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

Saw some other products partners with a Cloud vendor for marketing exposure, so we look into it.

It turns out that the most effective and easy way for their sales rep to pitch your products to their client is if you have something complementary. For us, this is because they have similar products, so they can propose it to the client if they don't like the native one.

cloud reps get commission for services sold via their marketplace. Often they even have a bigger financial incentive to sell third party products over native GCP/Azure stuff.

IT services companies / MSPs aren't illegal. I'm sure this was all detailed in a contract looked over by lawyers.

I assume “customers” means internal customers, i.e. business units at the energy company who had come to rely on this guy’s ability to navigate the insane I.T. and actually get things done for them.

It sounds like the employee is actually getting what they are worth. Lots of huge organizations require a single key person in order to function, and most of the time those key people are not compensated accordingly.

The company could have called the bluff and passed on the consulting services.

Extortion or price discovery?

> Maybe there’s a more charitable way to tell the story.

Yeah, management didn’t give the guy a raise so he quit and he could say no when they came begging.

If there’s anything that went wrong here it was management asking ‘what if we pay him more’ but not asking ‘what if we don’t’.

Without debating whether it’s ethical, it doesn’t sound like extortion. It sounds like taking advantage of dysfunctional decision making in an organization.

I assume he built his system and then onboarded the company as a client to it. Possible issue here is the degree of separation. If he ever worked on the system before he resigned, or re-used some concepts of it, then I’m sure company would sue him and take the system for free.

I’ve considered doing similar for one corp I’ve once worked with. The corp used an obscure hybrid cloud solution, unfortunately, the cloud provider didn’t really understand the corps needs (governance,devex,monitoring) making it impossible to do anything basic without manual action from an administrator. Pretty solvable with a couple of APIs and a few dashboards

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

>> resigned as a full time employee, waited until the panic had set in properly

The company couldn't even function without that person. Calling that an extortion is quite a leap.

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

How? The original company could have hired another employee to replace him, instead they entered into a b2b relationship with his company.

I've often considered something similar. I used to support a bunch of apps, where I thought "I could build most of these from scratch and they'd be better than what I'm supporting." Even if my employer didn't find value in them, and hired someone else to support the old junk, other companies would probably buy the new ones.

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.

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 their first clients or get your first clients from relationships associated with your former employer.

All of this assumes you don't burn bridges and have the interpersonal skills, in-demand expertise, luck, timing, and interest in building out a small service-based business.

Legal? Are you implying that having knowledge in a company (like, the result of doing a good job?) somehow should legally obligate you to never stop working there?

What am I missing? Can you spell out some boundaries for what you're implying because I must be wildly missing it.

In the US, it doesn't really cost anything to run a business as a sole proprietor. So, I can't live on Zestful, but it's definitely more profitable than not having the business.

>In my country it costs around 200 euro/month to be a freelancer (I think most of that money is for health insurance).

You get a real job to have health insurance.

> it's about 99% passive income, as I spend only about an hour or two on maintenance per year.

Looks like that $200 is just side income, not their main job.

It's generally apps that let users import or enter recipes. The apps want to do more with the recipes like create shopping lists or provide nutritional information.

I wrote blog posts about how I built the service[0] and answered StackOverflow questions that related to ingredient parsing[1].

[0] https://mtlynch.io/resurrecting-1/

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/a/52304008/90388

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.

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.

Thank you

Thank you!

He builds it in public so maybe you can find more details on his X profile. Last time he shared the server cost was about $5k/mo https://x.com/dmytrokrasun/status/1917817087461933560?s=46

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

Dug around their twitter a bit and they mentioned at one point having $14K MRR and $4K expenses

Browserless can do this for free:

docker run -p 3000:3000 browserless/chrome:latest

> Turn Websites Into Screenshots with a simple API

If anyone wants to build “turn websites into APIs” and do it really well like OP, feel free to hmu.

Highly experienced full-stack and rust developer with experience at startups, G and Google X.

MRR?

You're not surprised. I'm not surprised either. And yet: at a company of a handful of people working part time, I think the choice made sense: focus on the core competency.

I mean, the common advice is to “sell shovels”, no? I think it’s non-obvious that in this case the correct strategy could be “go dig for gold”

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.

>> 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.

the economic player with direct contact to the customer "owns" the customer and has a lot of power in negotiation with suppliers. the customer-facing players have the most information about their customers, and can offer adjacent products (want fries with that?)

Uber and Lyft make big money, not their drivers. Amazon and Ebay make big money, not their sellers. McDonalds makes more money than their food suppliers, and franchisees.

The exception is with something like intellectual property, let's use movies as an example. The owners of the content want to sell it widely and will do a variety of distribution deals for different distribution channels. However, if any distribution channel starts taking a big slice of the money pie, the terms of the contract renewal will be changed because without the content they are dead.

It's a small market yes. Our solution can be packaged as a stand alone app, but also has other relevant uses.

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 back into piracy

We connect directly with the operators using the protocols of their choice. Mostly IP-based protocols such as SMPP, SIP, MM7 and various kinds of VPN/TLS technology.

Very custom contracts and back in 2011 when we started there was no such thing as a virtual mobile phone number.

These days the operators are a bit more aware of the value of A2P (application-to-person) versus P2P which was/is very much on the decline. That also means the operators have capacity built of ready to be used without new investments.

As for our own software, we are mostly a Python based shop. And we use tons of open source. The most heavily used components we replace over time with cusomized software as these are generally fully not suited for our needs.

The true value for our customers is our technical support, our operator conectivity, the robustness of the platform, and lastly the nice REST API with it’s debugging capability.

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.

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

It runs on a AirBnB-like GPU network (also our own).

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

Thank you, fixed!

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?

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.

For groceries at least, the time cost + fuel cost of buying from different stores would probably cancel out any minor variations in prices

What do your eyes tell you? https://youtu.be/P7KBcsdPhxA?si=RNDXSwiHqCKDLv0i&t=107

Sounds a lot like rebrickable. I'm not sure if they have an API though

That's a funny idea :)

I think the first one should be very much doable, but I am not sure how I would build the "almost complete" and the "similar colors" features.

not sure if there are APIs, but there are a couple of websites that do that for Lego already.

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

This is included in Microsoft Teams.

Will even auto detected who spoke, transcribe, video records and AI summarize it (with defined actions / next steps).

You can set it up to auto perform once the first person joins the meeting.

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?

You know what's pretty good at cleaning up data that's a total trash fire? _More_ LLM. :-)

I run a web service whose primary purpose is cleaning up messy, SEO-enshittified data from Google, eBay, etc. After years of fine-tuning my own heuristics, I threw a super-cheap LLM at it and it massively out-performed my custom code. It's slower, but the results are well worth it.

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.

They are in the UK but you have to have some magic understanding of around 15 separate files. Seems to be purposefully difficult.