Ask HN: Do people actually pay for small web tools? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do people actually pay for small web tools?

58 pointsscratchyone68 comments

Hey all, there's a lot of web stuff and tools I'd love to make that I think would honestly be worth a small subscription ($5/mo maybe). I'm always a bit wary of approaching these ideas though because I feel like nobody would ever pay for small web stuff?

I see a lot of success stories but I don't know how much they can be trusted. Those of you who have built small single-use indie tools, do you find that anybody at all actually subscribes? A lot of the stuff I wanna try involves AI so I'd have to make sure subscription profits offset the cost of providing free demos.

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People, no. Companies, yes.

If a web tool saves me and my team at work a bit of time for $5/month, yes, 100%, swipe the company card! Sure let’s buy another JS table library.

But if I’m working on a personal project, or I have to pay for said tool with my personal card, probably not. I’ll spend the time building my own solution from scratch while never actually finishing my project.

Also depends on whether company is building it for themselves or a client.

Just the licensing/subscription mess can be detraction if now your company have to tell your client that they need to pay for some 3rd party thing, even if your client have no problems with it it can take months if bureaucracy machine is slow

A former colleague makes it an interview question. He asks the recruiter what the procedure is if he wants to buy a product or use a service under $100/year. If the bureaucracy is overwhelming, it's a major red flag.

When I was working at Cisco, the general rule was to get manager approval and just go for it. Of course, these days, there are security concerns but for most cases, it's not a problem.

In a different company, it was sooo hard to get anything that they refused to buy JetBrains IntelliJ and forced us to use Eclipse. Most of us ended up buying it ourselves.

That is actually pretty clever & reveals quite a lot about the company culture.

On the other hand if you are targeting companies, just charging $5/month is leaving money on the table. If a company is willing to pay $5/month they are almost certainly also willing to pay $50/month.

It's as complex for me to spend $5 as it is $500, and businesses would approve it equally... but if I perceive it to be excessively priced I won't even try to.

I would definitely pay a small amount for a tool. What I would not do for a personal project is pay $150 every year to renew a small wordpress plugin.

I found that selling to some companies comes with a lot of bureaucracy attached.

The last company we signed up to our service took 3 months and at least 4 hours of paperwork, I personally wanted to just tell them to go somewhere else but we kept getting emails from the dev team saying sorry

Currently I pay for LWN, SourceHut, and an email service I'm trying out. I often forget to read LWN for weeks, but I keep renewing it year after year, because I honestly love taking a few minutes out of my morning, get coffee and read an article or two.

SourceHut, I don't use as much as I'd like, but the build and chat services keeps me paying. It's cheap, and I get a lot of enjoyment from using it.

I think if you do these types of services, then you really need to make sure that people feel good about using your service. I know that's a tricky and rather fluffy goal, but you either need to be REALLY good and then you can charge more than $5, or you can make people feel good and if the amount is low, it becomes an easy renewal next month/year.

If you're making a tool, fixed price for the current version, upgrade price for the next version, no subscription. I think we're at a point in time where your target audience would rather fork over $25 right now and then get a license, but would be hard press to give you $5 per month, even for a single month.

there's a lot of web stuff and tools I'd love to make

Make that stiff because doing what you love is doing what you love.

$5/mo

As a business, that is a terrible price. It is not enough money to provide good service and outsource all the things that should be outsourced. [1] Even worse good potential customers know this and bad potential customers don’t care if your business is unsustainable.

[1]: At five bucks a month you will need thousands of customers to cover one well-paid employee [2} focused on customer service, but acquiring, retaining, and servicing thousands of customers probably requires more than one full-time employee…

[2]: Of course if you are doing what you love, then being paid well might not matter. But unless you love solving billing problems, you will be doing some things you don’t love. But being well paid to do what you love is not bad.

Indiehackers.com has stripe-verified revenue for many small saas so check that out to see what makes money. General trend is other than the AI assistant bubble, the money is in marketing automation. The bar is high for dev tools. You compete with Jetbrains for quality and a lot of free stuff for price. Unless you are very niche. E.g. I think something like a tool that solves kubernetes soc2 compliance sort of thing.

You’re going to get very biased answers to these questions because the people paying for tools don’t post on webforums. They’re generally paying because they care so little about the problem they’re willing to throw money at it to make it go away.

That being said, also $5 is a terrible price. People who pay too much attention to people who post on web forums get gun shy and are afraid to discover what people are actually willing to pay for things.

Everyone who has ever raised their prices has said consistently that a) the number of people who left was below their expectations and b) the people who left were overwhelmingly their most complaining customers who caused the most support burden.

It saddens me to read some of the "no" responses, since I just shipped a few days ago exactly the type of small web app that OP speaks of. I personally find it really useful and wished I had this tool every single time at work. And the original version I made for the Mac App Store 10 years ago was a huge hit, placing in the top 5 rankings for over several weeks worldwide.

