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

252 points by meander_water 1y ago

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

vsupalov 1y ago
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.
- jlundberg 1y ago
  As a tech person, it is easy to wrongly think that ”anyone can build this” about a prototype you just built. At the end of the day, it is about what the customer is willing to pay for. Back when The Pirate Bay was huge, music was essentially free. But Spotify came along and proved people are ready to pay for something better. ImageMagick is an open source tool for resizing images etc. But some people successfully build API services or SaaS-services on top of it. It works because people AND businesses pay for convenience. What space do you have knowledge of? What pains do people have in that domain that can be solved with tech? Always start with the problem. And start with an industry you know by heart or customer profile you truly care for. For me that was software developers. I was that customer myself. I programmed a certain kind of solutions, realized there should be an API for this and built that API.
  - bad_haircut72 1y ago
    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
    - hollerith 1y ago
      Which police force was involved in that? In the US, it was the RIAA using private investigators to find people to sue.
    - jlundberg 1y ago
      True that the full win was due to copyright enforcement by various actors. However, in the early days of Spotify the ”play any song with a click” was pure magic and nothing piracy could compete with. A fun anecdote from that time is also that basically the whole Spotify catalogue was full of pirated music — they had not yet secured any music rights and I personally thought they never would succeed with that.
      - axpvms 1y ago
        The early days of napster felt like that (with a diminished experience due to lower speed connections). Not to take anything away from your point.
        jlundberg 1y ago
        Yeah, I agree. Having one place with a huge music library and downloads in parts of minutes was magic.. :)
- monero-xmr 1y ago
  Every company has secrets that few people know. If you know an industry intimately you can reverse engineer what the competition is doing. But generally speaking the “tricks of the trade” are non-obvious and make the business. I know right this very second exactly how I could do a unique twist on my existing business and conservatively make another $1 million a year in profit within 2 years. But I already work 60+ hours a week on this business and I’m making tons of money, and the risk of revealing my secrets to another person to build the new business is simply too high.
aaviator42 1y ago
On the same topic: does anyone have an API concept that they wish existed and that they'd be willing to pay for?
- la_fayette 1y ago
  For customer projects I am happily using paid "text to speech" APIs from several vendors. Privately, I would like to use an API, which gets my Lego bricks inventory and returns all sets which I could build. Further it should show me sets, which I almost can build and show me missing pieces. Also e.g. it should show me sets with slight color differences, e.g. I have bricks in yellow but originally it requires orange. Things like that...
  - alfons_foobar 1y ago
    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.
    - yesbabyyes 1y ago
      I guess calculating the Levenshtein distance between the sets would work somehow? Edit: scratch that, just intersect the set of available pieces with each set. If there are fewer than n--or m%--missing pieces, suggest those.
  - kingbob000 1y ago
    Sounds a lot like rebrickable. I'm not sure if they have an API though
  - Suppafly 1y ago
    not sure if there are APIs, but there are a couple of websites that do that for Lego already.
- fragmede 1y ago
  Sure, but the API itself is the easy part, especially with LLM help. The problem is the data source is a total trash fire, so in order for it to be worth it the API cost would either be exorbitant or not worth it.
longnguyen 1y ago
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 https://x.com/DmytroKrasun [1]: https://screenshotone.com https://screenshotone.com
- geiger01 1y ago
  I also have a similar api Screenshot api and web scraping api https://capturekit.dev https://capturekit.dev
  - thatguyagain 1y ago
    MRR?
    - JCoder58 1y ago
      Monthly Recurring Revenue
  - leoh 1y ago
    > 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.
    - sureglymop 1y ago
      It's a good idea. Lately I've been building many android apps in kotlin that all just use web scraping instead of REST APIs. So if you want, "turn your website into an app", that would be interesting.
- yapyap 1y ago
  Wondering what his monthly profit is if that’s not too personal, MRR doesn’t really tell me anything when I don’t know operating costs IMO.
qmatch 1y ago
Similarly curious if anyone has an API, that they ultimately subsidize through some other service or product.
- jlundberg 1y ago
