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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?

#91

Post by svnt »

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 really ever there.

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

#94

Post by merek »

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

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.

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

#97

Post by tredre3 »

nkrisc wrote: post #36
Lord_Zero wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Browserless can do this for free: docker run -p 3000:3000 browserless/chrome:latest

Sounds like this does a lot more than simply take a screenshot. It mentions removing cookie banners, ads, etc. which is an always moving target. If you have one, very narrow specific use case, then maybe that’s not so bad. But sounds like a huge pain if you need that for any arbitrary site.

> Sounds like this does a lot more than simply take a screenshot. It mentions removing cookie banners, ads, etc. which is an always moving target.

Oh okay so it does:

chrome --load-extension=path/to/ublock --headless --screenshot https://website.com

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

#98

Post by strangelove026 »

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.

I was kind of thinking about this as well! But in the end I kind of thought it would be something I would just build for myself. As in I often go to a few different grocery sites in nyc as ones super close, another is 5 mins further. And then there’s random little markets that have better deals on fruit. I walk by them all the time. Could perhaps be quite easy to make a little front end where you fuzzy find the food item with search and select qty options and insert the price.

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

#99

Post by jlundberg »

vernon99 wrote: post #84
jlundberg wrote: post #63

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…

So like Twilio but for some local European networks?

Yes, very much so. We came to the same conclusion but started with two-way SMS text messaging. Twilio started with voice.

We basically have full international support these days, but are strongest in Northern Europe.

For instance, if you want a virtual mobile phone number in Sweden that supports both SMS and voice, Twilio can’t provide that but we do.

Plus we have nicer API if you aks me :)

Company name is 46elks. The country code to Sweden is +46 so the name is an hint our service is in the telephony space.

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