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Comment by vld | Hacker News Reader

I launched a free API 4 years ago, and in January 2015 I introduced paid plans, which offered several benefits over the free service.

I have done no actual marketing, but the website ranks somewhat okay in search queries. It keeps growing every month, and recently passed $10k/month in profits. This is from pretty much word of mouth via stackoverflow or from google searches.

From this experience I can say that if your service is competitively priced, good, and needed by a somewhat large audience, even with no marketing you can turn a profit really fast.

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Care to share? Since you don't mention the name I guess not, but maybe you simply omitted it out of politeness :)

Based on comment history, I'm guessing it's IP-API [0].

[0] http://ip-api.com/

If that's the case, the author is some sort of marketing genius. There's tons of competition, including Google.

It actually geolocated me incorrectly by 7 miles. Google, on the other hand, knows my location to like 30 meters.

What percentage of your users are monthly active users? What percentage (of the monthly active users) ended up paying? How much do you charge per month? How did you figure out what to charge?

Since there is no authentication done for the free service I can't really track users, but just to give you some numbers, the free API serves over 10 billion HTTP requests/month. An educated guess would be 5% of users ended up paying.

Initially, I just wanted to make the service pay for itself (hosting, dev., data mining costs) and allow me to dedicate some time to provide support to users, so I asked myself, as a dev/company, how much would I pay for this service. I started with €80/year, and doubled the prices a few months later, to €160 (€13/month). The price increase seemed like a good business move, and surprisingly, the number of sales improved as a result.

...ten billion? What the hell servers are you running this on? Is this normal?

That's roughly 4k qps. Assuming it's a lightweight API a single server isn't out of the question. Nginx will handle 20k qps until the end of time on a tiny box serving static content.

Looks like the service is an IP lookup API. The sort of thing that many sites will hit once for each visitor. Most SaaS sites will never get anywhere near this, but things that do per-user or per-pageview queries (e.g. usage analytics) can get to billions of events per month with, say, 10k customers doing 1M hits each.

A mix of VPS and dedicated servers: 2 in EU, 3 in USA and 1 in Asia. Highly optimized stack.

Some live stats http://ip-api.com/docs/statistics

Mind talking a little more about your stack? This is very interesting.

If you were to use azure table storage and use shared access tokens for authorizing access to query results, you could run the whole thing from any individual data center for under $500/month.

Assumption is that every IP (all 4.3 billion) had about 100 bytes of data stored about them. That is ~430gb of storage runs you $30/month. The 10 billion queries to that storage costs about $360/month. ($.0036 per 100,000 transactions)

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