As I've grown older, I like to pay for things that make my life more efficient. Even if they are a subscription, and even if I feel like everything unfortunately has turned into a subscription and even if I feel like it should be cheaper. Hacking or finding workarounds to achieve the same thing for free is just not worth my time, and I value my time and boundaries more as I age.

For me it's more the thought of another subscription to keep track of than the price itself that often stops me. Charge me a one time price for something cool or useful and I'll probably pay. If you want me to subscribe to a thing then the barrier you need to clear is much higher.

$5/month is sort of the worst spot. I'd pay $1/month for some things (budgeting tools) and $20/month for say, chatgpt. And I paid $5 lifetime (life being ~5 years) for a resume tool once.

These days AI will probably build most of the things you'd charge a tiny fee for. $5/month is kind of the rate of a battle pass for a MMO, not quite a "small tool".

$1/month might be a bit shit because of transaction fees unless you charge per-year instead.

Some forms of payment charge on a percentage. Microtransactions are a thing too.

But you are then also the kind of customer that nobody wants. It's not worth doing business with people who want to pay less than $10 per month for a service. Those are problem customers always, so it's better to price them out.

As another commenter said, $5 is a terrible price.

$5 a month works for apps with huge user bases and they just take the small conversion and that makes their business run. And this is never web apps (certainly not new ones because the easy ones already exist).

If you charge $30-$100 a month you have to find 10 times less people which is way way easier for a small web dev. Yes the problem you solve will have to be more acute but a. There are actually loads of rich people out there - more than you think and b. You now basically only have to build for your most committed users.

See 1000 True Fans for better, fuller explanation: https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/

I built a tool that lets you read any article and especially and newsletter on Kindle. I charge $6-$10 monthly or about $60-$85 yearly for it and >150 active subscribers. The yearly pre-payment that's about 20% cheaper than monthly is by far the most popular plan.

If you don't mind sharing, how long did it take you to reach that level?

Speaking for myself: NO.

Perhaps HN is not the best audience to ask this question. A mostly tech savvy audience is more likely to solve their personal needs with a quick script, etc.

From a business perspective, you need to frame your MVP in terms of what problem you are solving? How many people really do have that problem? Of those people how many are willing to pay for the solution?

Whether you use AI or not is largely irrelevant. The knowledge of a specific domain and the typical problems encountered therein are far more relevant.

Yeah agreed with AI being irrelevant. I most mention that to explain that rather than just hosting costs, there are additional costs for model inference that make it a lot harder to break even. I'm fine with little to no profit as long as I can at least avoid losing money on side projects haha

No, there is a threshold for the amount of subscriptions/SaaS I tolerate, and it’s basically a tiny handful of them and they’re occupied by streaming services etc. So your feeling is right, when it comes to me at least.

The App Store model of small one-off payments works for this use-case. But no matter how useful a web tool is I don’t think I’d ever sign up for a small monthly fee for it. The ”mental overhead” of that is absolutely massive.

Sadly even one off payments for web tools are a poor UX since there is no central broker to take care of it. Next time I visit I (maybe a different browser etc) it’s a hassle.

I’d much rather just use a worse tool that is free. Because SaaS fatigue is real. Sorry hobbyists and startup dreamers I’m not paying money for your SaaS. Not because it’s not good enough but because it’s nearly impossible to be good enough to make me go through a subscription process. Even as an older person who can afford it and is used to paying for things, I’d much rather waste hours of my own time than pay a subscription. Importantly, I’d also much rather pay $100 once than $5/mo even if I don’t foresee using it for more than a year.

Make it an App Store app and you can easily get $10 from me though, is the sad reality of it.

For a subscription, no. If it's a really good tool, I'd pay some small amount under $20 depending on what it is.

I could probably name like 6 companies of the top of my head, all of them being in the boat of "call us and we give you our custom software for your business need", where any competent developer can probably come in, look at the use case, and probably write the entire backed in about 2-3 months (and now with LLMs, 3-4 months for front end and backed).

The thing about monetization of software isn't about usefulness, its about marketing, which starts with realizing that the things that are trivial for you to do are way less trivial for others.

Things I’ve paid over the last 15 years.

- Plex lifetime

- gmail workspace (was free lots of years, but not now) - domain(s)

- some Wordpress themes in the past for business clients

Nothing more, and I’d like to get out of workspace…

But internet is gigantic, just ship it.

> I'd love to make that I think would honestly be worth a small subscription ($5/mo maybe)

I buy a few things for web dev side. I'm a sample of one but I avoid /mth pricing for most stuff if I can and prefer annual. Maybe me but the 'another monthly subscription' feels annoying as much as I respect I want this for my own business.

Will almost always start using free first then pay if its business beneficial to feature enrich of scale.

