by meander_water on 5/31/25, 2:23 PM with 173 comments
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
by Bencheng on 6/1/25, 8:00 AM
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
by Simon_O_Rourke on 5/31/25, 3:35 PM
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.
by mtlynch on 5/31/25, 5:01 PM
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.
by longnguyen on 5/31/25, 3:28 PM
by tasuki on 5/31/25, 7:44 PM
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.
by vsupalov on 5/31/25, 3:14 PM
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.
by jlundberg on 5/31/25, 8:05 PM
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.
by MasterScrat on 6/1/25, 5:54 AM
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.
by lostmsu on 5/31/25, 8:13 PM
Biggest challenge was getting the first few customers (is there anyone for who this was not the case?).
by jachac on 5/31/25, 4:56 PM
@wenbin posts on here about it
by aaviator42 on 5/31/25, 3:17 PM
by laze00 on 6/1/25, 2:35 PM
at Postman, we have a network for companies to reach developers and distribute their APIs on our platform. worth checking out: https://www.postman.com/explore.
you need to handle monetization, but the network gives you eyeballs
by cx42net on 6/6/25, 1:34 PM
It took quite some efforts to have a service of really high quality, resilient and bug-free but I'm nearing this and it's a real pleasure.
To answer all your other points :
- What's your API: An API to convert HTML documents (URL/Raw) to PDF - How much MRR: About $12k - Pricing model: Subscription plan with limits in the number of converted documents that depends on the plan. The rest is the same for all the plans (no features unlocked at certain level). - First paying customers: Mostly from IndieHackers and Quora at the beginning, and a successful launch on ProductHunt when it was still big. - Problem I'm solving: Not having to manage your own servers to handle conversion. It can be done locally for sure, but as the service grow, the need for resources increases too and can lead to issues down the road. With PDFShift, it's just set up and forget it. - Biggest challenge: I was initially at OVH Strasbourg, when it caught fire, and lost a lot. I had to rebuilt the database from data I had around and gave access to everyone for free until I had all sorted up (took 2 days). This was a good lesson to learn to not save the backup on the same service and at the same place! - I would definitely do it again. (I'm thinking of this frequently for other services too :D)
by Eikon on 5/31/25, 7:20 PM
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.
by makowskid on 6/7/25, 6:30 AM
by aleggg on 6/6/25, 1:54 PM
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by satvikpendem on 5/31/25, 11:10 PM
by fallingmeat on 6/2/25, 2:18 PM
by tillcarlos on 6/1/25, 2:29 AM
It’s been some years already. Back then he had an office and a couple of developers. Seemed to be doing well. It has probably grown since then.
by kilroy123 on 5/31/25, 4:27 PM
by tudorconstantin on 5/31/25, 3:55 PM
by qmatch on 5/31/25, 3:28 PM
by ttcbj on 5/31/25, 4:10 PM
by flir on 5/31/25, 3:43 PM
by joewhale on 5/31/25, 7:59 PM