Ask HN: Anyone making a living from a paid API? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Anyone making a living from a paid API?

252 pointsmeander_water173 comments

Are there any solo devs or small teams out there genuinely paying their rent from selling API access?

What's your API? How much MRR? What's your pricing model? How did you find your first paying customers? And most importantly - what problem are you solving that people will actually pay for monthly?

Bonus points if you can share: - Your biggest challenge (rate limiting? customer support? competition?) - Whether you'd do it again - Any "I wish I knew this before starting" wisdom

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I started as a dev shop and built 2 API products based on user demand.

1 is an OCR and document extraction service [0]. We started with three customers asking for the same services and found none that were really useful (and supported Chinese characters) on the market at that time. Lately the product pivoted to based on (fine-tuned) LLM/VLMs and focus on adding various features that LLM out of the box are missing (fine tune based on specific customers data, prompt tune for particular type of elements e.g. Checkboxes, split 100s pages of PDF into dozens of documents with a few pages)

We're at around 55k MRR, the price model is per page, and we sign annual contracts with most clients (with some discounts)

2nd is an open-source CIAM [1]; Around 35k MRR.

We knew nothing about marketing when we started, so we partnered with local GCP/Azure as an ISV to get our first paying customers, which drove us to the more "Corporate" segment of the market.

A huge challenge is obviously how to market the product, but customer support for developers is tough as well -- you have to be developers to provide support for other developers, and sometimes it feels like you're troubleshooting for another dev team.

For example, one time we had a client email us saying they were getting incorrect results from our API suddenly, after many back-and-forth emails, we finally asked if we could do troubleshooting with a video call and share screen -- turns out they were interestingly calling our API via a proxy with cache enabled.

[0] https://formx.ai

[1] https://authgear.com

Curious how you landed on the idea to partner with local GCP/Azure reps. That’s a smart move, I didn’t realize they’d be open to helping. Did you pitch it as a way to help them close deals by offering custom solutions?

Saw some other products partners with a Cloud vendor for marketing exposure, so we look into it.

It turns out that the most effective and easy way for their sales rep to pitch your products to their client is if you have something complementary. For us, this is because they have similar products, so they can propose it to the client if they don't like the native one.

cloud reps get commission for services sold via their marketplace. Often they even have a bigger financial incentive to sell third party products over native GCP/Azure stuff.

Yeah, but a few years down the road, I learnt that the incentives are often misaligned. For example, the Account Manager wants all their client's consumption in their client's account, so they push the client for a dedicated Cloud deployment, while the other sales rep wants it on the other reseller account, etc.

It also sometimes conflicts with the incentives of us.

I know of a guy, but his scenario was quite unique. I was working for an energy company who shall remain nameless, but who's internal IT was a tangle of external consultants milking the place for millions, and ineffective/underserved full time staff who couldn't run a query on a database without a change control committee of consultants milking them for yet more cash.

Anyway, this guy was the go to guy for gas customers, and knew the database inside and out. So he created his own company, resigned as a full time employee, waited until the panic had set in properly.

Then he offered consulting services back to the energy company saying he'd take care of any database processing costs, or cloud migration costs or whatever, and moved the customer data for gas customers to his own system. Then he created an API, waited a while more and said he was going away again.... Or he could stay supporting this setup if the energy company agreed to a monthly fee and API usage. Then, as far as I know, he sat back and just watched the money roll in while he automated everything else about the job.

> moved the customer data for gas customers to his own system

That sounds highly illegal.

IT services companies / MSPs aren't illegal. I'm sure this was all detailed in a contract looked over by lawyers.

I assume “customers” means internal customers, i.e. business units at the energy company who had come to rely on this guy’s ability to navigate the insane I.T. and actually get things done for them.

aka he joined the squad of consultants. Just with better and more automated process

Sounds like extortion with extra steps? Maybe there’s a more charitable way to tell the story.

It sounds like the employee is actually getting what they are worth. Lots of huge organizations require a single key person in order to function, and most of the time those key people are not compensated accordingly.

The company could have called the bluff and passed on the consulting services.

Extortion or price discovery?

> Maybe there’s a more charitable way to tell the story.

Yeah, management didn’t give the guy a raise so he quit and he could say no when they came begging.

If there’s anything that went wrong here it was management asking ‘what if we pay him more’ but not asking ‘what if we don’t’.

Without debating whether it’s ethical, it doesn’t sound like extortion. It sounds like taking advantage of dysfunctional decision making in an organization.

I assume he built his system and then onboarded the company as a client to it. Possible issue here is the degree of separation. If he ever worked on the system before he resigned, or re-used some concepts of it, then I’m sure company would sue him and take the system for free.

I’ve considered doing similar for one corp I’ve once worked with. The corp used an obscure hybrid cloud solution, unfortunately, the cloud provider didn’t really understand the corps needs (governance,devex,monitoring) making it impossible to do anything basic without manual action from an administrator. Pretty solvable with a couple of APIs and a few dashboards

Sounds like the guy just got tired of being on salary in a place that was badly run.

