Ask HN: What API's do people wanna buy/pay for? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What API's do people wanna buy/pay for?

#61

Post by samsquire » Tue, Jan 31, 2023, 10:12 PM UTC

codazoda wrote: post #35

samsquire wrote: post #4

I 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’v…

Wow if you could do this this would be absolutely amazing. Thank you for looking at the page and the idea and thinking of building it. I appreciate it.

I would hopefully be capable of using it too if you choose to share it.

I have a external M2 SSD enclosure and SSD which I use for backups and I use freefilesync to synchronize the files from the OS SSD to the enclosure SSD. It's manual.

I think synchronization is a difficult problem. But if your using OneDrive, Google drive you could simply have a frontend that copies the archive file there.

Re: Ask HN: What API's do people wanna buy/pay for?

#62

Post by ericfrazier » Wed, Feb 01, 2023, 12:16 AM UTC

Why pay when you can scrape for free?

Re: Ask HN: What API's do people wanna buy/pay for?

#63

Post by fnomnom » Wed, Feb 01, 2023, 9:20 AM UTC

popcalc wrote: post #60

fnomnom wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>steam game hour idlers could you elaborate on that? what does this do exactly? idle for example on tf2 servers for drops but you dont have to run your own pc for that?

No, that's a whole other business. Idler services just run up the hours on games in your library without the games actually running. Vanity knows no limits. https://steamtimeidler.com/

oh wow. im the polar opposite. i wouldnt want to know most people the hours i out into some games at all

Re: Ask HN: What API's do people wanna buy/pay for?

#64

Post by lee101 » Wed, Feb 01, 2023, 8:43 PM UTC

Side note about rapid API, I originally built https://text-generator.io on rapid API but I got 0 customers there, you would think you could just look on rapid API to see the gaps, there wasn't and still isn't a good alternative to text-generator.io on there but that doesn't guarantee anything, market research takes a lot of thought and the product needs constant marketing just like all businesses, I had to launch it as its own website for it to get users, so there's a lot more that goes into it than just building the right API.

I've also had customers scared off or investors not want to invest because it is a plain API platform and not B2C...

To answer the question market research is kind of the only way to know, Google adwords keyword planner and Google trends are quite good, as well as researching the companies in the same space well and what gaps there APIs have.

As an example https://text-generator.io distinguishes itself from OpenAI by including automatic analysis for input links, linked images, documents etc and doing speech to text/self hosting/embedding images, text and code in the same space, so isn't just an API clone

Re: Ask HN: What API's do people wanna buy/pay for?

#65

Post by weird-eye-issue » Thu, Feb 02, 2023, 3:46 AM UTC

fnomnom wrote: post #63

popcalc wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's a whole other business. Idler services just run up the hours on games in your library without the games actually running. Vanity knows no limits. https://steamtimeidler.com/

oh wow. im the polar opposite. i wouldnt want to know most people the hours i out into some games at all

It can be used by scammers to make their accounts seem more legit. "Why would they scam me for $200 and risk their account they have played CSGO for 5000 hours with?"