Ask HN: New web service idea that you would pay for? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: New web service idea that you would pay for?

28 pointsandreinwald87 comments

Thread for ideas of a new web service or app solution, priced on a subscription model.

Which of your needs don't have a good solution yet?

For what app or web service are you ready to pay about 5-10$/month?

I am willing to pay $5-$10 a month for a service that provides quality suggestions for low-price subscription SaaS businesses.

I don't know their pricing but check out https://www.builtfirst.com

He was probably just joking.

There has to be at least one variation of this question per month over here. Sometimes the wording is kind of subtle but also the intent can be seen.

Nothing wrong with outsourcing ideas, but if you don't have itches to scratch, perhaps there are various qualities you should be improving before implementing a random idea from an internet forum?

For example I always write down my MVP ideas, and keep them indefinitely. This also requires being observant and proactive about the world around you.

The problem with questions like these: There is a difference between what people say they will pay for, vs what they actually pay for; as many failed startups found to their chagrin.

Unless somebody actually gives you their credit card, what they say they will pay for is largely an imaginary game

(sorry if this comes out too negative)

It is a simple fact, not too negative at all.

My wife started a business largely on the support of friends, family and strangers she talked to who said it was a good idea.

Imagine her surprise when literally noone was interested when it came time to buy what she was selling.

In a sibling comment there's this book "The Mom test" mentioned. It deals exactly with this: don't ask your mom or other close people for business idea opinions because they will be too supportive to answer honestly.

Which reminds me of a book once linked here on HN[0], The Mom Test[1]. Although (as far as I remember) not directly treats about this exact thing (or maybe it does?), it brings a lot of other very interesting points in general topic of coming up with the new business idea. I can definitely recommend, pure knowledge without fluff.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28667439

[1] http://momtestbook.com/

I'd pay $5-ish per month for social media if it came with no ads or data harvesting - just a more privately scoped version of Facebook with some of the useful bits like event scheduling and discussion groups. Of course the problem is getting non-technical people to value their attention and privacy at more than $5/month in order to catalyse the network effects.

social media where you can only post pixel art images. That way if you want to say something, you gotta click it out.

I've been saying for _years_ that what I really want is Facebook circa 2010.

How can a user confirm by himself that the company does not monetize the user data, without whistleblower news

Privacy in social media is a feature that is bound to self-discipline of the service provider

They probably can't, which is why I'm pessimistic about the idea being viable - unless there is some way for the application to be open-source and quasi-federated; for example with people/companies/communities hosting their own nodes - like Mastodon but with some kind of auto-discovery for regular users to make it approachable.

Paid services create a liability for the company to adhere to its terms, as the payments create a minimum floor for establishing damages in court.

A company could provide terms of service and perhaps an explicit creative works agreement defining the exact uses for which the company will use the data (to display on the website, to comply with legal requirements, etc).

It would still ultimately rely on a whistleblower or voluntary auditing, but the combination of clear damages and a not-open-ended terms of use would keep the company lawyers invested in keeping the company honest perhaps.

I've never had issues with the ads on social media. Some are indeed reasonable.

What I hate about FB or Instagram is the "look how great my life is" aspect.

It's super aggressive data harvesting and aggregation you need to be worried about. What's the end game when employers, landlords, insurers, creditors etc have a stream of your purchases, browser history, location history, offline friends, etc etc? Social credit much?

I've been hearing about this dystopian future for as long as I remember and don't really see it pan out as bad as it's described. In fact the existing credit reports or DMV records already are some form of personal data aggregation and I don't hear people losing sleep over it

The fact we've seen it coming doesn't make it wrong.

This has been tried though, app.net came and went. I mean if you want those things they exist in some form with Mastodon, Matrix/Element (not sure about the event scheduling).

app.net failed because they copied the most useless social network provider of them all.

Note that I specify provider above. Twitter is somewhat useful, but that is despite of, not because of the interaction design of it.

Edit: IIRC app.net was a bit overpriced and had some weird limitations too, although the latter might just be me remembering that they copied all the design mistakes of Twitter for no good reason.

Edit2: If anyone is in doubt at all: Twitter is popular because of the network effect. Everything else has been solved better by one or more competitors.

