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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?

#141

Post by Bencheng »

I started as a dev shop and built 2 API products based on user demand.

1 is an OCR and document extraction service [0]. We started with three customers asking for the same services and found none that were really useful (and supported Chinese characters) on the market at that time. Lately the product pivoted to based on (fine-tuned) LLM/VLMs and focus on adding various features that LLM out of the box are missing (fine tune based on specific customers data, prompt tune for particular type of elements e.g. Checkboxes, split 100s pages of PDF into dozens of documents with a few pages)

We're at around 55k MRR, the price model is per page, and we sign annual contracts with most clients (with some discounts)

2nd is an open-source CIAM [1]; Around 35k MRR.

We knew nothing about marketing when we started, so we partnered with local GCP/Azure as an ISV to get our first paying customers, which drove us to the more "Corporate" segment of the market.

A huge challenge is obviously how to market the product, but customer support for developers is tough as well -- you have to be developers to provide support for other developers, and sometimes it feels like you're troubleshooting for another dev team.

For example, one time we had a client email us saying they were getting incorrect results from our API suddenly, after many back-and-forth emails, we finally asked if we could do troubleshooting with a video call and share screen -- turns out they were interestingly calling our API via a proxy with cache enabled.

[0] https://formx.ai

[1] https://authgear.com

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

#142

Post by mike-cardwell »

Lord_Zero wrote: post #32
Lord_Zero wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I cant edit the above post but follow that command with a request for a screenshot like so: curl -X POST http://localhost:3000/screenshot \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -d '{"url": "https://example.com"}' \ --output screenshot.png

And what commands do I run if I want to do 100 screenshots per second?

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

#143

Post by la_fayette »

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.

Couldn't this be done with a headless Firefox and adblocker extensions?

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

#144

Post by longnguyen »

satvikpendem wrote: post #77
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.

Thank you

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

#145

Post by Erazal »

gervwyk wrote: post #53
thuanao wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recall.ai is exactly this. Using them at my current company and it works well. It even supports live transcription.

Aah nice. I knew about them but did not see they have a desktop sdk

also check out Meeting BaaS (meeting bots as a service), we're an open-source competitor.

We thought long and hard of creating an SDK but did not go that route for now. Our main problem is that if you have to support Windows machines you're putting the finger into something really complicated.

And then depend on the end user's specs, etc.

So I'm really curious, in your case are you planning on deploying to Apple machines (m1+)? Or also set it up on Windows machines?

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

#146

Post by dpacmittal »

krasun wrote: post #113
merek wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Don't you get problems with cloudflare blocking your browsers?

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

#148

Post by elwebmaster »

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…

How did you find your first customers?

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

#149

Post by tomburgs »

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'm curious why this is not preferable? You can focus on your core competency and I imagine you have enough apps using your API that it more than makes up for getting only a small slice of revenue from each.

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

#150

Post by porridgeraisin »

mike-cardwell wrote: post #142
Lord_Zero wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cant edit the above post but follow that command with a request for a screenshot like so: curl -X POST http://localhost:3000/screenshot \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -d '{"url": "https://example.com"}' \ --output screenshot.png

And what commands do I run if I want to do 100 screenshots per second?

Not arguing as a part of this thread but as an aside.

Can chrome even take 100 screenshots a second? What would be the max? I think it's interesting.

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