Crime data by location. Many real-estate sites removed their crime maps due to racism, but I think it’s still a valid metric to consider when moving to a new location.
Ask HN: What API's do people wanna buy/pay for?
31–40 of 65 posts
Re: Ask HN: What API's do people wanna buy/pay for?
#32So my lessons here after trying to tackle this market, it's hard. You can look at articles by Rapid and others that list "Top APIs". You can do some customer research by going to places like HN or reddit where people say, "I need an API for this". You can look at existing single purpose APIs in the market for niche use cases like currency conversion, IP data, etc. Or you can try build something and anticipate user needs based on your own. I built M3O.com for this purpose. Ultimately it was supposed to be a two sided market, where backend devs build for frontend devs, but never materialised that way.
I think either catering to your own first need is better than trying to build a thing you might not understand well. The alternative is to just do a poll on a large channel of distribution like a nocode platform where they're dying for a certain dataset.
Re: Ask HN: What API's do people wanna buy/pay for?
#33Usually good money in scarping price data and selling to traders. HOWEVER, they will expect a very robust API that goes beyond a hobby project / side-hustle level of polish and robustness.
What price data exactly?
Re: Ask HN: What API's do people wanna buy/pay for?
#34I am curious as to your phrasing of "besides by doing market research" — market research is the whole point!
Most successful API products in the sense that you're describing share two common characteristics:
1. They are a thin wrapper around some dynamic dataset.
2. The cost to an organization maintaining that dataset is prohibitively large and/or difficult relative to the value they receive from it.
If I were in your shoes, I'd find a niche that I was relatively well-positioned to address (say, Shopify stores, or programmatic SEO — something small enough to have a uniform opinion but large enough such that there are multiple cohorts of individuals willing to pay) and spend time in their forums looking for people complaining about datasets or information they wish they had. The API part is an implementation detail.
Re: Ask HN: What API's do people wanna buy/pay for?
#35I have a list of problems I want solved. And hopefully they'll be solved by good high quality APIs that have wide adoption. https://github.com/samsquire/ideas4#5-permanent-softwareplat... BSD sockets solved communication for everyone in one library that everyone uses. But communication isn't the only problem we have. Most of the problems listed are solved independently by each software shop, installation and company.
I might be off base but I’ve been thinking about building something that addresses “Automatic Personal file Archives”.
What I’m noticing is that my mom has 1000’s of embroidery files that she’s collected over the years but they are everywhere. They are in zip files, in several different formats, and stored all over her various drives. I think her strategy for storing them changes over the years, ending in a mess.
I’ve been thinking about building an app that she can drop files on to collect them. It would capture some meta data, store the binary files somewhere, and make them searchable and browsable, like a custom file explorer.
I recently read about the advantages of storing small binary files in SQLite, and I thought that sounded like a good solution. The “archive” in your example. The SQLite file could then be stored on Dropbox, Google Drive, or backed up to my own hosting service.
Once she starts to collect them, I can add features like the ability to export to a local directory or in a specific format. The machines themselves take proprietary data cards, 1.44 floppy disks or USB sticks and support files in various mfg formats.
These machines cost thousands of dollars and each set of designs costs a few dollars, so people with this problem (if there are others) are pretty invested in their collection.
Re: Ask HN: What API's do people wanna buy/pay for?
#36Property data records (physical characteristics, ownership chain, zoning, tax assessments, liens, etc) for under $0.10 per API call.
Re: Ask HN: What API's do people wanna buy/pay for?
#37Do one that parse addresses or first name/last name reliably and I'll pay for it.
Re: Ask HN: What API's do people wanna buy/pay for?
#38No one wants to pay for APIs. They want to solve headaches, appease their bosses, build cool things. Figure out a problem that a niche group of people have and you're golden. There are people making 6 figures selling CS:GO skin price feeds.
What is CS:GO?
Re: Ask HN: What API's do people wanna buy/pay for?
#39So here is an API we would have paid for, and I assume many still will: A product catalog. They do exist, but they are expensive and aren't not that great. What we where after and gave up on was an API that would accept an EAN-13 barcode and return product details, images, good descriptions, in multiple language (specifically NOT machine translated) and possible alternative EAN-13 barcodes for the same product. As a…
> As a side project to this: An API that will take a list of EAN-13 barcode, a price and a quantity (in stock) and transform it into a number of feeds for various price comparison sites
From this: do the people who have the data have an incentive to make it available, or to keep it unavailable so that price discovery is harder? The more efficient the market, the smaller the margins.
This is a big factor in many things that don't have APIs or actively discourage automated access with anti-scraper tools.
Re: Ask HN: What API's do people wanna buy/pay for?
#40No one wants to pay for APIs. They want to solve headaches, appease their bosses, build cool things. Figure out a problem that a niche group of people have and you're golden. There are people making 6 figures selling CS:GO skin price feeds.
What is CS:GO?
Counter Strike: Global Offensive.