IMO this kind of question will get "faster horse" kind of responses, not "a car" kind of responses (context: https://www.inc.com/michael-graber/people-would-have-asked-f...)

Don't focus on price. Don't focus on other people's ideas. The word "need" is overloaded; too many people will tell you the solution they think they need and not the emotional need itself that is not being met by a solution. Instead, try to understand how other people are suffering, and only then try to come up with ideas for how to alleviate their suffering.

It’s a catch 22 as you could potentially be solving a problem that someone doesn’t even know they have.

The journey of identifying a shortcoming and attempting to address it is a critical part of the product journey.

If you don’t understand what you are solving chances are you won’t be the best at it.

It's a good point, but I think this is still a valuable exercise. The strategy shouldn't be "listen to what people say they want and then build that", but instead listen through what they say they want and into their problems. If nothing else this may lead, eventually, to discovering a class of problems you weren't aware of.

If you listen to what people say they want, it becomes difficult to actively ignore that in favor of a better overall solution. The sheer fact that a solution was proposed becomes ammunition that the proposed solution is what you should build. It becomes a form of authority bias.

Part of the insight that good product managers have is that their customer base aren't omniscient gods. They're flawed human beings like the rest of us, with limited experience and perspective. Our customers often don't know what we're capable of building, so why should we let our customers' proposals limit us?

This is why it's most important to focus on customer suffering. The facts of the gap that stands between them and happiness. That is the purest signal.

Maybe a better way to phrase this to elicit good answers is: "What web service did you wish other people built for you?"

I'd pay money for a service that finds me the best product according to parameters I provide. Like, not the product with the fanciest advertisement, but something that is actually good.

* My phone is broken. I want to buy a new one. I want to find the best one, given it must have at least 48 hour battery life and be able to handle falling to the floor a lot. I don't care about cameras or big screens. Show me what to buy. I don't want the options to be influenced by what other people want out of a phone, like an ultraviolet infrared stereoscopic 3D camera and 0.5g weight, but my parameters.

* I need new hiking shoes. I want something that lasts a while. Which ones do I get?

* I drive a Mazda CX-5 from 2014, maybe time to replace it? I want low mileage and I'm quite tall so I need some leg room. Give me some options. Oh, maybe the answer is I don't need a new car. That's useful to know too.

Currently, this requires a lot of research as most reviews are bought, most product information is unreliable. I'd pay for a service that shows me what is in my best interest as a consumer, not what is in the best interest of the sellers.

Sellers can easily pay to the site more than the buyers and it won't be in the buyer's interest

Right, I want someone to solve that.

I'd like an accountability service like beeminder but with an actual human being who helps me not stray for my indiehacking goals.

There was something called bossasaservice or something but don't think they were able to keep up with the demand and closed. Also the suggested $10 might be too low a price point for this.

I think about this all the time myself.

Have you looked into StikK? They provide services like automatically donating to your most hated charity if you don't meet your goals (they provide options like the NRA and Planned Parenthood).

No haven't heard of them but sounds like beeminder. In my opinion these automated solutions seldom work in the long run. Otoh having a real human being who calls you up or even WA you to check how you're doing from time to time can make a hell of a difference (right now my wife does that for me in a good way :P but I really think the guys who started bossasaservice were on to something and people were going crazy about them on PH and twitter.. but due the crazy amount of orders and the difficulty of scaling something with a real human I think they had to shutdown. I think the demand is still there though.

I was misleading when I said it was automated. In StikK, you have to get someone on board who will sign off on your proof-of-work. To make it a service, you could probably pay someone on Fiverr to be your signer.

Hi, Boss as a Service founder here, thanks for the mention! :)

We're very much active! (Though we did add a waitlist so we could onboard people in batches!) We're inviting people every week now though!

I just want to give you big ups for going with the waitlist approach. I think the status quo these days would be to try to grow way too fast in order to keep up with the demand (and outpace competition etc). I look forward to seeing if this works out for you.

> In my opinion these automated solutions seldom work in the long run

Beeminder cofounder here. Can I hear more about why you think this? There are definitely people for whom Beeminder doesn't work at all but you sound like you're making a different claim -- that it may work for a while but then stop working. That's the opposite of our experience. Our churn numbers get really good for those who stick around for a year and anecdotally we have lots of people getting PhD theses written thanks to Beeminder, etc.