Yes he did, I think he saw the weakness in the org and exploited it properly.

>> resigned as a full time employee, waited until the panic had set in properly

The company couldn't even function without that person. Calling that an extortion is quite a leap.

>Sounds like extortion with extra steps? Maybe there’s a more charitable way to tell the story.

How? The original company could have hired another employee to replace him, instead they entered into a b2b relationship with his company.

I've often considered something similar. I used to support a bunch of apps, where I thought "I could build most of these from scratch and they'd be better than what I'm supporting." Even if my employer didn't find value in them, and hired someone else to support the old junk, other companies would probably buy the new ones.

If the thing you're threatening a business with is "I'll stop working for you", how is that extortion?

If the employee deliberately made the IT infrastructure worse, then maybe that would be fraud, but it sounds like he was the main person who was improving it.

Is this legal? How frequently do people with unique knowledge in a company pull things like this off?

All the time. The company is usually begrudgingly okay with it too because they'd rather a former employee sell their expertise back to them instead of a competitor.

I guess check your employment contracts and whatnot, but it's very common for people to leave a company and start consulting and/or freelancing in the expertise they gained at that company. And it's not too uncommon for former employers to be one of their first clients or get your first clients from relationships associated with your former employer.

All of this assumes you don't burn bridges and have the interpersonal skills, in-demand expertise, luck, timing, and interest in building out a small service-based business.

If he’s successfully replacing the millions in external consultants, it might even be what the business folks call “a win/win”…

win/win/lose. The consultants have lost revenue.

>The consultants have lost revenue.

We don't care about them though.

Legal? Are you implying that having knowledge in a company (like, the result of doing a good job?) somehow should legally obligate you to never stop working there?

What am I missing? Can you spell out some boundaries for what you're implying because I must be wildly missing it.

Not making a living, but I make about $200/mo from an API that parses recipe ingredients like "2 cups finely chopped onions" into structured JSON.[0]

I put it in maintenance mode in 2019, so it's about 99% passive income, as I spend only about an hour or two on maintenance per year.

I'm surprised all my clients haven't switched to LLMs, but maybe I still outdo LLMs on price/accuracy since it's so niche.

I'd like to sell it to someone who wants to do something with it, but it would probably take me 30-40 hours to package everything up to hand off to someone, so I consider just the opportunity cost there to be around $5-10k, and I don't think anyone wants to pay $10k for an API that makes $200/mo.

What I wish I knew: don't use RapidAPI. They charge 20%, they have a terrible interface, and they let customers run up huge charges and walk away without paying anything. I wish I'd just rolled my own simple thing with Paddle.

[0] https://zestfuldata.com/

I made this exact website with ChatGPT’s API to prep for an interview a couple months ago! Biggest hurdle I ran into - asking chatgpt for help on using the chatgpt api was completely useless, as it was trained on a deprecated version of the api so none of its examples even worked.

In my country it costs around 200 euro/month to be a freelancer (I think most of that money is for health insurance). So making $200/month would be a no go for me. How do people manage to legally earn that money when the margins are so low?

In the US, it doesn't really cost anything to run a business as a sole proprietor. So, I can't live on Zestful, but it's definitely more profitable than not having the business.

>In my country it costs around 200 euro/month to be a freelancer (I think most of that money is for health insurance).

You get a real job to have health insurance.

> it's about 99% passive income, as I spend only about an hour or two on maintenance per year.

Looks like that $200 is just side income, not their main job.

What kind of customers are using this API? I’ve had many similar thoughts but I get hung up on the idea that customers are “developers” from a marketing standpoint, because those developers are developing something and that something is probably a bigger driver of utility that a truly generically developer tool like Cursor.

It's generally apps that let users import or enter recipes. The apps want to do more with the recipes like create shopping lists or provide nutritional information.

How did you find your first customers?

I wrote blog posts about how I built the service[0] and answered StackOverflow questions that related to ingredient parsing[1].

[0] https://mtlynch.io/resurrecting-1/

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/a/52304008/90388

My friend Dmytro[0] has been running a screenshot API called ScreenshotOne[1]. He's been building it solo and has reached $20K MRR recently.

[0]: https://x.com/DmytroKrasun

[1]: https://screenshotone.com

Does he manage his own automated browsers? I suppose this could simply be a wrapper for something like Scrapfly (or Scraping Bee or Zen Rows or many others), with some custom JS injected to remove banners.

I managed my own cluster.

I didn’t consider wrapping any service.

What needed for scraping is a bit different for what needed to screenshot websites.

I need to have full control over my cluster to guarantee the best possible quality.

It is great!

I signed up on my phone and tested in the playground.

It will fit perfectly into my workflow. I'm building a hyper-local directory site.

