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

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

#121

Post by lelanthran »

tasuki wrote: post #60

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 beco…

> 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.

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

#122

Post by lostmsu »

the_pwner224 wrote: post #72
lostmsu wrote: post #64

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://borgc…

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?

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

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

#123

Post by pinkmuffinere »

lelanthran wrote: post #121
tasuki wrote: post #60

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 beco…

> 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.

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”

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

#124

Post by baq »

ambicapter wrote: post #22
Simon_O_Rourke wrote: post #8

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 custom…

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

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’.

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

#125

Post by lostmsu »

pzo wrote: post #111
the_pwner224 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#126

Post by user32489318 »

ambicapter wrote: post #22
Simon_O_Rourke wrote: post #8

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 custom…

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

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

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

#127

Post by jazzyjackson »

698969 wrote: post #67
soared wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#129

Post by Suppafly »

ambicapter wrote: post #22
Simon_O_Rourke wrote: post #8

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 custom…

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

>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.

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

#130

Post by Suppafly »

ipaddr wrote: post #117
alwa wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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