Is there any money in building small utility websites?

It depends on what your idea of "any money" is, who your users are, and what your utility does. If you're going to make any money from a small utility website it'll either be subscription based or (more likely) advertising based.

There are demographics of users who never even see ads, let alone click them, and there are others that click ads and can earn you real money (I have friends who pay their rent off their ad revenue from relatively small sites).

Your product would have to be something really special to convince people to subscribe, but a few dedicated core subscribers is enough to net you some money.

Are you likely to get rich? No. Can it be another ten, hundred, or thousand dollars in your pocket each month, quite possibly, but it depends.

I don't think there is as much money in building a website as there is in making an app for one of the handheld device platforms eg. iPhone app store.

Good examples is Remember the Milk or Things. They built solid services and then capitalized on converting some heavy users to paid pro accounts.

Alternatively you need to build a community around your app. Check out Daily Burn for that.

The market for standalone websites is extremely saturated. To break the mold explore some of these options to see how you could build something unique of your own.

You would need to be able to tie them together into a system that will help make people more efficient with their time, and that fits in well with their lives.

The fact that many websites don't do this well is that there is some opinion that these programs aren't not important enough to spend a great deal of resources on.

It would seem that these applications may be more useful to people if on a mobile device perhaps, but, again, it depends on the implementation.

It sounds like you might get small amounts of money for this. But hey, prove me wrong and get rich. It sounds like the sort of thing where doing is a better option than asking: try a low cost experiment. Pick one application and see if it works or not. Maybe an iPhone app?

If selling to businesses, then yes. But on the whole, you'd need something pretty compelling to get consumers to part with money.

I pay for a few things, but the majority of the time I either use what's freely available, or write my own tools to scratch any itch I have.

If you enjoy doing it, then write the tools/sites anyway. While they might not be something you can immediately sell, you don't know what will take off and end up having a life of it's own.

I would personally stay out of those two markets myself, given the great profusion of existing competitors, but small standalone sites do have a purpose: they demonstrate to others (employers, investors, anyone else) that you can build working products that people value. If you aren't trying to go full time from a site, gaining users is lower stress, and you can focus on keeping them happy rather than absolutely maximizing your sales strategy.

As Gabriel said, you probably won't be rolling in money, but with the correct audience you can definitely pay some of your monthly bills from the revenue.