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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?

#131

Post by tasuki »

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.

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.

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

#132

Post by Suppafly »

tkiolp4 wrote: post #76
mtlynch wrote: post #44

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 s…

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 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.

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

#133

Post by tasuki »

svnt wrote: post #91
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…

> 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 reall…

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

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

#134

Post by Suppafly »

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

>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.

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

#135

Post by Suppafly »

tiffanyh wrote: post #101
gervwyk wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

#136

Post by Suppafly »

gervwyk wrote: post #105
tiffanyh wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#137

Post by Suppafly »

la_fayette wrote: post #12
aaviator42 wrote: post #3

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

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.…

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

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

#139

Post by vsupalov »

krasun wrote: post #114
gervwyk wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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

#140

Post by osullip »

krasun wrote: post #113
merek wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

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