Are there any solo devs or small teams out there genuinely paying their rent from selling API access?
What’s your API? How much MRR? What’s your pricing model? How did you find your first paying customers? And most importantly – what problem are you solving that people will actually pay for monthly?
Bonus points if you can share:
– Your biggest challenge (rate limiting? customer support? competition?)
– Whether you’d do it again
– Any “I wish I knew this before starting” wisdom
18 Comments
vsupalov
I'm also curious about ways to provide value with a technical project.
The challenge when exploring this topic: the incentive to stay under the radar. Those succeeding don't have much to gain from sharing details here. Worst case: it could invite competitors into their space.
Communities that thrive on growth (e.g., open-source) tend to share freely, but API businesses, especially ones which are easy to execute, often guard their edge.
A recent finding I had, while not necessarily an API: services which help you 24/7 stream a lenghty video file. YouTube live streams seem to work well for those lofi-types of channels, and there are services which are built to enable autopilot live streams.
aaviator42
On the same topic: does anyone have an API concept that they wish existed and that they'd be willing to pay for?
longnguyen
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
qmatch
Similarly curious if anyone has an API, that they ultimately subsidize through some other service or product.
teruza
[dead]
Simon_O_Rourke
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 customers, and knew the database inside and out. So he created his own company, resigned as a full time employee, waited until the panic had set in properly.
Then he offered consulting services back to the energy company saying he'd take care of any database processing costs, or cloud migration costs or whatever, and moved the customer data for gas customers to his own system. Then he created an API, waited a while more and said he was going away again…. Or he could stay supporting this setup if the energy company agreed to a monthly fee and API usage. Then, as far as I know, he sat back and just watched the money roll in while he automated everything else about the job.
flir
I can tell you what we pay for: postcode lookups.
tudorconstantin
The blockchain hosting companies like infura live by offering API access to ethereum, solana, binance smart chain, etc. I’d say they are now rather hosting companies because these blockchains are huge and a PITA to host reliably, but back in 2017 it was possible to host them on a personal computer
ttcbj
Wasn’t there a post on HN about someone who made a lot of money with an API that told you the geolocation of an IP address quickly? Maybe 5 years ago?
kilroy123
This is my dream. I'm trying to do this with AI Agents you call programmatically. So far, I'm not making money.
jachac
https://www.listennotes.com/blog/how-i-accidentally-built-a-…
@wenbin posts on here about it
mtlynch
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 sell it to someone who wants to do something with it, but it would probably take me 30-40 hours to package everything up to hand off to someone, so I consider just the opportunity cost there to be around $5-10k, and I don't think anyone wants to pay $10k for an API that makes $200/mo.
What I wish I knew: don't use RapidAPI. They charge 20%, they have a terrible interface, and they let customers run up huge charges and walk away without paying anything. I wish I'd just rolled my own simple thing with Paddle.
[0] https://zestfuldata.com/
Eikon
I run https://www.merklemap.com/ a certificate transparency / subdomain search engine.
I’d say that this kind of projects are not different than any entrepreneurial endeavor, and the biggest challenge is usually acquisition, even though the technical part was / is hefty too.
tasuki
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 becoming good enough for the average potential customer.
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.
joewhale
Market data delivered via API for hedge funds and quants.
jlundberg
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 find the first few early adopters.
Which is also our biggest challenge, it is hard to scale an offline based go-to-market method.
It has certainly been a painful struggle to get here and it still feels surreal it works so well.
lostmsu
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://borgcloud.org/speech-to-text
satvikpendem
Lots of indie hackers in this space, Bannerbear is one making at least one million USD a year based on their latest posts.