflation, and lived off the real interest, you'd earn $144,000/year.
Now, that's clearly not as nice as an $8.5 billion acquisition by Microsoft, but it's still pretty sweet. If nothing else, you can comfortably feed your family while working on a new startup. :-)
$1,000/month is great beer money. How much work goes into day to day operations?
One of the things to keep in mind that if something 'only' makes $1,000/month but only takes two or three days out of your time a month its "effectively" paying you $15K - $20K/month because you have those other days to do something else. People who set up linkbait pages (I'm looking at you content farms) which bring in 4x their operating cost just replicate the crap out of them.
For comparison purposes, if you sold your company for $3.6 million, invested the money at 4% above inflation, and lived off the real interest, you'd earn $144,000/year.
Now, that's clearly not as nice as an $8.5 billion acquisition by Microsoft, but it's still pretty sweet. If nothing else, you can comfortably feed your family while working on a new startup. :-)