I built a tool that lets you read any article and especially and newsletter on Kindle. I charge $6-$10 monthly or about $60-$85 yearly for it and >150 active subscribers. The yearly pre-payment that's about 20% cheaper than monthly is by far the most popular plan.
Indiehackers.com has stripe-verified revenue for many small saas so check that out to see what makes money. General trend is other than the AI assistant bubble, the money is in marketing automation. The bar is high for dev tools. You compete with Jetbrains for quality and a lot of free stuff for price. Unless you are very niche. E.g. I think something like a tool that solves kubernetes soc2 compliance sort of thing.
I could probably name like 6 companies of the top of my head, all of them being in the boat of "call us and we give you our custom software for your business need", where any competent developer can probably come in, look at the use case, and probably write the entire backed in about 2-3 months (and now with LLMs, 3-4 months for front end and backed).
The thing about monetization of software isn't about usefulness, its about marketing, which starts with realizing that the things that are trivial for you to do are way less trivial for others.
If a web tool saves me and my team at work a bit of time for $5/month, yes, 100%, swipe the company card! Sure let’s buy another JS table library.
But if I’m working on a personal project, or I have to pay for said tool with my personal card, probably not. I’ll spend the time building my own solution from scratch while never actually finishing my project.
Perhaps HN is not the best audience to ask this question. A mostly tech savvy audience is more likely to solve their personal needs with a quick script, etc.
From a business perspective, you need to frame your MVP in terms of what problem you are solving? How many people really do have that problem? Of those people how many are willing to pay for the solution?
Whether you use AI or not is largely irrelevant. The knowledge of a specific domain and the typical problems encountered therein are far more relevant.
Yeah agreed with AI being irrelevant. I most mention that to explain that rather than just hosting costs, there are additional costs for model inference that make it a lot harder to break even. I'm fine with little to no profit as long as I can at least avoid losing money on side projects haha
$5/month is sort of the worst spot. I'd pay $1/month for some things (budgeting tools) and $20/month for say, chatgpt. And I paid $5 lifetime (life being ~5 years) for a resume tool once.
These days AI will probably build most of the things you'd charge a tiny fee for. $5/month is kind of the rate of a battle pass for a MMO, not quite a "small tool".
there's a lot of web stuff and tools I'd love to make
Make that stiff because doing what you love is doing what you love.
$5/mo
As a business, that is a terrible price. It is not enough money to provide good service and outsource all the things that should be outsourced. [1] Even worse good potential customers know this and bad potential customers don’t care if your business is unsustainable.
[1]: At five bucks a month you will need thousands of customers to cover one well-paid employee [2} focused on customer service, but acquiring, retaining, and servicing thousands of customers probably requires more than one full-time employee…
[2]: Of course if you are doing what you love, then being paid well might not matter. But unless you love solving billing problems, you will be doing some things you don’t love. But being well paid to do what you love is not bad.
I think you are asking the right question here. Before building something determine if there is a market, and if that market will pay.
Personally my gut says no. I personally don't use any tools in that range, but I also think that at first glance the numbers don't add up.
Firstly, people pay for value. You seem to feel your ideas are low value (hence the low price) which means you don't really expect users to use it a lot. And "very occasional use" doesn't motivate me to go to the effort of paying.
Since the absolute number is low, you're either expecting really tiny numbers or you're hoping for really high numbers. The tiny numbers result in tiny revenues and tiny profits, so what's the point?
High numbers of people are likely to consume all that revenue. If you got high numbers you'd like ho the ads based route, with maybe a premium "no ads" subscription. But then you can charge more (getting rid of ads is $20 value.)
But again people dont pay for occasional use. If the use is frequent then it's likely more valuable than 5$.
To answer your root question - people don't "subscribe" to single-use tools (if by single-use you mean one-time-use.)
Perhaps you need to charge more? (People pay $10 for a coffee and that's single use). Or charge per use?
See that's my challenge! Very well put. I see a lot of influencers bragging about mini SaaS apps being profitable but I don't know if I really see how. I'm more interested in multi-use simple tools. For example, an app that solves a common small problem/inconvenience really well is probably worth $5/mo (I would probably pay for that), but I can't imagine anyone just buys subscriptions to indie apps haha. I'm honestly happy with very low profit if it's possible. I love building stuff as a hobby and I'd just like to make enough money to cover my hosting costs so I can run side projects that cost me a bit to deploy. Maybe a better model is 1-2 free uses and then sign up and then charge per use at-cost? That way I can cover costs without getting people stuck into a subscription...
I paid for R# out of pocket monthly for years between multiple companies when I was programming in C#. I can’t imagine any other tool that I’ve come across that I wanted.
Got any examples of small web tools that people are charging for?
I built a tool that lets you read any article and especially and newsletter on Kindle. I charge $6-$10 monthly or about $60-$85 yearly for it and >150 active subscribers. The yearly pre-payment that's about 20% cheaper than monthly is by far the most popular plan.