Getting good images for businesses is hard, so I'll use this to grab an image of their site as a place holder.

I can also add it to my AI workflow where I pass a website to OpenAI Assistant to extract data. OpenAI s not as robust with URLs as it is with images or PDFs. Often it won't visit then URL.

I can use this to get an image or pdf, pass it on and ask for the data back. OpenAI is better with files than URLs in my experience.

Good job!

Well done!

Don't you get problems with cloudflare blocking your browsers?

This is awesome. wondering how would a company like this build a user base? Any ideas / speculation would be appreciated!

It was unimaginably tough. If I were to start again, I wouldn’t do it. I would choose a much easier niche.

SEO, social media and other channels. I spent a lot of time on all of that.

What would be an easier niche in your opinion?

Thanks for BoltAI as well, by the way.

Thank you

Wondering what his monthly profit is if that’s not too personal, MRR doesn’t really tell me anything when I don’t know operating costs IMO.

He builds it in public so maybe you can find more details on his X profile. Last time he shared the server cost was about $5k/mo https://x.com/dmytrokrasun/status/1917817087461933560?s=46

I spent a lot on servers. Around $5500 all monthly expenses.

Dug around their twitter a bit and they mentioned at one point having $14K MRR and $4K expenses

Such a great product. Happy customer since years!

Thank you!

Thanks for the mention, my friend!

holy crap - our company needs basically exactly this for a crazy feature our PM cooked up and we were gonna build something similar ourselves - this will save us so much time

Browserless can do this for free:

docker run -p 3000:3000 browserless/chrome:latest

Sounds like this does a lot more than simply take a screenshot. It mentions removing cookie banners, ads, etc. which is an always moving target.

If you have one, very narrow specific use case, then maybe that’s not so bad. But sounds like a huge pain if you need that for any arbitrary site.

> Sounds like this does a lot more than simply take a screenshot. It mentions removing cookie banners, ads, etc. which is an always moving target.

Oh okay so it does:

chrome --load-extension=path/to/ublock --headless --screenshot https://website.com

Couldn't this be done with a headless Firefox and adblocker extensions?

I’m sure it could be. Just like I could bake an apple pie by first sowing wheat and planting apple trees.

Feels like Dropbox comment.

Browserless is not free for commercial use.

> instead of managing browser clusters, and handling all the corner cases

The cost with running a docker container is you have to manage that container. You’re paying with dev time not money.

Exactly this. We keep forgetting time and money that needs to be paid to a developer to setup and manage stuff.

I cant edit the above post but follow that command with a request for a screenshot like so:

    curl -X POST http://localhost:3000/screenshot \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url": "https://example.com"}' \
  --output screenshot.png

And what commands do I run if I want to do 100 screenshots per second?

Not arguing as a part of this thread but as an aside.

Can chrome even take 100 screenshots a second? What would be the max? I think it's interesting.

Yeah that's basically just a 100 FPS video at that point lol

Well, for some users and uses, it's free. It seems they consider their small amount glue between docker and chrome a to be of commercial value. Still better than the original.

https://github.com/browserless/browserless/blob/main/LICENSE

Following the journey from the beginning

I also have a similar api Screenshot api and web scraping api

https://capturekit.dev

> Turn Websites Into Screenshots with a simple API

If anyone wants to build “turn websites into APIs” and do it really well like OP, feel free to hmu.

Highly experienced full-stack and rust developer with experience at startups, G and Google X.

It's a good idea. Lately I've been building many android apps in kotlin that all just use web scraping instead of REST APIs.

So if you want, "turn your website into an app", that would be interesting.

MRR?

Monthly Recurring Revenue

I work for a tiny company. Most of the revenue is from paid API access.

I don't think I'm authorized to share any of the specifics, so will keep it generic.

The API is a world-class machine learning model for a specific scenario. There's a public price list, and various customers manage to negotiate various discounts.

Our biggest challenge is that Google Lens (while much worse than us for our specific domain) is becoming good enough for the average potential customer.

I think one of the regrets is only doing the ML API and not the end-user apps. It turns out the people creating the front end pocket most of the money.

> It turns out the people creating the front end pocket most of the money.

Well, yes. They're solving a pain-point for the paying customer. You're solving a pain-point for someone who is solving a pain-point for the paying customer.

You're one (or more) degree's removed from the source of the revenue.

You're not surprised. I'm not surprised either. And yet: at a company of a handful of people working part time, I think the choice made sense: focus on the core competency.

I mean, the common advice is to “sell shovels”, no? I think it’s non-obvious that in this case the correct strategy could be “go dig for gold”

You can sell shovels to people who think they might find gold. That doesn't sound like the product area given by the parent.

> I think one of the regrets is only doing the ML API and not the end-user apps. It turns out the people creating the front end pocket most of the money.

I'm curious why this is not preferable? You can focus on your core competency and I imagine you have enough apps using your API that it more than makes up for getting only a small slice of revenue from each.