I think your best focusing on free and getting users. Once you hit a threshold you can ask for some $$ and some people will feel that's reasonable. If you start paid I suspect you'll have little chance of growth unless you come out with something truly amazing.

Here you can find statistics based on data scraped from Indie Hackers, but it’s not split by the tool size: https://scrapingfish.com/blog/indie-hackers-revenue

Great slider on the page XD

20/year maybe, 5/month very rarely. At 5/month on my personal credit card there are so many tools out there that there is usually something, in a different space, that I could spend on. I don't want to be eaten alive by subscriptions, so I made a budget and I'm at limit for subscriptions.

Obviously I would be better off trying to reduce my grocery costs instead (spend way more), but personal subscription translates in my brain to "I should be using this almost every day" and that is rarely the case for these tools. Exceptions are YNAB, Logseq, raindrop

You do what you want to do. You might find a niche you can double down on. $5 is a terrible price but a great way to see if what you build solves anything. In that way it’s a lot better than $0. Then you double down on the winners.

If it doesn’t work, you’ve tried and now you know, and you probably built a bunch of skills you can use.

I had quite a few people who said “I’ve never bought anything ever but I love your app so much I’ve paid for it.” Incredibly gratifying.

Although check out Patio11’s advice on charging more. Customers who spend more give you less shit.

> I'm always a bit wary of approaching these ideas though because I feel like nobody would ever pay for small web stuff?

There are 2 billion internet users.

If you can sell a $5 subscription to just 40 000 of them (0.002%) [1], you can retire. There will always be someone who will be willing to pay for something. The problem is finding these 40000 people.

[1] 40000*5 - 30% various commissions - 50% tax = 14000 dollars a month, 168000 dollars a year unless I'm really bad at math :D

The closest thing I used to pay for was Android games, but only a few euros at a time. Now it's big games when they have an offer.

I'd have to be self-employed or have my employer pay for it if I needed a small web tool. It does fit more into the "need" category than "want", doesn't it? That is, IF you need it and that's a big IF.

Why is it a big IF? If you need it for your job you pay for it. I would hate it to have employees wasting their time coding something by themselves that we could just buy for a few bucks.

Yes absolutely. If not an employee or self-employed though you'll more likely try free software or trials.

I pay for a small wiki like site for my D&D campaigns.

Yeah I can fiddle with self hosting and finding the right OSS tools, but really, I just don't want to think about it. Its a small fee and I'll happily pay it.

https://www.obsidianportal.com/

Webapps? I prefer not. No reason most of these apps should be web apps or subscription based. I prefer local apps

I concur but as someone who is currently trying to bootstrap a small software business, I've gotten doubts about the viability of selling small native apps. The administration and technical overhead for each platform has grown out of proportion for a solo-developer. You have to deal with certificates & signing, app stores, mandatory testing & reviews, false antivirus positives, platform-specific requirements, etc., and all of this in addition to the marketing, running a business, and developing the product.

is signing a must?

can't it work by just sending them the app or letting them download and install it?

I have not used windows for a while, so don't know much about signing.

Sorry, I'm replying a bit late, just saw this. Signing is not a must but unsigned executables trigger Defender's warning screen way more easily (always in the beginning) and users have to define it as an exception to explicitly run the app. Signing the binaries does not guarantee that no warning is triggered but they help making the screen go away. It depends on the certificate. The most expensive certifications, EV certificates, will allow users to run the binaries as a trusted binary without warning screen but they require very extensive org authentication.

Some companies go with unsigned binaries but it's not recommended. It's hard to quantify how many users are lost with unsigned executables, and probably depends a lot on the area. For example, I've noticed that many small producers of audio plugins don't sign their installers and customers don't seem to care much. However, most normal end consumer software is signed at least with OV certificates.

See [1] for more info.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/electronjs/comments/17sizjf/a_guide...

thank you. will check that link.

I (well, my company) pays for https://onlinetools.com/ (USD 6 per month if you pay for a year upfront), which a found super-handy for (de-)prettifying and (de-)stringifying JSON. (It does a lot of other things too.)

How does it compare to the free, self hostable https://it-tools.tech/ ?

Hadn't seen this before - thanks! I'll take a look before it comes round to resubscribing next year. :-)

I was going to mention onlinetools.com as soon as I saw this thread, but then decided to browse the comments first.

that tools site is by Peter(is) Krumins of the blog catonmat.net.

he also founded Browserling.

I am in a similar boat, I will launch a little tool (web page) for creating legally compliant invoices in Germany.

But I will go down the 3€/use road instead of the subscription one. I don't know if this is better, I just do what I would prefer as a customer.

There's a very nice solution called Cakedesk, made by a German developer.

ironically, at $5/mo? no.

at $60/mo without even asking a question about the product? yep, all the time.

