Comment by laktek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by laktek | Hacker News Reader

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Thanks for the comment! So both Screen.rip and Page.REST are my way of validating the market. I don't expect these API services to be the end product (but rather the building blocks for bigger ideas).

However, APIs do seem to arouse curiosity among people. Lot of the emails I've been getting follows the theme of "I saw your API and was wondering how we can use to solve X". This way I get a more focused set of real problems (and their potential value), rather than I try to hypothesis problem spaces.

PS: Another cool thing about releasing API first is I can start charging people sooner, rather than having to wait till I build a finished product. It helps since I'm bootstrapping.

$7 is cheap imo. I paid for a service similar to yours for years. Their price point was close to 10 times as high as yours, yet I happily paid my monthly subscription.

I love this.

$7 for 10,000 is not that cheap ($0.0007 per screenshot). I'm charging $0.000365 per screenshot and I thought that was on the higher end.

https://www.prerender.cloud/docs/api

  curl http://service.prerender.cloud/screenshot/https://google.com/ > out.jpg

I paid 10 times more for years happily.

Now, the question is, did you already charged anyone with these APIs? Do yo want to share any concrete experience since you are bootstrapping?

Yes, I blogged about it on the experience of releasing Page.REST https://www.laktek.com/what-i-learned-from-building-pagerest...

(and people have purchased Screen.rip tokens in the last hour or so :))

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