> It turns out the people creating the front end pocket most of the money.

Would you be able to elaborate on this? I don't fully understand this statement.

You create hotdog / not-hotdog API. It reads an image and returns hotdog or not-hotdog.

You set API pricing at 1.5 cents per image analysis.

Another company creates an Android hotdog/not-hotdog app. They price it at $5/month. Each app user does an average of 60 food queries per month.

You get 60 API calls = $0.9 revenue. Let's say half of that gets used for compute costs. You're left with $0.45/month profit per user.

The company that made the frontend around your API gets ($5 - 30% app store cut - $0.9 your API cut) = $2.6/month profit per user.

Exactly this, thank you!

>> It turns out the people creating the front end pocket most of the money.

> Would you be able to elaborate on this? I don't fully understand this statement.

the economic player with direct contact to the customer "owns" the customer and has a lot of power in negotiation with suppliers. the customer-facing players have the most information about their customers, and can offer adjacent products (want fries with that?)

Uber and Lyft make big money, not their drivers. Amazon and Ebay make big money, not their sellers. McDonalds makes more money than their food suppliers, and franchisees.

The exception is with something like intellectual property, let's use movies as an example. The owners of the content want to sell it widely and will do a variety of distribution deals for different distribution channels. However, if any distribution channel starts taking a big slice of the money pie, the terms of the contract renewal will be changed because without the content they are dead.

> I think one of the regrets is only doing the ML API and not the end-user apps. It turns out the people creating the front end pocket most of the money.

I think this generally means you chose too small a market for your API. If the API is 1:1 an app, then sure build the app. But if the API supports a dozen apps which make some money but your API flounders, then I think you never had a chance. The market wasn’t really ever there.

It's a small market yes. Our solution can be packaged as a stand alone app, but also has other relevant uses.

I'm also curious about ways to provide value with a technical project.

The challenge when exploring this topic: the incentive to stay under the radar. Those succeeding don't have much to gain from sharing details here. Worst case: it could invite competitors into their space.

Communities that thrive on growth (e.g., open-source) tend to share freely, but API businesses, especially ones which are easy to execute, often guard their edge.

A recent finding I had, while not necessarily an API: services which help you 24/7 stream a lenghty video file. YouTube live streams seem to work well for those lofi-types of channels, and there are services which are built to enable autopilot live streams.

As a tech person, it is easy to wrongly think that ”anyone can build this” about a prototype you just built.

At the end of the day, it is about what the customer is willing to pay for.

Back when The Pirate Bay was huge, music was essentially free. But Spotify came along and proved people are ready to pay for something better.

ImageMagick is an open source tool for resizing images etc. But some people successfully build API services or SaaS-services on top of it.

It works because people AND businesses pay for convenience.

What space do you have knowledge of? What pains do people have in that domain that can be solved with tech?

Always start with the problem. And start with an industry you know by heart or customer profile you truly care for.

For me that was software developers. I was that customer myself. I programmed a certain kind of solutions, realized there should be an API for this and built that API.

If the cops hadnt also aggressively pursued people "stealing" music (a bullshit proposition to begin with) Spotify would not have won. For most people avoiding a potentially big fine, even if the chance is small, tips the balance into just paying a few bucks (which is itself a huge price concession from the music industry, who would love to charge what CDs used to cost) - but they cant, that would tip the balance back into piracy

True that the full win was due to copyright enforcement by various actors.

However, in the early days of Spotify the ”play any song with a click” was pure magic and nothing piracy could compete with.

A fun anecdote from that time is also that basically the whole Spotify catalogue was full of pirated music — they had not yet secured any music rights and I personally thought they never would succeed with that.

The early days of napster felt like that (with a diminished experience due to lower speed connections). Not to take anything away from your point.

Yeah, I agree. Having one place with a huge music library and downloads in parts of minutes was magic.. :)

Which police force was involved in that? In the US, it was the RIAA using private investigators to find people to sue.

Every company has secrets that few people know. If you know an industry intimately you can reverse engineer what the competition is doing. But generally speaking the “tricks of the trade” are non-obvious and make the business.

I know right this very second exactly how I could do a unique twist on my existing business and conservatively make another $1 million a year in profit within 2 years. But I already work 60+ hours a week on this business and I’m making tons of money, and the risk of revealing my secrets to another person to build the new business is simply too high.

I make a living from the SMS & telephony API I made.

Our MRR is ~500 000 EUR and our pricing model is pay-as-you-go (per SMS, per MMS, per phone call minute, per month for virtual mobile phone numbers).

The problem we solve is programmatic access to the mobile networks, specifically in Europe/Sweden.

We got out first paying customers through offline networking: going to hackathons, meetups and poking tech friends to find the first few early adopters.

Which is also our biggest challenge, it is hard to scale an offline based go-to-market method.