But if you've had short-term success with things like Beeminder -- https://blog.beeminder.com/competitors -- and then had it fail, that would be valuable to hear more about.

Oh, and I should mention that Beeminder isn't necessarily entirely automated. If you derail and are about to be charged money but don't agree that it was a legit derailment, you talk to a human about that.

I say this all the time when people as questions like these:

Read The Mom Test

http://momtestbook.com/

I have no affiliation, it's just a great short read that will answer your questions.

Easily configurable Asset pipelines service

Not for images/videos so much but instead focused on GLTF, Step and other 3d file formats

There is a huge wave of 3d apps/games coming to browsers. WebGPU starting to roll out this year will just further accelerate that trend. Many of them feature user content that will have to be converted and optimized to be used

At https://flux.ai we had to build our own pipeline to optimize geometries, triangle counts, auto correct UVs, convert step and other file formats to gltf.

I wish there would have been a turnkey service to just plug into!

Not a subscription but I'd pay $100 after booking of a vacation travel planner that could give me options tailored to what I want, on flexible dates.

For ex if I want to travel to some place warm sometime in say January - March, with some flexibility on length, I end up spending a lot of time figuring out if flying a week later of some random date is way cheaper, or if the airport waiting times or fly times are terrible. If you add hotel options and flexibility in destination itself, it's a huge search space but I'd be happy with just the flight solution.

Like an online travel agency?

Todoist with metrics.

Todoist to me is regular (habits) + irregular to-dos (e.g. buy book, follow-up on email, etc.).

Pure habit tracking apps don't work b/c you need build a habit to use the app and with the content always being stale, they have high churn.

I want an app that also lets me track personal OKRs (habits). My goal might be to do 15 pullups and my habit could be to do 5 pullups per day. I want to know how often I skip my daily pull up habit so I can know to make adjustments (e.g. maybe 5 is too many. I should start with 3.).

How about storage/sync? Is there something that's as easy to use as Dropbox used to be and based on S3, Backblaze, etc? The things I pay for are slightly more convenient than rsync and far slower.

I just searched and found Sync.Com: "one of the best alternatives to Dropbox right now. SYNC is cheaper than Dropbox and also comprises more features." Is this any good? I'd like one with less features.

Old ideas: I've built a few but never put in (proper) sales/marketing effort.

1. aggregation of status pages. This was free. It had all the popular SaaS ones and was kept up-to-date with polling scripts written with a variety of heuristics or explicit scripting.

2. "20,000 foot view" distributed log events. It was a distributed 'key-event' log that integrated with logging so that you could put in a request-id or user-id and get the high-level 'human-rate' events in a time interval. Each high-level event had a link to the Loggly search. It could also present the events in a sequence-diagram view through the chain of connected services.

3. Hosted (private or public) exact github repo trigram/regex search using Hound-Search (aka etsy/houndd). The automated provisioning using cloud vms (not K8s) was pretty neat to set up.

4. Others. Tried making some info aggregators for products or movies to make it easy for me to find things I liked. Not complete enough to be better than existing web sites.

I have paid about $5 a month for a couple of years for the most promising Google+ replacement I could find at the time. At some point after sending feedback multiple times on a specific pain point I gave up.)

Today I'm paying $20 for Marginalia while I wait for Kagi (and because I love Marginalia and the ideas behind it).

I'd probably pay for a "cloud provider with seatbelts" too for learning/testing (e.g. "GCP"/"AWS"/"Azure" but without the possibility to empty my bank account. Bonus if it let me attempt that without doing it and immediately tell me I messed up, etc.)

Edit: there are probably a number of other things I would buy if I could buy them in the form of tokens, not a monthly subscription. I have serious subscription fatigue so I try to only pay subscribtions for stuff that I love or need.)

How does marginalia work for you? I am using kagi and it's really nice but it still has some misses, especially for non-English content

Marginalia puts a smile on my face.

Just knowing that there is one Swede with one tower PC doing what almost everyone on HN thinks needs redundant datacenters, sysadmin teams, ux teams and what not gives me some hope for the future of the web.

Oh, another reason: every time I use it, either searching for something or using the explore function it proves that the old web isn't dead.

And sometimes it gives very good results that I wouldn't have found otherwise (ln topics like linux, git etc).