I paid for R# out of pocket monthly for years between multiple companies when I was programming in C#. I can’t imagine any other tool that I’ve come across that I wanted.

Got any examples of small web tools that people are charging for?

5$/mo is expensive for a small tool. 20$ once would be fine.

I hate subscriptions but I pay for $5-$20 one shot tools all the time, and I will donate a similar amount for open source stuff.

Personally, no, I would not pay $5/mo for some small single-use tool. Some tools I would (and have) pay per use.

The only time I paid was for Excel or Wordpress plugins and it would have been a one time payment.

I've been paying a premium subscription to Focumon (https://www.focumon.com/) for a year and a month. It's a small Pokémon themed productivity tool that I found promoted here on this site. The paid subscription doesn't really give you much, but is inexpensive and I want to support the creator.

Small web tools have some advantages that could make them sustainable as a business model. Off the top of my head, some of these are:

* Creators are way more reachable, they often get back to you directly when you send them feedback. Sometimes, even, you get to have longer conversations with them too.

* You have more impact on what the product evolves into. It's also likely that you get some minor features added if you ask for them.

* Smaller tools are able to resist against enshittification with less of an effort. Doesn't mean that it may not happen, of course.

If you're asking this because you want to create a small web tool, I'd say the best advice you could use is to make something you like, make it reliable, and be proactive in engaging with you clients / let them reach out easily, demonstrating that you can and will listen and care about their concerns.

And if you create something you're proud of and have value, feel more than welcome of posting it here!

I think you are asking the right question here. Before building something determine if there is a market, and if that market will pay.

Personally my gut says no. I personally don't use any tools in that range, but I also think that at first glance the numbers don't add up.

Firstly, people pay for value. You seem to feel your ideas are low value (hence the low price) which means you don't really expect users to use it a lot. And "very occasional use" doesn't motivate me to go to the effort of paying.

Since the absolute number is low, you're either expecting really tiny numbers or you're hoping for really high numbers. The tiny numbers result in tiny revenues and tiny profits, so what's the point?

High numbers of people are likely to consume all that revenue. If you got high numbers you'd like ho the ads based route, with maybe a premium "no ads" subscription. But then you can charge more (getting rid of ads is $20 value.)

But again people dont pay for occasional use. If the use is frequent then it's likely more valuable than 5$.

To answer your root question - people don't "subscribe" to single-use tools (if by single-use you mean one-time-use.)

Perhaps you need to charge more? (People pay $10 for a coffee and that's single use). Or charge per use?

See that's my challenge! Very well put. I see a lot of influencers bragging about mini SaaS apps being profitable but I don't know if I really see how. I'm more interested in multi-use simple tools. For example, an app that solves a common small problem/inconvenience really well is probably worth $5/mo (I would probably pay for that), but I can't imagine anyone just buys subscriptions to indie apps haha. I'm honestly happy with very low profit if it's possible. I love building stuff as a hobby and I'd just like to make enough money to cover my hosting costs so I can run side projects that cost me a bit to deploy. Maybe a better model is 1-2 free uses and then sign up and then charge per use at-cost? That way I can cover costs without getting people stuck into a subscription...

Just remember $60/yr. can also be seen by some as a high hurdle.

i do, so probably a lot of people do.

competition is stiff though. but if you have a niche and you don't bet the farm on it i say why not?

Depends. I don't pay for much these days

> I'm always a bit wary of approaching these ideas though because I feel like nobody would ever pay for small web stuff?

Build them and find out! There's almost always room for something better, and if what you build is that, then some people will pay.

Unless the tools have large running costs, consider offering them for free (at least at first).

A few things are likely to happen:

Nobody cares enough to sign up – fine, zero users, zero costs.

People use it but don’t stick around – ask them what would make the tool more valuable.

People use it a lot – great, now you can charge for the value.

Two examples come to mind: spaced repetition app Mochi and markdown editor Typora. Mochi is $5 a month, I think. Typora was free and is now a $15 one-time purchase.

Both compete with free alternatives and still have many paying users.

What problem(s) are you looking to solve?

Small tools on big platforms? The number of 5 buck wordpress extensions I see in the bloated corpses of my customers webpages is telling.

they do. But honestly, from business point of view, it maybe not a good idea to charge fractional amount like that because Stripe or other payment gateways will charge us 3.9 usd minimum per transaction

Why would I subscribe to a tool?

$5 once, sure. $60 per year in perpetuity? Hard no.

Flat price works if you get one major version with that. Don’t expect new features.

Tell that to Apple or Blackmagic.

Anyway, small tools like the one in question here generally benefit from being marked done and not changed further.

We don’t know anything about this tool. Maybe it requires data storage or processing power in cloud and that does not work well with flat prices. But if it works locally just in the browser, I could agree, but that is rarely case. AI was mentioned in this case so it is likely that there are ongoing long term costs.

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