  This is a very intresting question. My answer here is fairly far fetched, but probably also nothworthy: The Swedish employment office have a publicly available API for open positions. It is subsidized by their main branch because they see value in more companies / sites building business on top of their data. https://data.arbetsformedlingen.se/ https://data.arbetsformedlingen.se/
teruza 1y ago
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Simon_O_Rourke 1y ago
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.
- thasso 1y ago
  Is this legal? How frequently do people with unique knowledge in a company pull things like this off?
  - cootsnuck 1y ago
    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.
    - alwa 1y ago
      If he’s successfully replacing the millions in external consultants, it might even be what the business folks call “a win/win”…
flir 1y ago
I can tell you what we pay for: postcode lookups.
- pylua 1y ago
  Like smarty streets ?
- kinard 1y ago
  Ridiculous that postcodes/uprns lookups are not open data (yet). hohum.
  - callamdelaney 1y ago
    They are in the UK but you have to have some magic understanding of around 15 separate files. Seems to be purposefully difficult.
    - mrngm 1y ago
      NL as well, but the source data has a couple of indirections before you get to the postcode. It's doable, monthly updatable for free, but requires a bit of processing and understanding of the geo structures.
- cheriot 1y ago
  What country? Does the Google Maps API not do this or is it too expensive? An example of what you look up a postcode for (and the input data) would be useful.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
tudorconstantin 1y ago
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 1y ago
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?
- slig 1y ago
  ipinfo.io, I believe.
  - gervwyk 1y ago
    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.
    - sanjayparekh 1y ago
      The whole geo-IP space started back with my startup, Digital Envoy, in 1999 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39734355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39734355). The way we went about it was by providing an API to clients but we actually hosted our entire database (encrypted and in a proprietary format) with clients. The reason for this was for latency (back in 1999 we could get about 0.03ms per transaction something that you can't get on any edge delivered service) which was necessary for the types of clients we went after. The business was very valuable across a lot of industries - gambling, encryption, advertising, security, adult entertainment, etc. - so there was a lot of demand that also helped smooth out the demand up/down cycles. If one market was cold, another was hot. But basically it's a lot of work and a lot of hand-to-hand combat. This is the best way to learn and get passionate customers. Show up, sell to them, and convince them they need you. You'll learn so much by doing this. And don't use the excuse that you're an introvert or not good at selling. If you want to be an entrepreneur, you need to learn and improve. No one is the best at anything on day one - you won't be either. But you'll get there if you keep at it. Being the absolute best in the market meant that even having much more better funded competitors ($50m+ for competitors against our $12m in funding) meant we tended to win all the time. And before you ask, if I had this to do over again now, I could do this company for a LOT less money given how commoditized things are. I can tell you the time I almost spent $1m on a storage array until I found a cheaper vendor for $250k. Oh, that storage array was for 1TB of storage. So yeah. Feel free to ask me anything. If there are enough people who have questions and want to do a chat I'd be happy to host a video call and get peppered with whatever questions you might have.
kilroy123 1y ago
This is my dream. I'm trying to do this with AI Agents you call programmatically. So far, I'm not making money.
jachac 1y ago
https://www.listennotes.com/blog/how-i-accidentally-built-a-podcast-api-business-46/ https://www.listennotes.com/blog/how-i-accidentally-built-a-... @wenbin posts on here about it
mtlynch 1y ago
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/ https://zestfuldata.com/
- soared 1y ago
  I made this exact website with ChatGPT’s API to prep for an interview a couple months ago! Biggest hurdle I ran into - asking chatgpt for help on using the chatgpt api was completely useless, as it was trained on a deprecated version of the api so none of its examples even worked.
- philipodonnell 1y ago
  What kind of customers are using this API? I’ve had many similar thoughts but I get hung up on the idea that customers are “developers” from a marketing standpoint, because those developers are developing something and that something is probably a bigger driver of utility that a truly generically developer tool like Cursor.
  - mtlynch 1y ago
    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.
- tkiolp4 1y ago
  In my country it costs around 200 euro/month to be a freelancer (I think most of that money is for health insurance). So making $200/month would be a no go for me. How do people manage to legally earn that money when the margins are so low?
Eikon 1y ago
I run https://www.merklemap.com/ 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 1y ago
