3 Remote Side Hustle Business Ideas That Cost $0 To Start In 2025

There’s never been a better time to start a side hustle and grow your small business—even if you’re working full-time. Full-time professionals can leverage advanced technology, the array of digital platforms that are available across the internet, and the on-demand, drag-and-drop, mobile accessibility of features that years ago, would have been next-to-impossible to achieve while working a day job.

And you don’t even need to create a hole in your bank account either.

3 Online Side Hustles/Business Ideas That Cost Zero Upfront In 2025

If you’ve been dreaming of starting your own business but never knew what idea to start with, or how to begin without splurging out money you don’t even have, here are three easy ideas to get you started:

1. Virtual Assistant Business

Virtual assistants handle most of the routine tasks that businesses and individual professionals don’t have the time or resources to deal with on their own. You’re essentially enabling businesses, especially entrepreneurs with just a few team members working with them, to cost-effectively reduce their workload and concentrate on the important aspects of their business.

Initially, virtual assistance was usually connected to simply managing administrative tasks such as handling inbound emails and messages and providing customer service support as well as appointment bookings. Today, virtual assistants provide much more comprehensive services. In fact, the more multifaceted your business, the better. If you have skills in social media management, marketing inventory and e-commerce management, events management and coordination, or even project management, you could find yourself in high demand with several streams of income from your virtual assistance business.

It would be good for you to think about what are your strengths and skills within these areas, and how best you can support small businesses and entrepreneurs with your virtual assistant services. Try to focus on a niche; for example, do you work with coaches and consultants, designers, tech entrepreneurs, or ecommerce businesses? Perhaps you could create a bespoke package that would directly address their needs. And if you have prior experience and knowledge within those industries, that certainly helps to boost your credibility and insight into what your clients would actually need from you.

2. Online Course Creation Business

Online courses will never go old. People are constantly seeking to learn something new every day—whether it’s a skill for work, for their personal lives, or to help them make more money and grow a business. As a course creator, you can develop courses on any topic and share them on platforms such as Udemy, which at the time of writing, does not charge for course creators to publish on their platform. Instead, Udemy takes a percentage commission from each sale you make.

Don’t be satisfied with just creating one course; create two, three, four, even 10 of them. The more students love your courses, the better, as they will naturally want to learn more and enrol on your other courses. You can design the resources for the course using Canva and even create faceless videos for the course using AI tools. Many course creators have gone on to make thousands each month in passive income through developing and selling online courses.

So what’s stopping you from being the next?

3. Remote College Prep Business

Another highly profitable business idea is starting a college prep business, especially for students who have strong ambitions to be attend highly ranked universities in their desired field. College prep can involve tutoring would-be students on several problem areas to strengthen their chances of being admitted to their colleges of choice; for instance, you could tutor them for a GMAT exam, or offer guidance on what to expect and how to present themselves at admissions interviews for places at leading colleges and universities.

You can put together a prep package or offer individual services, and deliver this entirely online, through courses, YouTube tutorials, and 1-2-1 coaching via videoconferencing software such as Google Meet (which is free up to an hour).

There you have it. Get started with one of these business ideas and let it grow on the side of your main job. After some time, you will be able to scale it to the point where you may not even need to work your day job anymore—and you can go full-time into working in your passion and fulfilling your career and financial dreams.