7 ms·
Ask HN: What's an app you'd pay $5/month for?
I'm looking to build apps and learn as much as I can about programming, rails, APIs etc.
HMers, what's something that's been bugging you?
I'd love to make something here, for All HN to see.
Why $5?
Anytime someone is willing to pay any sort of money, it becomes a clearer problem :P. Plus it's a lot more motivating to make money + program
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Edit : There seem to be some really good ideas here! it might just make a nice resource that new hackers can use to start and Show HN
- qweasd321 14y agoA fart app.
- alpb 14y agoI covered this in my blog and it has many answer comments: http://ahmetalpbalkan.com/blog/the-5-saas/ http://ahmetalpbalkan.com/blog/the-5-saas/
- damian2000 14y agoAnything that will save me more than $10 per month. E.g. could save me money on bills, fees, government charges, tax, anything. But it has to be on something I am already spending money on (e.g. a recurring spend).
- stopachka 14y agoInteresting. What are you currently spending money on? Is there a process you hate to do, that you do anyways on what you're spending money on? These are pretty loaded questions, but even a brief answer will be very appreciated :)
- damian2000 14y agoSome examples ... insurance, mortgage, car loan, internet, mobile phone, usenet, web hosting. Maybe an app could help in finding better/cheaper deals with some of these... probably difficult to automate much of that though.
- OafTobark 14y agoWho do you use for usenet? What for primarily? Any good?
- damian2000 14y agoAstraweb - no complaints - $10 a month. Never hit any limits yet. I download TV shows and such like (via NZB) that I can't find anywhere else. Much better than torrent.
- r00fus 14y agoAn feed (RSS/twitter) reader that takes voice (or wand-like) commands, reads me the entries so I can commute and listen to meaningful news without blind tapping my phone. This is worth $5/mo to me.
- stopachka 14y agoThat's really interesting! It could be cool to learn how to interact with Twitter, as well as Voice API's. The only downside I forsee is that hearing the news might be unbearable, with the text-to-speech type of stuff. Thanks for the suggestion r00fus
- murrain 14y agoTry http://voicebunny.com/ http://voicebunny.com/. They have an API, or listing the jobs on Mechanical Turk to be read by a human.
- DanBC 14y agoA subscription to something like Longform - curated stories of interest to me. For $5 per month I'd like to have ad free versions of the stories, with better than normal styling.
- stopachka 14y agoVery interesting as well! I took a look at their site, and it did seem hard to parse with the styling. So the current reason you aren't happy with Longform are the ads and the styling?
- DanBC 14y agoOh,I'm happy with Longform. But I'm happy to pay for great content. I think that's a clear signal to producers to keep making great content. Until micropayments are sorted and I can pay each different newspaper for every article I read I guess it'd make sense for users to pay the aggregator who then pays the papers based on article read rates. There's some thorny problems there to be sorted out. The styling thing is mostly my personal preference; I like big san-serif dark fonts on a light yellow (#ffffcc) background. I use browser plugins at the moment.
- mcrider 14y agoAgreed -- I'd be happy to pay $5/month for Longform if stories were formatted better (I don't see ads but sometimes content is missing/duplicated), and maybe for a recommendation engine based on what I've already read.
- joonix 14y agoThere are plenty of things I would, and do, pay monthly for. An app still isn't one of them. My point is there's opportunity everywhere and people these days think it's only in software.
- murtza 14y agoExactly. Two examples for inspiration: Manpacks and Candy Japan (the owner is on HN). There is also a startup based out of Mountain View that delivers new games and puzzles for kids every month, but I cannot remember the name of it. http://www.manpacks.com/ http://www.manpacks.com/ http://www.candyjapan.com/ http://www.candyjapan.com/
- thekillerdev 14y agoDo you, by any chance, knows who is the owner of those? i would like to be able to contact him directly.
- bdr 14y agoA web service that makes it easier to debug problems that users of my website are encountering, by recording all console log statements and letting me filter and search on various dimensions. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4081806 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4081806 I'm not sure how many other people want this. But you'd be saving developer-hours, which are worth a lot, and could charge accordingly.
- zengr 14y agoSomething like a combination newrelic and keen.io?
- venomsnake 14y agoI am already paying that for Backblaze. Okay - here are some services that can be automated. Deal hunters - I say I want 240 GB SSD or 7970 for x, you scrape regularly some interesting places (newegg, ebay etc) and if something drops - notify me and charge me a dollar.
- anywherenotes 14y agoHow about a coupon manager. For example I scan all the items I'm buying at a store using the app, and it finds all the coupons available from that store or manufacturer. Than I hand over the phone to clerk, who scans it, and all the coupons are applied.
- eytanlevit 14y agoThese guys are doing EXACTLY what you just described, great idea! http://www.saverrapp.com/ http://www.saverrapp.com/
- jeffool 14y agoA service that did bandwidth intense tasks for me. If I'm on my cell phone, I'd like to be able to take a link to an mp3 file hosted anywhere, and have an "upload to Google Music/Amazon/etc" option. The key would be to have you, the service provider, download and upload the file. Send me an email when it's done. This would be infinitely convenient for me when it comes to podcasts, videos, large DJ sets, conference footage, etc. I say this as someone on America. I imagine you could find a few users in nations where virtually all services are metered. And once you program your tool once, it's automated. The work is finding what services allow this, and adding then to your framework as requested. And, of course, your own bandwidth/storage bill... Maybe this is best as a feature for existing data lockers.
- jeffool 14y agoIn the exceptionally rare case someone comes across this in the future, I've been informed that someone is doing this with DropBox! It's called URLDroplet, and is at urldroplet.com!