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.
- pan69 1y ago
  > 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_pwner224 1y ago
    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.
    - tasuki 1y ago
      Exactly this, thank you!
  - fsckboy 1y ago
    >> 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.
joewhale 1y ago
Market data delivered via API for hedge funds and quants.
- calderarrow 1y ago
  Are you able to share a bit more about this? Specifically: 1. How did you find your first customers? 2. How did you determine a price? 3. What are the payment plans based on? Usage? Flat rate? Something else? 4. How much are you currently earning MRR and what are your costs like?
- cheriot 1y ago
  Curious what kind of datapoints they won't have through FactSet, BB, etc
- ajoseps 1y ago
  I'm assuming this is some sort of alternative market data?
- IAmGraydon 1y ago
  Kpler?
jlundberg 1y ago
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.
- vernon99 1y ago
  So like Twilio but for some local European networks?
  - jlundberg 1y ago
    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.
- xelxebar 1y ago
  Mind if I ask what stack you use? I've got some acquaintances working with Swedish infrastructure, and they have lots of stories.
  - jlundberg 1y ago
    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.
lostmsu 1y ago
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 https://borgcloud.org/speech-to-text
- jlundberg 1y ago
  Cool and congratulations! This feels like a very competitive space, especially with whisper etc being so good. Btw, looks like you made a typo in your first paragraf writing text-to-speech instead of speech-to-text.
  - lostmsu 1y ago
    > paragraf writing text-to-speech instead of speech-to-text Thank you, fixed!
- the_pwner224 1y ago
  Congratulations! As the other commenter mentioned, this seems like an extremely competitive space. But I did a quick Google for speech-to-text and your solution is a few times cheaper than most others. I know you may not want to share your secret sauce, but I'm curious as to how you managed that. I'm guessing you use Whisper, is the trick to just run it on your own hardware instead of paying AWS prices for compute?
  - pzo 1y ago
    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 https://groq.com/pricing . Gemini 2.0 flash is around $0.08 per hour
    - 1y ago
satvikpendem 1y ago
Lots of indie hackers in this space, Bannerbear is one making at least one million USD a year based on their latest posts.
- tpetry 1y ago
  He‘s reporting SGD dollars. So something around 700k-800k USD a year. Still impressive.
tillcarlos 1y ago
I met the founder of Kraken.io - an image crunching SaaS. 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.
MasterScrat 1y ago
We run an API to finetune text-to-image models (dreamlook.ai), as a two-person team. 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.
- akilat90 1y ago
  Interesting work! Do you have any figures about GPU costs your service would incur monthly and how much was spent while building it?
- dcsan 1y ago
  I used this neck in the day! You somehow did better Lora training than others in the space! Found you via discord
helios12 1y ago
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Bencheng 1y ago
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 https://formx.ai [1] https://authgear.com https://authgear.com
- its_down_again 1y ago
  Curious how you landed on the idea to partner with local GCP/Azure reps. That’s a smart move, I didn’t realize they’d be open to helping. Did you pitch it as a way to help them close deals by offering custom solutions?
  - nopcode 1y ago
    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.
    - Bencheng 1y ago
laze00 1y ago
re: finding paying customers 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 https://www.postman.com/explore. you need to handle monetization, but the network gives you eyeballs
fallingmeat 1y ago
Know a guy who setup themselves as a cert authority for STIR/SHAKEN and pretty much is an almost completed automated system; just issues certs they generate with a small hardware device. Sounds like it easily makes about $10k/month almost pure profit! https://authenticate.iconectiv.com/approved-certification-authorities https://authenticate.iconectiv.com/approved-certification-au...
micro_design 1y ago
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cx42net 1y ago
I've been running PDFShift.io, an API to convert HTML to PDF for seven years now. It's profitable (around $12K MRR) and still growing. 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)
aleggg 1y ago
I definitely do not make a living from it, but after two years, my Bitcoin on-chain data and metrics API service has started to generate some revenue. It's basically a service where you can download highly processed Bitcoin data in CSV, XLSX, or JSON formats, updated hourly. I offer affordable subscriptions paid directly in satoshis to my self-hosted Lightning Network node — no intermediaries! If you’d like to check it out: https://bitcoinisdata.com/ https://bitcoinisdata.com/
makowskid 1y ago
https://SharpAPI.com/ https://SharpAPI.com/ - not making a living yet, but it provides quite good revenue already.
DMayBikes19 1y ago
[flagged]

