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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?

#111

Post by pzo »

the_pwner224 wrote: post #72
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?

I think people who don't have tech skills not aware of cheaper solutions so still can make profit but yeah many solutions that are cheaper: e.g. groq provide whisper v3 large turbo for $0.04 per hour: https://groq.com/pricing . Gemini 2.0 flash is around $0.08 per hour

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

#113

Post by krasun »

merek wrote: post #94
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.

I managed my own cluster.

I didn’t consider wrapping any service.

What needed for scraping is a bit different for what needed to screenshot websites.

I need to have full control over my cluster to guarantee the best possible quality.

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

#114

Post by krasun »

gervwyk wrote: post #38
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

This is awesome. wondering how would a company like this build a user base? Any ideas / speculation would be appreciated!

It was unimaginably tough. If I were to start again, I wouldn’t do it. I would choose a much easier niche.

SEO, social media and other channels. I spent a lot of time on all of that.

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

#115

Post by krasun »

mnewme wrote: post #73
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!

Thank you!

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

#116

Post by krasun »

yapyap wrote: post #21
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

Wondering what his monthly profit is if that’s not too personal, MRR doesn’t really tell me anything when I don’t know operating costs IMO.

I spent a lot on servers. Around $5500 all monthly expenses.

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

#117

Post by ipaddr »

alwa wrote: post #25
cootsnuck wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the time. The company is usually begrudgingly okay with it too because they'd rather a former employee sell their expertise back to them instead of a competitor. I guess check your employment contracts and whatnot, but it's very common for people to leave a company and start consulting and/or freelancing in the expertise they gained at that company. And it's not too uncommon for former employers to be one of thei…

If he’s successfully replacing the millions in external consultants, it might even be what the business folks call “a win/win”…

win/win/lose. The consultants have lost revenue.

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

#118

Post by strken »

ambicapter wrote: post #22
Simon_O_Rourke wrote: post #8

I know of a guy, but his scenario was quite unique. I was working for an energy company who shall remain nameless, but who's internal IT was a tangle of external consultants milking the place for millions, and ineffective/underserved full time staff who couldn't run a query on a database without a change control committee of consultants milking them for yet more cash. Anyway, this guy was the go to guy for gas custom…

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

If the thing you're threatening a business with is "I'll stop working for you", how is that extortion?

If the employee deliberately made the IT infrastructure worse, then maybe that would be fraud, but it sounds like he was the main person who was improving it.

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

#119

Post by jlundberg »

bad_haircut72 wrote: post #85
jlundberg wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bui…

If the cops hadnt also aggressively pursued people "stealing" music (a bullshit proposition to begin with) Spotify would not have won. For most people avoiding a potentially big fine, even if the chance is small, tips the balance into just paying a few bucks (which is itself a huge price concession from the music industry, who would love to charge what CDs used to cost) - but they cant, that would tip the balance bac…

True that the full win was due to copyright enforcement by various actors.

However, in the early days of Spotify the ”play any song with a click” was pure magic and nothing piracy could compete with.

A fun anecdote from that time is also that basically the whole Spotify catalogue was full of pirated music — they had not yet secured any music rights and I personally thought they never would succeed with that.

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

#120

Post by MasterScrat »

We run an API to finetune text-to-image models (dreamlook.ai), as a two-person team.

When we launched 3 years ago our differentiator was that we could train both cheaper and faster by running on TPUs, these days GPUs have mostly caught up, and open source models are not as competitive as they once were.

It’s making ~5k/month these days, not bad as we’re no longer actively working on it, but a fraction of what we were doing a year ago.

The main challenge for us was the non-technical part. We built an API-first product because we love the tech and felt it’d allow us to focus on that part. But we still had to do marketing, sales support etc which we didn’t enjoy or excel at.

Now we’re both back in larger companies where we can focus on doing ML. It was satisfying to build a working business from scratch, no regrets, but I’m definitely happier now.

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