It has certainly been a painful struggle to get here and it still feels surreal it works so well.

Mind if I ask what stack you use? I've got some acquaintances working with Swedish infrastructure, and they have lots of stories.

We connect directly with the operators using the protocols of their choice. Mostly IP-based protocols such as SMPP, SIP, MM7 and various kinds of VPN/TLS technology.

Very custom contracts and back in 2011 when we started there was no such thing as a virtual mobile phone number.

These days the operators are a bit more aware of the value of A2P (application-to-person) versus P2P which was/is very much on the decline. That also means the operators have capacity built of ready to be used without new investments.

As for our own software, we are mostly a Python based shop. And we use tons of open source. The most heavily used components we replace over time with cusomized software as these are generally fully not suited for our needs.

The true value for our customers is our technical support, our operator conectivity, the robustness of the platform, and lastly the nice REST API with it’s debugging capability.

So like Twilio but for some local European networks?

Yes, very much so. We came to the same conclusion but started with two-way SMS text messaging. Twilio started with voice.

We basically have full international support these days, but are strongest in Northern Europe.

For instance, if you want a virtual mobile phone number in Sweden that supports both SMS and voice, Twilio can’t provide that but we do.

Plus we have nicer API if you aks me :)

Company name is 46elks. The country code to Sweden is +46 so the name is an hint our service is in the telephony space.

We run an API to finetune text-to-image models (dreamlook.ai), as a two-person team.

When we launched 3 years ago our differentiator was that we could train both cheaper and faster by running on TPUs, these days GPUs have mostly caught up, and open source models are not as competitive as they once were.

It’s making ~5k/month these days, not bad as we’re no longer actively working on it, but a fraction of what we were doing a year ago.

The main challenge for us was the non-technical part. We built an API-first product because we love the tech and felt it’d allow us to focus on that part. But we still had to do marketing, sales support etc which we didn’t enjoy or excel at.

Now we’re both back in larger companies where we can focus on doing ML. It was satisfying to build a working business from scratch, no regrets, but I’m definitely happier now.

I used this neck in the day! You somehow did better Lora training than others in the space! Found you via discord

Interesting work! Do you have any figures about GPU costs your service would incur monthly and how much was spent while building it?

I built a speech-to-text API at $0.06/h. Currently making about $5k MRR. The pricing model is flat rate + throttled API for experimentation. The first paying customers came from Reddit comments on relevant topics. Speech transcription at scale is expensive with majority of the current cloud providers.

Biggest challenge was getting the first few customers (is there anyone for who this was not the case?).

https://borgcloud.org/speech-to-text

Congratulations!

As the other commenter mentioned, this seems like an extremely competitive space. But I did a quick Google for speech-to-text and your solution is a few times cheaper than most others.

I know you may not want to share your secret sauce, but I'm curious as to how you managed that. I'm guessing you use Whisper, is the trick to just run it on your own hardware instead of paying AWS prices for compute?

I think people who don't have tech skills not aware of cheaper solutions so still can make profit but yeah many solutions that are cheaper: e.g. groq provide whisper v3 large turbo for $0.04 per hour: https://groq.com/pricing . Gemini 2.0 flash is around $0.08 per hour

Oh, did not know Groq offers ASR at that rate. Will be tough to compete with.

Will probably have to at least match their price in STT API and take a hit to revenue. But we are working on an end-to-end voice offering, and Groq does not seem to have anything in that area yet, so hopefully will stay afloat.

It runs on a AirBnB-like GPU network (also our own).

Cool and congratulations! This feels like a very competitive space, especially with whisper etc being so good.

Btw, looks like you made a typo in your first paragraf writing text-to-speech instead of speech-to-text.

> paragraf writing text-to-speech instead of speech-to-text

Thank you, fixed!

https://www.listennotes.com/blog/how-i-accidentally-built-a-...

@wenbin posts on here about it

On the same topic: does anyone have an API concept that they wish existed and that they'd be willing to pay for?

Local grocery prices. Let me upload a shopping list and allow me to optimize for cost (visit this store for these items, this store for these items) and a trail to follow through the store for optimal pathing.

Same thing for home improvement - Lowe’s in stock indicator is wildly wrong to the point that I sometimes call and ask an employee to go physically look at the item.

If you are seriously interested in this, then I would appreciate your answers to these questions! What is the specificity of your shopping list? Cheerios 12 oz, Cheerios, cereal, etc.? If cereal, is it a standin for the all the cereals you usually buy? How consistent is your list? Do you change what you buy significantly from week to week? What causes you to substitute other items for your usual items? And do you do it to save money, try new things, a little of both, something else? If you had Cheerios 12.5 oz on your list, but one of the retailers near you had a significant promotion on the family size, would you want that instead? Let’s say you put “healthy cereal” on your list and you wanted the best price on all healthy cereals. Does that mean organic, low sugar, whole grain, something else? Do you think it would be possible to figure that out from your purchasing history? How much money do you think you would have to save to visit 2 stores? Do you have loyalty program membership at all your nearby grocery retailers?