gervwyk 1y ago

not an api but, Internally we’re just looking for a native text to speach app that auto records all meetings and call a webhook with the transcript. not the notes! for some reason all most rmeetings apps gives you only notes and seldomly a webhook or similar. also not interested in zapier etc. After two weeks off looking for a solution, we’re going to vibe code something basic and use deepgram. If we just skipped the shopping around, the solution would be live already..

thuanao 1y ago
Recall.ai is exactly this. Using them at my current company and it works well. It even supports live transcription.
- gervwyk 1y ago
  Aah nice. I knew about them but did not see they have a desktop sdk
  - Erazal 1y ago
    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?
    - gervwyk 1y ago
      A mix but primarily apple.
satvikpendem 1y ago
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?
- gervwyk 1y ago
  We want to process the transcript to build up project context. Making it easy for team members and customers to ask project questions and brainstorm ideas with a chatbot
  - satvikpendem 1y ago
    Interesting, I'm working on that exact type of use case on the consumer side as more of a mobile app chatbot, didn't realize there was an enterprise version need too of the same idea.
tiffanyh 1y ago
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.
- gervwyk 1y ago
  Many meetings happen that are not on teams.. So that would only do for 10%.. Id like to meet the teams where they are working instead of telling them to change how they work.
  - Suppafly 1y ago
    I'm pretty sure bots already exist for this, I've seen them join, albeit Teams, meetings that I've been on, so they can get a transcription of meetings where they don't control the host settings.
- Suppafly 1y ago
  >This is included in Microsoft Teams. This, and there are also 3rd party bots that work with Teams (and presumably other video chats as well) that will join the meeting and do their own transcription. I've seen a couple of on meetings with vendors lately, it'll join and be called something like x company transcription bot.
  - gervwyk 1y ago
    I’ve checked out about 5 of them, I like krisp.ai the best, really nice native experience on mac. We do a lot of team meetings in discord channels. Almost none of them support discord and krisp allows for discord and in person recording. However no webhook in krisp, as team admin, i dont want to have every user configure a zapier integration to get the notes out. then pay for zapier also. Only read.ai has webhook support, but all these tools only post notes to integrations. we want the full transcript to generate extract of what we think is important. Have not tried recall.ai
    - deleted 1y ago

throwaway106382 1y ago

holy crap - our company needs basically exactly this for a crazy feature our PM cooked up and we were gonna build something similar ourselves - this will save us so much time

