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

Hacker News Discussion ↗

Why API businesses are often secretive

  • Several commenters note a strong incentive to “stay under the radar”: sharing details risks inviting copycats into niches that are easy to execute.
  • Unlike open source communities, API providers often guard implementation and go-to-market “tricks of the trade” as their competitive edge.

What makes a paid API valuable

  • Convenience and reliability repeatedly trump “anyone can build this.”
  • Examples: image processing, HTML→PDF, screenshots, SMS/telephony, STT, OCR, geo-IP, podcast search, certificate transparency, blockchain node access, market data, recipe parsing, Bitcoin analytics.
  • A common origin story: “I was the user; I built an API to solve my own recurring problem.”
  • Advice: start with a painful, well-understood problem in a domain you know, not with a neat piece of tech.

Idea generation and demand quality

  • Thread includes wishlists (Lego-set-from-inventory, multi-store grocery optimization, better meeting transcription/webhooks, native TTS/STT tooling).
  • Many such ideas already exist, showing the danger of building “cool” APIs without checking for real, paying demand.
  • One commenter frames it as: sell “painkillers, not vitamins.”

Real-world API businesses (orders of magnitude)

  • Solo/very small teams report:
    • ~$200/mo (recipe ingredient parser).
    • ~$5k/mo (speech-to-text; model fine-tuning; image finetuning API).
    • ~$12k MRR (HTML→PDF).
    • ~$20k MRR (screenshot API).
    • ~$35k–55k MRR (CIAM and OCR APIs).
    • ~€500k MRR (SMS/telephony API with pay-per-use).
  • Some are now largely “maintenance mode”; others are declining due to commoditization by big cloud/LLMs.

Go-to-market and distribution

  • First customers often come from: personal networks, meetups/hackathons, Reddit/HN/Quora/StackOverflow, Product Hunt, cloud-provider marketplaces, or dedicated developer platforms.
  • Marketing and sales (not engineering) are repeatedly cited as the hardest part.

Pricing and value capture

  • Models include per-call, per-minute, per-page, subscriptions with usage tiers, and negotiated enterprise contracts.
  • A recurring regret: backend API providers often capture far less revenue than the customer-facing apps built on top, because “who owns the end user” owns pricing power.

Ethics, legality, and odd cases

  • One story describes an employee spinning out an internal system into a paid external API for the same company, prompting debate about legality and whether this is extortion vs normal consulting.
  • Some APIs are subsidized or public (e.g., government job-posting feeds), used to stimulate ecosystem growth rather than direct profit.