I was kind of thinking about this as well! But in the end I kind of thought it would be something I would just build for myself. As in I often go to a few different grocery sites in nyc as ones super close, another is 5 mins further. And then there’s random little markets that have better deals on fruit. I walk by them all the time. Could perhaps be quite easy to make a little front end where you fuzzy find the food item with search and select qty options and insert the price.

For groceries at least, the time cost + fuel cost of buying from different stores would probably cancel out any minor variations in prices

Hm, I am equidistant from 3 different grocers and sometimes 15 dollar steaks are marked down to 10. I think you're right with a variered enough basket the sales will be a wash but maybe if I let the algorithm decide what my diet is that week based on what's discounted the most I could save some dollars. The thing that actually keeps me loyal to one store is I'm familiar with the floor plan so it doesn't take 5 minutes to find the hot sauce, so I would love a wayfinder for unfamiliar stores. Could be a good app for ambient competing / meta raybans.

depends on where you live. in european cities you tend to have multiple grocery stores within walking distance from each other. also you don't have to go to all of them on the same day. i delay buying certain things until i have a chance to go to the place where those are cheaper. it just takes a bit planning ahead.

>For groceries at least, the time cost + fuel cost of buying from different stores would probably cancel out any minor variations in prices

Sure, but alternatively, using the same data you could find out what the whole list costs at each store and just go to the cheapest one.

What do your eyes tell you? https://youtu.be/P7KBcsdPhxA?si=RNDXSwiHqCKDLv0i&t=107

For customer projects I am happily using paid "text to speech" APIs from several vendors.

Privately, I would like to use an API, which gets my Lego bricks inventory and returns all sets which I could build. Further it should show me sets, which I almost can build and show me missing pieces. Also e.g. it should show me sets with slight color differences, e.g. I have bricks in yellow but originally it requires orange. Things like that...

Sounds a lot like rebrickable. I'm not sure if they have an API though

That's a funny idea :)

I think the first one should be very much doable, but I am not sure how I would build the "almost complete" and the "similar colors" features.

I guess calculating the Levenshtein distance between the sets would work somehow?

Edit: scratch that, just intersect the set of available pieces with each set. If there are fewer than n--or m%--missing pieces, suggest those.

not sure if there are APIs, but there are a couple of websites that do that for Lego already.

not an api but, Internally we’re just looking for a native text to speach app that auto records all meetings and call a webhook with the transcript. not the notes! for some reason all most rmeetings apps gives you only notes and seldomly a webhook or similar. also not interested in zapier etc.

After two weeks off looking for a solution, we’re going to vibe code something basic and use deepgram. If we just skipped the shopping around, the solution would be live already..

Recall.ai is exactly this. Using them at my current company and it works well. It even supports live transcription.

Aah nice. I knew about them but did not see they have a desktop sdk

also check out Meeting BaaS (meeting bots as a service), we're an open-source competitor.

We thought long and hard of creating an SDK but did not go that route for now. Our main problem is that if you have to support Windows machines you're putting the finger into something really complicated.

And then depend on the end user's specs, etc.

So I'm really curious, in your case are you planning on deploying to Apple machines (m1+)? Or also set it up on Windows machines?

A mix but primarily apple.

This is included in Microsoft Teams.

Will even auto detected who spoke, transcribe, video records and AI summarize it (with defined actions / next steps).

You can set it up to auto perform once the first person joins the meeting.

>This is included in Microsoft Teams.

This, and there are also 3rd party bots that work with Teams (and presumably other video chats as well) that will join the meeting and do their own transcription. I've seen a couple of on meetings with vendors lately, it'll join and be called something like x company transcription bot.

I’ve checked out about 5 of them, I like krisp.ai the best, really nice native experience on mac. We do a lot of team meetings in discord channels. Almost none of them support discord and krisp allows for discord and in person recording. However no webhook in krisp, as team admin, i dont want to have every user configure a zapier integration to get the notes out. then pay for zapier also.

Only read.ai has webhook support, but all these tools only post notes to integrations. we want the full transcript to generate extract of what we think is important.

Have not tried recall.ai

If you're looking for webhook support plus full transcript access (not just summarized notes), I'd recommend checking out ChatterBox as an alternative to Recall, but no sales call to start using, self-service, and less expensive (consumption model .09/hr). It supports real-time transcription and meeting data across platforms—including Zoom, Meet, and Teams. I don't believe they have a Discord or Slack integration, but it's built with developers in mind - I'd bet they'd explore it.

https://chatter-box.io/

Many meetings happen that are not on teams.. So that would only do for 10%.. Id like to meet the teams where they are working instead of telling them to change how they work.