To be fair, my search engine isn't really trying to be google, it's more of an exploration and discovery tool even though it dresses up as a search engine and sometimes does a decent job at it.

Unless someone sends me a ton of money, I just don't have the budget to be more than that. I also think the "better google" space is getting a bit crowded anyway, I think there's probably more interesting niches to be carved out in the general space of discovery.

Of course if I had to choose between Marginalia and Google I'd probably have to choose Google.

But don't underestimate the value of proving that it is possible to create a delightful (fast, less patronizing, less spamful, surfaces more real content) search engine without having a FAANG budget or backing from a national state or someone with a FAANG budget.

Edit: also don't underestimate how cool it is. ;-)

Yeah, I do think that's sort of one goal of it, a "show, don't tell" contradiction about some of the less well founded assumptions that seems widely accepted about software development and webdesign. It's too easy to dismiss words.

I've wanted to build this for a while: favicon/icon as a service. Enter a domain, and get back an icon to represent the site. Could be a favicon, or a high-res application icon captured from meta tags. There are solutions to this now, but none of them are rock solid. You will end up pulling a hero image for twitter half the time. Params could include the size icon you are looking for, a good fallback, etc.

Imagine a product that deals with domains. You might want to show icons next to each domain in your product. You can build this yourself, as many do, but I think there is room for a "gravatar" style API that does this

Perhaps something like this: https://favicon.allesedv.com/

Seems similar to this:

https://clearbit.com/blog/logo

I'd pay $10/month for a news website that didn't cram a ton of ads and tracking into every page, covered a bit of everything, and was genuinely well-balanced. I don't particularly mind if it was left- or right-leaning in each article so long as it averaged out to be close to the centre overall.

I actually think it's a pretty good potential application for a GPT-3 style prose-generating AI - I'd happily accept something that was 'readable' (for GPT-3 levels of readable) without human bias, editorialization, and sensationalization. The hard part is getting unbiased facts to turn into articles.

Check out https://join1440.com/. No affiliation, I just enjoy their balanced daily newsletter that like you said covers a bit of everything. It does have text ads/sponsors in the email, but you can subscribe for an ad free experience.

I'd pay ~5-10 dollars a month for high quality local grammar checking. I can't use grammarly in many contexts due to corporate security concerns.

I want the same for the same reason and have considered building it. Would you want it running in the browser? As some kind of plug-in to other tools? I have considered both.

Browser would work, but might get blocked by security. An app wouldn’t be to bad

Not necessarily anything new, but I've been looking for a clean and simple todo / project planning web application for an affordable price and ideally e2e encrypted. From what I've seen most solutions that look appealing are focused on teams and have set their pricing accordingly. I just need a todo app that goes a little further with a kanban board, sprints. Full e2ee would be the cherry on top.

I use Todoist and have beeen happy with it. You can even do a kanban board.

I love Todoist, but they are slowly shifting their product into the b2b space by making it more collaborative and company friendly. I am worried they will eventually become unusable for consumers since there just isn't much money in it.

That's what I use currently, but kanban boards look and feel like an afterthought to me. Sprints would also be nice to have.

Can you provide an example of a todo or project management app that does sprints well?

We're building a todo/planning app https://thymer.com. It will have a free version for individual users (and paid for teams).

Although it doesn't have a kanban board (at this stage), our goal is of course to offer a good solution for everything related to planning and scheduling.

We're strongly considering e2e encryption, but we're not 100% sure yet, because other features like CALDAV integration and server-side search are not compatible with e2e. The app runs entirely locally and syncs in the background (via CRDT), so it's super responsive.

Looks neat and I particularly like the 80 day startup thing you've got going on :)

The product isn't exactly what I'm looking for. I have a web based, more visual application in mind.

We are using Basecamp as a team and have been really happy with it. I think their free tier should work well for a single person and I could see myself using it if I was working solo.

A streaming service for my children that allows me to choose which advertisements/PSAs play to them, preferably for values and not products.

Why stop there? Streaming service for kids that shows no ads!

I pay 25$ a month to Textedly to enable me to easily send text messages to a group of people and enable signups to a list via a short code.

