Ask HN: Do people actually pay for small web tools?
Hey all, there's a lot of web stuff and tools I'd love to make that I think would honestly be worth a small subscription ($5/mo maybe). I'm always a bit wary of approaching these ideas though because I feel like nobody would ever pay for small web stuff?
I see a lot of success stories but I don't know how much they can be trusted. Those of you who have built small single-use indie tools, do you find that anybody at all actually subscribes? A lot of the stuff I wanna try involves AI so I'd have to make sure subscription profits offset the cost of providing free demos.
For a subscription, no. If it's a really good tool, I'd pay some small amount under $20 depending on what it is.
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
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.
$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".
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...
ironically, at $5/mo? no.
at $60/mo without even asking a question about the product? yep, all the time.
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
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