I'm pretty sure bots already exist for this, I've seen them join, albeit Teams, meetings that I've been on, so they can get a transcription of meetings where they don't control the host settings.

I was working on a work based STT system (I assume that's what you meant, not text tk speech) but might have to add in a webhook as well. What's the use case you need it for, just storing the transcripts somewhere?

We want to process the transcript to build up project context. Making it easy for team members and customers to ask project questions and brainstorm ideas with a chatbot

Interesting, I'm working on that exact type of use case on the consumer side as more of a mobile app chatbot, didn't realize there was an enterprise version need too of the same idea.

Sure, but the API itself is the easy part, especially with LLM help. The problem is the data source is a total trash fire, so in order for it to be worth it the API cost would either be exorbitant or not worth it.

You know what's pretty good at cleaning up data that's a total trash fire? _More_ LLM. :-)

I run a web service whose primary purpose is cleaning up messy, SEO-enshittified data from Google, eBay, etc. After years of fine-tuning my own heuristics, I threw a super-cheap LLM at it and it massively out-performed my custom code. It's slower, but the results are well worth it.

This thread is a really really good example of why this kind of question sounds good but can lead you astray. So many folks have been generous with their answers here but a huge portion of them have multiple replies with existing solutions that were a simple google away, which means they thought of a neat idea but they definitely were not desperate enough for a solution to even search for one let alone pay for it.

Those kinds of ideas can still become real businesses, especially if you have a great way to get awareness of your solution out to people who aren't actively looking for that, but you're better off trying to find problems where people have tried throwing money at every solution out there and are still yelling for help.

Tl;dr try to sell "pain killers" not "vitamins".

re: finding paying customers

at Postman, we have a network for companies to reach developers and distribute their APIs on our platform. worth checking out: https://www.postman.com/explore.

you need to handle monetization, but the network gives you eyeballs

I've been running PDFShift.io, an API to convert HTML to PDF for seven years now. It's profitable (around $12K MRR) and still growing.

It took quite some efforts to have a service of really high quality, resilient and bug-free but I'm nearing this and it's a real pleasure.

To answer all your other points :

- What's your API: An API to convert HTML documents (URL/Raw) to PDF - How much MRR: About $12k - Pricing model: Subscription plan with limits in the number of converted documents that depends on the plan. The rest is the same for all the plans (no features unlocked at certain level). - First paying customers: Mostly from IndieHackers and Quora at the beginning, and a successful launch on ProductHunt when it was still big. - Problem I'm solving: Not having to manage your own servers to handle conversion. It can be done locally for sure, but as the service grow, the need for resources increases too and can lead to issues down the road. With PDFShift, it's just set up and forget it. - Biggest challenge: I was initially at OVH Strasbourg, when it caught fire, and lost a lot. I had to rebuilt the database from data I had around and gave access to everyone for free until I had all sorted up (took 2 days). This was a good lesson to learn to not save the backup on the same service and at the same place! - I would definitely do it again. (I'm thinking of this frequently for other services too :D)

I run https://www.merklemap.com/ a certificate transparency / subdomain search engine.

I’d say that this kind of projects are not different than any entrepreneurial endeavor, and the biggest challenge is usually acquisition, even though the technical part was / is hefty too.

https://SharpAPI.com/ - not making a living yet, but it provides quite good revenue already.

I definitely do not make a living from it, but after two years, my Bitcoin on-chain data and metrics API service has started to generate some revenue.

It's basically a service where you can download highly processed Bitcoin data in CSV, XLSX, or JSON formats, updated hourly.

I offer affordable subscriptions paid directly in satoshis to my self-hosted Lightning Network node — no intermediaries!

If you’d like to check it out: https://bitcoinisdata.com/

Lots of indie hackers in this space, Bannerbear is one making at least one million USD a year based on their latest posts.

He‘s reporting SGD dollars. So something around 700k-800k USD a year. Still impressive.

Know a guy who setup themselves as a cert authority for STIR/SHAKEN and pretty much is an almost completed automated system; just issues certs they generate with a small hardware device. Sounds like it easily makes about $10k/month almost pure profit! https://authenticate.iconectiv.com/approved-certification-au...

I met the founder of Kraken.io - an image crunching SaaS.

It’s been some years already. Back then he had an office and a couple of developers. Seemed to be doing well. It has probably grown since then.

This is my dream. I'm trying to do this with AI Agents you call programmatically. So far, I'm not making money.

The blockchain hosting companies like infura live by offering API access to ethereum, solana, binance smart chain, etc. I’d say they are now rather hosting companies because these blockchains are huge and a PITA to host reliably, but back in 2017 it was possible to host them on a personal computer

Similarly curious if anyone has an API, that they ultimately subsidize through some other service or product.