Indiehackers.com has stripe-verified revenue for many small saas so check that out to see what makes money. General trend is other than the AI assistant bubble, the money is in marketing automation. The bar is high for dev tools. You compete with Jetbrains for quality and a lot of free stuff for price. Unless you are very niche. E.g. I think something like a tool that solves kubernetes soc2 compliance sort of thing.
I could probably name like 6 companies of the top of my head, all of them being in the boat of "call us and we give you our custom software for your business need", where any competent developer can probably come in, look at the use case, and probably write the entire backed in about 2-3 months (and now with LLMs, 3-4 months for front end and backed).
The thing about monetization of software isn't about usefulness, its about marketing, which starts with realizing that the things that are trivial for you to do are way less trivial for others.
People, no. Companies, yes.
If a web tool saves me and my team at work a bit of time for $5/month, yes, 100%, swipe the company card! Sure let’s buy another JS table library.
But if I’m working on a personal project, or I have to pay for said tool with my personal card, probably not. I’ll spend the time building my own solution from scratch while never actually finishing my project.
Speaking for myself: NO.
Perhaps HN is not the best audience to ask this question. A mostly tech savvy audience is more likely to solve their personal needs with a quick script, etc.
From a business perspective, you need to frame your MVP in terms of what problem you are solving? How many people really do have that problem? Of those people how many are willing to pay for the solution?
Whether you use AI or not is largely irrelevant. The knowledge of a specific domain and the typical problems encountered therein are far more relevant.
Yeah agreed with AI being irrelevant. I most mention that to explain that rather than just hosting costs, there are additional costs for model inference that make it a lot harder to break even. I'm fine with little to no profit as long as I can at least avoid losing money on side projects haha
$5/month is sort of the worst spot. I'd pay $1/month for some things (budgeting tools) and $20/month for say, chatgpt. And I paid $5 lifetime (life being ~5 years) for a resume tool once.
These days AI will probably build most of the things you'd charge a tiny fee for. $5/month is kind of the rate of a battle pass for a MMO, not quite a "small tool".
there's a lot of web stuff and tools I'd love to make
Make that stiff because doing what you love is doing what you love.
$5/mo
As a business, that is a terrible price. It is not enough money to provide good service and outsource all the things that should be outsourced. [1] Even worse good potential customers know this and bad potential customers don’t care if your business is unsustainable.
[1]: At five bucks a month you will need thousands of customers to cover one well-paid employee [2} focused on customer service, but acquiring, retaining, and servicing thousands of customers probably requires more than one full-time employee…
[2]: Of course if you are doing what you love, then being paid well might not matter. But unless you love solving billing problems, you will be doing some things you don’t love. But being well paid to do what you love is not bad.
Personally, no, I would not pay $5/mo for some small single-use tool. Some tools I would (and have) pay per use.
For a subscription, no. If it's a really good tool, I'd pay some small amount under $20 depending on what it is.
ironically, at $5/mo? no.
at $60/mo without even asking a question about the product? yep, all the time.
I think you are asking the right question here. Before building something determine if there is a market, and if that market will pay.
Personally my gut says no. I personally don't use any tools in that range, but I also think that at first glance the numbers don't add up.
Firstly, people pay for value. You seem to feel your ideas are low value (hence the low price) which means you don't really expect users to use it a lot. And "very occasional use" doesn't motivate me to go to the effort of paying.
Since the absolute number is low, you're either expecting really tiny numbers or you're hoping for really high numbers. The tiny numbers result in tiny revenues and tiny profits, so what's the point?
High numbers of people are likely to consume all that revenue. If you got high numbers you'd like ho the ads based route, with maybe a premium "no ads" subscription. But then you can charge more (getting rid of ads is $20 value.)
But again people dont pay for occasional use. If the use is frequent then it's likely more valuable than 5$.
To answer your root question - people don't "subscribe" to single-use tools (if by single-use you mean one-time-use.)
Perhaps you need to charge more? (People pay $10 for a coffee and that's single use). Or charge per use?
See that's my challenge! Very well put. I see a lot of influencers bragging about mini SaaS apps being profitable but I don't know if I really see how. I'm more interested in multi-use simple tools. For example, an app that solves a common small problem/inconvenience really well is probably worth $5/mo (I would probably pay for that), but I can't imagine anyone just buys subscriptions to indie apps haha. I'm honestly happy with very low profit if it's possible. I love building stuff as a hobby and I'd just like to make enough money to cover my hosting costs so I can run side projects that cost me a bit to deploy. Maybe a better model is 1-2 free uses and then sign up and then charge per use at-cost? That way I can cover costs without getting people stuck into a subscription...
What problem(s) are you looking to solve?
I paid for R# out of pocket monthly for years between multiple companies when I was programming in C#. I can’t imagine any other tool that I’ve come across that I wanted.
Got any examples of small web tools that people are charging for?
Depends. I don't pay for much these days