Everything sold as passive income seems to need ten hours a week — what has actually run without you?

I sell a set of spreadsheet templates for one specific trade. Front-loaded work was about 200 hours over four months; it now takes me maybe three hours a month, and two of those three are answering the same five support emails from people who have not read the instructions. So it is real, it is genuinely close to passive, and it is also much smaller than the internet promises — think a decent phone bill, not a salary. The honest framing is not passive, it is paid once and maintained cheaply.

I bought a small niche content site with two years of traffic history. It was not passive: it needed content updates, hosting broke twice, and one platform change halved traffic for four months. It did make money throughout and I did not do the writing, so it was passive-ish compared with consulting. If you go this route, assume the seller's traffic graph is the best month of its life and pay accordingly.

Politely disagreeing with the whole framing. You already have a service people pay for, which is more than most people chasing passive income have. The higher-percentage move is productising it — fixed scope, fixed price, a written process, then eventually somebody else delivering it — rather than starting a brand new thing from zero in a market you don't know. Every genuinely passive business I know personally was a service business first. Going straight to passive skips the part where you learn who pays and why.

The useful distinction is front-loaded versus recurring, not passive versus active. Everything worth having is front-loaded: months of unpaid work, then a long tail that decays unless you top it up. If somebody is selling you something with no front load and no tail, they are selling you the course, not the business.

Mine is deeply unglamorous: stock photography of one very specific industrial subject that nobody else bothers to shoot. It took two years to be worth mentioning and it now pays roughly what a weekend at my normal rate would, every month, for essentially no ongoing work. The lesson I would pass on is that the boring, narrow, slightly ugly niche is where passive is actually achievable, because nobody is competing for it.

Six months of evenings and £3,000 buys exactly one real attempt, or two small ones. Pick something you can ship in eight weeks, sell it badly, and spend the remaining four months on version two. Two attempts beats one perfect plan.