This is a very intresting question. My answer here is fairly far fetched, but probably also nothworthy:

The Swedish employment office have a publicly available API for open positions. It is subsidized by their main branch because they see value in more companies / sites building business on top of their data.

https://data.arbetsformedlingen.se/

Wasn’t there a post on HN about someone who made a lot of money with an API that told you the geolocation of an IP address quickly? Maybe 5 years ago?

ipinfo.io, I believe.

Any idea how a company like this would go about building a user base? Would love any sources of how to learn to market something like this.

The whole geo-IP space started back with my startup, Digital Envoy, in 1999 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39734355). The way we went about it was by providing an API to clients but we actually hosted our entire database (encrypted and in a proprietary format) with clients. The reason for this was for latency (back in 1999 we could get about 0.03ms per transaction something that you can't get on any edge delivered service) which was necessary for the types of clients we went after.

The business was very valuable across a lot of industries - gambling, encryption, advertising, security, adult entertainment, etc. - so there was a lot of demand that also helped smooth out the demand up/down cycles. If one market was cold, another was hot. But basically it's a lot of work and a lot of hand-to-hand combat. This is the best way to learn and get passionate customers. Show up, sell to them, and convince them they need you. You'll learn so much by doing this. And don't use the excuse that you're an introvert or not good at selling. If you want to be an entrepreneur, you need to learn and improve. No one is the best at anything on day one - you won't be either. But you'll get there if you keep at it.

Being the absolute best in the market meant that even having much more better funded competitors ($50m+ for competitors against our $12m in funding) meant we tended to win all the time. And before you ask, if I had this to do over again now, I could do this company for a LOT less money given how commoditized things are. I can tell you the time I almost spent $1m on a storage array until I found a cheaper vendor for $250k. Oh, that storage array was for 1TB of storage. So yeah.

Feel free to ask me anything. If there are enough people who have questions and want to do a chat I'd be happy to host a video call and get peppered with whatever questions you might have.

Thanks so much for this!

I’m just now really trying to put myself out there and get into sales to further develop our business. We’ve been lucky with some early network sales, but for the next chapter of our business (https://resonancy.io) I need to build the sales engine and I feel very much out of my depth.

Just telling myself its a practice and trying to chip away at it one week at a time.. At this point identifying potential customers and getting meetings is a real challenge. Been trying Apollo and doing cold outreach but is a slow grind. Also trying my best in linkedin..

IMO - and again, remember this is experience from 20+ years ago although I still do a lot of this now - using these kinds of automated shotgun approaches is a mistake, especially early on and especially if you are selling something. We use an automated engine for our podcast agency (https://edgewise.media) but that is a different pitch when it's "come on my podcast and talk about yourself" versus "I want you to spend money for my widget".

What we did was more labor intensive and a function of these kinds of tools not existing (initial dot-com days). We would read the tech press, etc. and identify companies that might have a use for our tech. Then we would email the top person (guessing their email address usually - and most companies use a small number of variations for addresses) with a custom written, but short, tailored pitch to why they could use us and see if they wanted to talk. No pitch deck or attachments. Literally 2-3 sentences. Something that if even someone is going to quickly delete, something in those 2-3 sentences might catch their eye and make them reply instead of delete. We landed customers like Google (who we ended up later suing - that is a different tale), Doubleclick (who ended up being bought be Google), PayPal, Xbox, and a bunch of others through this method.

Happy to chat more. Startups are hard and all of us should help one another out to make the road a little less hard if possible. Keep at it - I know you'll get there. Hard work will get you there, shortcuts (usually) won't.

Did running the geolocation service allow you to see otherwise hidden abuses by ISPs and other service providers ?

What I mean is: did anything ever break or behave badly ... and then when you investigated you discovered "Oh, look at what these people are doing ..." ?

Interesting question. We never saw anything to this extent but did see when mergers happened how dial-in POPs would be merged and reallocated. Also interesting was how many IP addresses existed for North Korea (less than 32 IIRC) versus Antarctica (more than 2k IIRC). Reminder: I've been out of the business since 2005 (stayed on the board until we were acquired in 2007). So my data is quite dated at this point.

I can tell you what we pay for: postcode lookups.

Ridiculous that postcodes/uprns lookups are not open data (yet). hohum.

They are in the UK but you have to have some magic understanding of around 15 separate files. Seems to be purposefully difficult.

NL as well, but the source data has a couple of indirections before you get to the postcode.

It's doable, monthly updatable for free, but requires a bit of processing and understanding of the geo structures.

What country?

Does the Google Maps API not do this or is it too expensive?

An example of what you look up a postcode for (and the input data) would be useful.

Like smarty streets ?

Market data delivered via API for hedge funds and quants.

Are you able to share a bit more about this? Specifically:

1. How did you find your first customers?

2. How did you determine a price?

3. What are the payment plans based on? Usage? Flat rate? Something else?

4. How much are you currently earning MRR and what are your costs like?

I'm assuming this is some sort of alternative market data?

Curious what kind of datapoints they won't have through FactSet, BB, etc

Kpler?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com