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.

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.

11 hours agoby coolcase

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.

1 day agoby delbronski

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.

1 day agoby GianFabien

$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".

1 day agoby muzani

Personally, no, I would not pay $5/mo for some small single-use tool. Some tools I would (and have) pay per use.

14 hours agoby KomoD

For a subscription, no. If it's a really good tool, I'd pay some small amount under $20 depending on what it is.

15 hours agoby giantg2

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.

23 hours agoby brudgers

ironically, at $5/mo? no.

at $60/mo without even asking a question about the product? yep, all the time.

1 day agoby rozenmd

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?

1 day agoby bruce511

What problem(s) are you looking to solve?

1 day agoby pyb

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?

21 hours agoby scarface_74

Depends. I don't pay for much these days

1 day agoby cranberryturkey