Lord_Zero 1y ago
Browserless can do this for free: docker run -p 3000:3000 browserless/chrome:latest
- Lord_Zero 1y ago
  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
  - mike-cardwell 1y ago
    And what commands do I run if I want to do 100 screenshots per second?
    - porridgeraisin 1y ago
      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.
      - Lord_Zero 1y ago
        Yeah that's basically just a 100 FPS video at that point lol
- fastball 1y ago
  Browserless is not free for commercial use.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- nkrisc 1y ago
  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.
  - tredre3 1y ago
    > 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. Oh okay so it does: chrome --load-extension=path/to/ublock --headless --screenshot https://website.com https://website.com
  - la_fayette 1y ago
    Couldn't this be done with a headless Firefox and adblocker extensions?
    - ozim 1y ago
      Feels like Dropbox comment.
    - nkrisc 1y ago
      I’m sure it could be. Just like I could bake an apple pie by first sowing wheat and planting apple trees.
- sjducb 1y ago
  > instead of managing browser clusters, and handling all the corner cases The cost with running a docker container is you have to manage that container. You’re paying with dev time not money.
  - throwaway7783 1y ago
    Exactly this. We keep forgetting time and money that needs to be paid to a developer to setup and manage stuff.
- yencabulator 1y ago
  Well, for some users and uses, it's free. It seems they consider their small amount glue between docker and chrome a to be of commercial value. Still better than the original. https://github.com/browserless/browserless/blob/main/LICENSE https://github.com/browserless/browserless/blob/main/LICENSE

ambicapter 1y ago

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

harvey9 1y ago
Sounds like the guy just got tired of being on salary in a place that was badly run.
- Simon_O_Rourke 1y ago
  Yes he did, I think he saw the weakness in the org and exploited it properly.
nkrisc 1y ago
Without debating whether it’s ethical, it doesn’t sound like extortion. It sounds like taking advantage of dysfunctional decision making in an organization.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
__turbobrew__ 1y ago
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.
justsomehnguy 1y ago
>> 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.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
strken 1y ago
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.
baq 1y ago
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’.
user32489318 1y ago
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
Suppafly 1y ago
>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.

rsync 1y ago
Did running the geolocation service allow you to see otherwise hidden abuses by ISPs and other service providers ? What I mean is: did anything ever break or behave badly ... and then when you investigated you discovered "Oh, look at what these people are doing ..." ?
- sanjayparekh 1y ago
  Interesting question. We never saw anything to this extent but did see when mergers happened how dial-in POPs would be merged and reallocated. Also interesting was how many IP addresses existed for North Korea (less than 32 IIRC) versus Antarctica (more than 2k IIRC). Reminder: I've been out of the business since 2005 (stayed on the board until we were acquired in 2007). So my data is quite dated at this point.
gervwyk 1y ago
Thanks so much for this! I’m just now really trying to put myself out there and get into sales to further develop our business. We’ve been lucky with some early network sales, but for the next chapter of our business (https://resonancy.io https://resonancy.io) I need to build the sales engine and I feel very much out of my depth. Just telling myself its a practice and trying to chip away at it one week at a time.. At this point identifying potential customers and getting meetings is a real challenge. Been trying Apollo and doing cold outreach but is a slow grind. Also trying my best in linkedin..
- sanjayparekh 1y ago
  IMO - and again, remember this is experience from 20+ years ago although I still do a lot of this now - using these kinds of automated shotgun approaches is a mistake, especially early on and especially if you are selling something. We use an automated engine for our podcast agency (https://edgewise.media https://edgewise.media) but that is a different pitch when it's "come on my podcast and talk about yourself" versus "I want you to spend money for my widget". What we did was more labor intensive and a function of these kinds of tools not existing (initial dot-com days). We would read the tech press, etc. and identify companies that might have a use for our tech. Then we would email the top person (guessing their email address usually - and most companies use a small number of variations for addresses) with a custom written, but short, tailored pitch to why they could use us and see if they wanted to talk. No pitch deck or attachments. Literally 2-3 sentences. Something that if even someone is going to quickly delete, something in those 2-3 sentences might catch their eye and make them reply instead of delete. We landed customers like Google (who we ended up later suing - that is a different tale), Doubleclick (who ended up being bought be Google), PayPal, Xbox, and a bunch of others through this method. Happy to chat more. Startups are hard and all of us should help one another out to make the road a little less hard if possible. Keep at it - I know you'll get there. Hard work will get you there, shortcuts (usually) won't.