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Comment by GFischer | Hacker News Reader

There are a lot of websites that I'm not sure if they count as businesses but are reasonably simple:

  - code prettifiers,
  - converting from X to PDF, 
  - converting image formats, 
  - YouTube downloaders, 
  - TimeZone converters,
  - Online calculators,
  - SQL formatters

And so many more...

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> YouTube downloaders

Not a good business to go into right now. There have been some recent suspicious crackdowns of those[1].

[1]: https://torrentfreak.com/keepvid-site-no-longer-allows-users...

On that note, hooktube says they got shut out of the YT API and can only do regular embedded videos now. Kinda no point.

I still use HookTube to watch age-restricted videos when I don't feel like logging in.

I give a lot of page views to those ad-heavy online unit conversion calculators that are quite simple. While the page itself really just implements basic arithmetic, I have no idea how hard it is to get the 1st result from the search engine when you google "Convert 130 inch ounce to newton meters"

I've been working on an omniglot code prettifier ( https://nicen.pw/ ), but I'm not sure how I could ever make it a business. :D

It's not what I'd personally do, but the traditional solution is advertising.

Converting X to PDF is far from simple ( I wish it was! ).

It's actually not always hard (depending on use case and what 'x' is) if you use an existing api or something that has already been developed...why re-invent the wheel?

wkhtmltopdf is pretty easy to use... there's some other tools...

I think eterm's point is not that there aren't readily-available tools to do it, but that it's hard to do in full generality without loss of information.

my point was if you just wanted a simple 'online tool' to slap some ads on, or have a fancier upgrade, it's probably doable without a ton of effort..obviously some integrations will be harder than others...

From my experience almost nothing around PDF is simple once you scratch the surface...

simplepdf did a great job, good example of doing something simple that’s actually not that simple

PDFSharp FTW!

Simple != Easy.

Think the question isn't what's easy money - you can have really simple ideas or products that just do one thing, but they're not necessarily easy to do.

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