I run a successful SaaS and while we have 2 engineers including myself, sometimes there are issues that are outside of my skill level (usually devops or db-related) or just aren't worth it for me to deal with on my own. I would likely pay 3 figures a month (maybe low 4?) just to have the privilege to field technical questions a couple times per month and ensure I can get good advice/help quickly.

It's not that I don't have developer friends, it's moreso that I respect their time and would rather not bother them for tech problems related to my business. I would love to pay for help, but at the same time my friends would never accept my money, so you can see my dilemma. I've used codementor.io in the past but there's a lot of friction in terms of finding a developer/posting a "job", scheduling a time with them, and so on. I'd like to just field these questions into a discord group, feel zero guilt/shame about it, and feel like someone smart will be able to help me within a reasonable time frame.

Of course, whoever figures this out would need to figure out how to balance the costs and the scope of the problems (i.e. I obviously wouldn't be able to have someone just rewrite my entire app), but for example here are some things that I've recently had questions about that I would love to have solved for me that vary in difficulty:

- What CSS do I need to write for me to get these boxes to look this way given that the widths/heights can be variable? (css questions)

- Figuring out what is going on with node-sass and later versions of Webpacker preventing me from compiling assets. (js problems)

- I have no idea how to do this query in an effective manner, here is my data model, can someone help me write an ActiveRecord or SQL query for this? (DB-related questions)

- We have a massive performance bottleneck in this part of the app, here is the business context of why we did it this way, but also why it ended up being really bloated, I'd like some help talking through a better way of fetching and serializing this data for the frontend. (performance problems)

- Our site is going down intermittently and nginx is giving me weird errors (devops problems).

- Here's a feature we want to implement, what do you think is the best way to execute this in terms of tools, packages, and so on? (general consultative questions)

I know these questions on HN are usually fishing for some 100% automated software solution, but after 5 years of building SaaS, this is the one recurring problem I've had.

Edit: To be clear, I'm not looking to hire a consultant specifically, but rather that I think something like this can be productized if someone were ambitious enough to want to assemble this sort of marketplace.

Please contact me. My Background: founder of successful VC backed company with a successful exit. Professor of Practice at University of Wyoming (now) retiring at the end of this semester. I teach full stack development and database. My product company was a database performance tuning and storage management tool. pschlump@gmail.com

I'm curious about this. What if you could pay for a stack overflow bounty? I'm sure there's folks who would happily earn a side hustle answering questions there at $50-$100/ea

I like this. A sort of incentivized professional Stack Overflow / Quora

try codementor.io

A viable YouTube competitor, including its social and recommendation features, but without the ad-based business model making it so... fraught. I am happy with (and pay for) YouTube, but I'd love competition in this space.

Just out of curiousity, how would someone go about competing with YouTube? Build a prototype, raise a bunch of $$ from investors? Do you need to come in with domain / technical experience? Do you target a niche first?

Nebula[1] comes pretty close to what I want, actually. They are targeting a niche, like you suggest, mostly educational video content. I don't know their business model. Anyway, I should put my money where my mouth is and try it out.

[1] https://nebula.app/

Track changes to a number on a webpage (e.g. Zillow home value, price of an item, temperature at a location), over email and RSS, and plot the changes on a graph as a function of time.

A shopping / todo list that triggers based on my location. I need stuff / should do stuff from / at certain places and would like a reminder when I am close.

Monthly List of seed funded startups from across the world

a weather app or service that allows you to look at least one year-long time lapse of global satellite and radar loop. Most services that i looked into offer up to 12hrs, but not sure why.

Something like this, but up to date: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8w3o6_cn-O8

What would you pay for? Every really successful software business I know came from somebody solving one of his or her own problems.

I know this is good advice, but it is the thing that holds me back the most. I live a simple life and I literally don't have anything I would pay for that I could also conceivably build myself (any ideas I have tend more towards hardware than software).

Maybe you should build hardware! There are plenty of businesses built on hardware. What's keeping you from going that route?

The few ideas I have are for very niche needs (think homesteaders / permies) and I already make enough money writing software for others that the risk of investing in hardware for a tiny, tech-averse market makes it a foolish risk / payoff proposition.

Everything else I could want hardware-wise already has a startup that I would rather support than compete with.

Slack ignore for channel, user(bot), and/or regex pattern.

Twitter but where all the users have to be verified.

A streaming service without DRM

high quality coding school that lands you a job.

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