Hacker News Reader

Comment by asim | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the feedback on pricing. Yea we understand the initial cost on some APIs might seem high in aggregate but what you see is what you get. Unlike AWS who bill you in aggregate across storage, egress, etc, we only have one cost - the price per request. So some costs are baked in but we as developers ourselves totally get it and pricing will definitely evolve. Thanks again for the feedback.

View on HN

Likely an unreasonable ask, specially considering that you folks are just starting out - but have you considered adding a free tier for hobbyists and pet projects?

Most of you competitors have some form of free tier and cheapo devs like me would prefer to embrace some complexity over paying upfront for just simple projects. the $5 starting bit is great but is not the same as a limited free tier.

Overall love the idea and wish you all the best. Love the minimalistic/functional UX of the site as well.

Free tier was something we've had previously but it became hard to justify because of our third party integrations and what it costs us. It might be something we try figure out in the future. Thanks for the feedback.

That's reasonable—glad to know you considered it. Two alternatives to the free tier for single or small-batch uses so that you don't need to deal with payment information and reduce sign-up friction:

User completes a human-level task (for another API even) somewhere between CAPTCHA and MTurk to earn a few API calls.

Do something with ads near or even on the result to earn a few API calls. (Prototyping dev eyeballs are valuable.)

A free tier that didn't allow third party integrations might work if that's really your sticking point.

But honestly nothing wrong with charging money for a service.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com