Running a bootstrapped SaaS for 20 years with my brother
blog.zamzar.com
blog.zamzar.com
Would you consider a pay-as-you go option, perhaps with a deposit?
Right now, I won't subscribe for $12 per month (or $25 for API). But I have some use for both the interactive and API conversions and am happy to pay per conversion, so a pre-paid version (like OpenRouter) would be great.
My first thought was "imagine the astonishing amount of private documents and PII you could collect and store if you ran something like this for free as a honeypot". People just blithely uploading any document from their personal data to convert to another format.
And if I would have to guess it's less technical users who aren't going to try something like opening a document in the latest Libreoffice (or gimp, etc) and then exporting it to another format, using local software on their computer, first.
Why don’t you create an alternative?
Money is part of how you get there, but it is not a goal in itself. Many start businesses where money is the main goal, and where the amount that you are satisfied with inevitably shifts once you get richer
They also have a paid API.
"Side" in the sense that my main income coming from somewhere else, aka my "normal" job
Money that doesn’t need to be spent is freedom of time.
?
Great job and thanks!
[edit: what’s with the downvotes? I love the story and am curious if Claude etc have affected their business.]
They are regular users, not developers.
ok.
Rather than using this as your world-view, I think you should take this as a signal to expand the current bubble you live in. I'm guessing most of these people you refer to as "non technical" are still white-collar workers or similar?
Most people in the world, even with all the marketing towards "non developer business users", has never heard of "Claude", "Gemini", "Grok" or anything else LLM-adjacent like that, but will have some light understanding of "ChatGPT", and might actually be using some AI service via their phone or whatever, but still call that "ChatGPT" as that's essentially synonymous with "AI" in common parlance.
This is a case study of how a software company can still make money in the age of ai.
My guess is that the impact of ai on the business won't be too much as they have a good brand and a loyal customer base whereas the vibecoded ones will have a hard time getting noticed by customers. They will also have a competitive advantage by being able to handle so many different types of files, by being a one-stop-shop if you like. They will be able to attract more customers by handling really obscure file formats and in some cases by being able to do a better job of the conversion (desktop publishing and vector formats are an example). There is probably a power advantage of being able to convert n filetypes to m different formats where n and m are very large.
If they've been in business this long, they must have, by now, internal filetypes for specific classes of formats. For example, all rgb files first convert to an RGB format, and then to the destination format. Or, all transcription first convert to an internal format, and then to the destination format.
Not sure how you'd handle .ps or .pdf files in this way, though.
Tried doing it with pandoc and the result was similar but less good. (I like it when the result is more good.)
It's amazing how many formats they support. It's kind of strange that this isn't built into the computer, though. Without Zamzar, the computer still lives in the pre-Babelfish era...
> Over 550 million people have used Zamzar since launch,
There are 8.3 billion people on earth. You are saying that about 1 in 42 have used your service? I had never heard of it and I don't know anybody who had. And that's a sample that should be biased in your favor. Sorry, does not pass the smell test.
Or maybe they were not unique visitors, containing duplicates? How many? This makes me skeptical of the remaining statistics on the page.
> converting over 766 million files. We now process over 1 million API requests per day.
1 million per day now and 766 million over 20 years? At the current rate you'd achieve that in about 2 years. This would indicate a rapid growth in the last couple years or even just months. It is unclear why that would be reasonable. Especially since you'd probably have emphasized this explosion more if your service was essentially dormant for 19 years and just recently went through the roof. (Sth like "how we handled 100x growth of our SaaS business over 3 months")
After these two data points I stopped reading. Something doesn't feel right.
The numbers make sense to me, because I assume an API is used for high volume processing by other businesses and manual upload of files is done by individuals
They may have been inaccurate in their description, but that's what happens when regular people write articles and not scientists, engineers or LLM
The precise wording, again:
> Over 550 million people have used Zamzar since launch
How is "over X million people have done ..." making it obvious that they were not unique?
If you go to a Taylor Swift concert and the newspaper next day headlines "over 60000 people were in the audience", does that mean to you that it was obviously just a handful and they were counted multiple times?