There are plenty of scams scattered around the intersection of lust and technology, but making money off of sexting is actually legit. It’s basically like old-school sex hotlines, but reimagined for the digital age. If that’s something you’re interested in, you’ll need to first know what apps are available in this space and understand that there are professionals and sex workers who use them strategically, so you’ll have to put in the effort. The landscape is also constantly changing: once-great sites have either disappeared or changed their business models, so you can’t rely on seven-year-old Reddit posts to help you navigate them all.

SextPanther, NiteFlirt, and Phrendly are good places to start, and you can expect to make around $0.60 per volley or relay. Generally speaking, these things work like this: The other party pays a fee ($1, $1.25, or somewhere around that, depending on the site and your settings), but only if you respond to their message. They send a message and if you respond, the fee is taken from their account and you get a cut. You can respond more than once, but they only pay you once until they respond again and you respond back, which gives you a cut of the fee again. Many sites also allow audio and video calling, which earns you more money, but if you're not comfortable with that, you can stick to message relays. (More on that later.)

You can also advertise on adult sites and charge money for access to Snapchat or other standard chat apps, but for now we'll stick with these ready-made sites, which are very useful for beginners.

First of all, while you should be prepared to get sexual, you should also keep in mind that you’ll likely be chatting with people who are keeping things surprisingly PG-13. Like the older generation sex lines, these platforms are used by all sorts of people, some of whom just want to chat normally and consistently with someone. One former multi-platform user, Ellen, told me that she had a regular customer who was a truck driver. He would check in with her in the evenings when he was unwinding after a day of driving, and while he wanted to talk dirty every now and then, he was also interested in her life, sharing stories about his day, and general discussions. She got paid for it all.