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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?

#61

Post by dgllghr »

soared wrote: post #52
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?

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.

If you are seriously interested in this, then I would appreciate your answers to these questions! What is the specificity of your shopping list? Cheerios 12 oz, Cheerios, cereal, etc.? If cereal, is it a standin for the all the cereals you usually buy? How consistent is your list? Do you change what you buy significantly from week to week? What causes you to substitute other items for your usual items? And do you do it to save money, try new things, a little of both, something else? If you had Cheerios 12.5 oz on your list, but one of the retailers near you had a significant promotion on the family size, would you want that instead? Let’s say you put “healthy cereal” on your list and you wanted the best price on all healthy cereals. Does that mean organic, low sugar, whole grain, something else? Do you think it would be possible to figure that out from your purchasing history? How much money do you think you would have to save to visit 2 stores? Do you have loyalty program membership at all your nearby grocery retailers?

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

#63

Post by jlundberg »

I make a living from the SMS & telephony API I made.

Our MRR is ~500 000 EUR and our pricing model is pay-as-you-go (per SMS, per MMS, per phone call minute, per month for virtual mobile phone numbers).

The problem we solve is programmatic access to the mobile networks, specifically in Europe/Sweden.

We got out first paying customers through offline networking: going to hackathons, meetups and poking tech friends to find the first few early adopters.

Which is also our biggest challenge, it is hard to scale an offline based go-to-market method.

It has certainly been a painful struggle to get here and it still feels surreal it works so well.

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

#64

Post by lostmsu »

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://borgcloud.org/speech-to-text

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

#65

Post by pan69 »

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.

Would you be able to elaborate on this? I don't fully understand this statement.

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

#66

Post by jlundberg »

vsupalov wrote: post #2

I'm also curious about ways to provide value with a technical project. The challenge when exploring this topic: the incentive to stay under the radar. Those succeeding don't have much to gain from sharing details here. Worst case: it could invite competitors into their space. Communities that thrive on growth (e.g., open-source) tend to share freely, but API businesses, especially ones which are easy to execute, ofte…

As a tech person, it is easy to wrongly think that ”anyone can build this” about a prototype you just built.

At the end of the day, it is about what the customer is willing to pay for.

Back when The Pirate Bay was huge, music was essentially free. But Spotify came along and proved people are ready to pay for something better.

ImageMagick is an open source tool for resizing images etc. But some people successfully build API services or SaaS-services on top of it.

It works because people AND businesses pay for convenience.

What space do you have knowledge of? What pains do people have in that domain that can be solved with tech?

Always start with the problem. And start with an industry you know by heart or customer profile you truly care for.

For me that was software developers. I was that customer myself. I programmed a certain kind of solutions, realized there should be an API for this and built that API.

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

#67

Post by 698969 »

soared wrote: post #52
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?

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

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

#68

Post by jlundberg »

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…

Cool and congratulations! This feels like a very competitive space, especially with whisper etc being so good.

Btw, looks like you made a typo in your first paragraf writing text-to-speech instead of speech-to-text.

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

#69

Post by lostmsu »

jlundberg wrote: post #68
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…

Cool and congratulations! This feels like a very competitive space, especially with whisper etc being so good. Btw, looks like you made a typo in your first paragraf writing text-to-speech instead of speech-to-text.

> paragraf writing text-to-speech instead of speech-to-text

Thank you, fixed!

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

#70

Post by jlundberg »

qmatch wrote: post #5

Similarly curious if anyone has an API, that they ultimately subsidize through some other service or product.

This is a very intresting question. My answer here is fairly far fetched, but probably also nothworthy:

The Swedish employment office have a publicly available API for open positions. It is subsidized by their main branch because they see value in more companies / sites building business on top of their data.

https://data.arbetsformedlingen.se/

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