Ask HN: Anyone making a living from a paid API? • Hacker News Board

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

#71

Post by the_pwner224 » Sat, May 31, 2025, 9:32 PM UTC

pan69 wrote: post #65

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.

You create hotdog / not-hotdog API. It reads an image and returns hotdog or not-hotdog.

You set API pricing at 1.5 cents per image analysis.

Another company creates an Android hotdog/not-hotdog app. They price it at $5/month. Each app user does an average of 60 food queries per month.

You get 60 API calls = $0.9 revenue. Let's say half of that gets used for compute costs. You're left with $0.45/month profit per user.

The company that made the frontend around your API gets ($5 - 30% app store cut - $0.9 your API cut) = $2.6/month profit per user.

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

#72

Post by the_pwner224 » Sat, May 31, 2025, 9:40 PM UTC

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?

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

#73

Post by mnewme » Sat, May 31, 2025, 9:49 PM UTC

longnguyen wrote: post #4

My friend Dmytro[0] has been running a screenshot API called ScreenshotOne[1]. He's been building it solo and has reached $20K MRR recently. [0]: https://x.com/DmytroKrasun [1]: https://screenshotone.com

Such a great product. Happy customer since years!

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

#74

Post by Simon_O_Rourke » Sat, May 31, 2025, 10:20 PM UTC

harvey9 wrote: post #26

ambicapter wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sounds like the guy just got tired of being on salary in a place that was badly run.

Yes he did, I think he saw the weakness in the org and exploited it properly.

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

#75

Post by tasuki » Sat, May 31, 2025, 10:44 PM UTC

the_pwner224 wrote: post #71

pan69 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You create hotdog / not-hotdog API. It reads an image and returns hotdog or not-hotdog. You set API pricing at 1.5 cents per image analysis. Another company creates an Android hotdog/not-hotdog app. They price it at $5/month. Each app user does an average of 60 food queries per month. You get 60 API calls = $0.9 revenue. Let's say half of that gets used for compute costs. You're left with $0.45/month profit per user.…

Exactly this, thank you!

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

#76

Post by tkiolp4 » Sat, May 31, 2025, 10:45 PM UTC

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?

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

#77

Post by satvikpendem » Sat, May 31, 2025, 11:04 PM UTC

longnguyen wrote: post #4

My friend Dmytro[0] has been running a screenshot API called ScreenshotOne[1]. He's been building it solo and has reached $20K MRR recently. [0]: https://x.com/DmytroKrasun [1]: https://screenshotone.com

Thanks for BoltAI as well, by the way.

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

#78

Post by satvikpendem » Sat, May 31, 2025, 11:07 PM UTC

gervwyk wrote: post #41

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?

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…

I was working on a work based STT system (I assume that's what you meant, not text tk speech) but might have to add in a webhook as well. What's the use case you need it for, just storing the transcripts somewhere?

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

#79

Post by satvikpendem » Sat, May 31, 2025, 11:10 PM UTC

Lots of indie hackers in this space, Bannerbear is one making at least one million USD a year based on their latest posts.

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

#80

Post by sanjayparekh » Sat, May 31, 2025, 11:30 PM UTC

gervwyk wrote: post #43

slig wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ipinfo.io, I believe.

Any idea how a company like this would go about building a user base? Would love any sources of how to learn to market something like this.

The whole geo-IP space started back with my startup, Digital Envoy, in 1999 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39734355). The way we went about it was by providing an API to clients but we actually hosted our entire database (encrypted and in a proprietary format) with clients. The reason for this was for latency (back in 1999 we could get about 0.03ms per transaction something that you can't get on any edge delivered service) which was necessary for the types of clients we went after.

The business was very valuable across a lot of industries - gambling, encryption, advertising, security, adult entertainment, etc. - so there was a lot of demand that also helped smooth out the demand up/down cycles. If one market was cold, another was hot. But basically it's a lot of work and a lot of hand-to-hand combat. This is the best way to learn and get passionate customers. Show up, sell to them, and convince them they need you. You'll learn so much by doing this. And don't use the excuse that you're an introvert or not good at selling. If you want to be an entrepreneur, you need to learn and improve. No one is the best at anything on day one - you won't be either. But you'll get there if you keep at it.

Being the absolute best in the market meant that even having much more better funded competitors ($50m+ for competitors against our $12m in funding) meant we tended to win all the time. And before you ask, if I had this to do over again now, I could do this company for a LOT less money given how commoditized things are. I can tell you the time I almost spent $1m on a storage array until I found a cheaper vendor for $250k. Oh, that storage array was for 1TB of storage. So yeah.

Feel free to ask me anything. If there are enough people who have questions and want to do a chat I'd be happy to host a video call and get peppered with whatever questions you might have.