Ask HN: What's an app you'd pay $5/month for? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's an app you'd pay $5/month for?

15 pointsstopachka28 comments

I'm looking to build apps and learn as much as I can about programming, rails, APIs etc.

HMers, what's something that's been bugging you?

I'd love to make something here, for All HN to see.

Why $5?

Anytime someone is willing to pay any sort of money, it becomes a clearer problem :P. Plus it's a lot more motivating to make money + program

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Edit : There seem to be some really good ideas here! it might just make a nice resource that new hackers can use to start and Show HN

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Anything that will save me more than $10 per month. E.g. could save me money on bills, fees, government charges, tax, anything. But it has to be on something I am already spending money on (e.g. a recurring spend).

Interesting. What are you currently spending money on? Is there a process you hate to do, that you do anyways on what you're spending money on?

These are pretty loaded questions, but even a brief answer will be very appreciated :)

Some examples ... insurance, mortgage, car loan, internet, mobile phone, usenet, web hosting. Maybe an app could help in finding better/cheaper deals with some of these... probably difficult to automate much of that though.

Who do you use for usenet? What for primarily? Any good?

Astraweb - no complaints - $10 a month. Never hit any limits yet. I download TV shows and such like (via NZB) that I can't find anywhere else. Much better than torrent.

A subscription to something like Longform - curated stories of interest to me. For $5 per month I'd like to have ad free versions of the stories, with better than normal styling.

Very interesting as well! I took a look at their site, and it did seem hard to parse with the styling.

So the current reason you aren't happy with Longform are the ads and the styling?

Oh,I'm happy with Longform.

But I'm happy to pay for great content. I think that's a clear signal to producers to keep making great content. Until micropayments are sorted and I can pay each different newspaper for every article I read I guess it'd make sense for users to pay the aggregator who then pays the papers based on article read rates.

There's some thorny problems there to be sorted out.

The styling thing is mostly my personal preference; I like big san-serif dark fonts on a light yellow (#ffffcc) background. I use browser plugins at the moment.

Agreed -- I'd be happy to pay $5/month for Longform if stories were formatted better (I don't see ads but sometimes content is missing/duplicated), and maybe for a recommendation engine based on what I've already read.

A service that did bandwidth intense tasks for me. If I'm on my cell phone, I'd like to be able to take a link to an mp3 file hosted anywhere, and have an "upload to Google Music/Amazon/etc" option. The key would be to have you, the service provider, download and upload the file. Send me an email when it's done. This would be infinitely convenient for me when it comes to podcasts, videos, large DJ sets, conference footage, etc.

I say this as someone on America. I imagine you could find a few users in nations where virtually all services are metered. And once you program your tool once, it's automated.

The work is finding what services allow this, and adding then to your framework as requested. And, of course, your own bandwidth/storage bill...

Maybe this is best as a feature for existing data lockers.

In the exceptionally rare case someone comes across this in the future, I've been informed that someone is doing this with DropBox! It's called URLDroplet, and is at urldroplet.com!

I am already paying that for Backblaze.

Okay - here are some services that can be automated. Deal hunters - I say I want 240 GB SSD or 7970 for x, you scrape regularly some interesting places (newegg, ebay etc) and if something drops - notify me and charge me a dollar.

I covered this in my blog and it has many answer comments: http://ahmetalpbalkan.com/blog/the-5-saas/

There are plenty of things I would, and do, pay monthly for. An app still isn't one of them.

My point is there's opportunity everywhere and people these days think it's only in software.

Exactly. Two examples for inspiration: Manpacks and Candy Japan (the owner is on HN). There is also a startup based out of Mountain View that delivers new games and puzzles for kids every month, but I cannot remember the name of it.

http://www.manpacks.com/ http://www.candyjapan.com/

Do you, by any chance, knows who is the owner of those? i would like to be able to contact him directly.

A web service that makes it easier to debug problems that users of my website are encountering, by recording all console log statements and letting me filter and search on various dimensions. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4081806

I'm not sure how many other people want this. But you'd be saving developer-hours, which are worth a lot, and could charge accordingly.

Something like a combination newrelic and keen.io?

How about a coupon manager. For example I scan all the items I'm buying at a store using the app, and it finds all the coupons available from that store or manufacturer. Than I hand over the phone to clerk, who scans it, and all the coupons are applied.

These guys are doing EXACTLY what you just described, great idea!

http://www.saverrapp.com/

An feed (RSS/twitter) reader that takes voice (or wand-like) commands, reads me the entries so I can commute and listen to meaningful news without blind tapping my phone.

This is worth $5/mo to me.

That's really interesting! It could be cool to learn how to interact with Twitter, as well as Voice API's. The only downside I forsee is that hearing the news might be unbearable, with the text-to-speech type of stuff.

Thanks for the suggestion r00fus

Try http://voicebunny.com/. They have an API, or listing the jobs on Mechanical Turk to be read by a human.

A fart app.

Someday I'll be able to downvote you.

Would you pay $5 a month for the ability to downvote?

I would pay $5 per month to be able to down vote, to be honest.

Hmm maybe I should make one to call you out?

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