Comment by takkatakka
2 years ago
I built https://bankstatement2csv.com It's a pdf bank statement to csv converter (which seems like an increasingly popular niche for solo devs), making $550/month as of today.
Marketing is challenging, and have only really had some minor success using ppc. Also, I have a fairly high churn rate (like 30%). From talking with users, it's mostly from individuals or small business owners that convert their statements from the year and then are done. Book keepers and CPAs tend to keep their subscriptions, which makes sense.
Tech stack: Java, Javalin, Jooq, PdfBox, JavaScript, React, Tailwind
Hosted on DO
Since you are struggling with churn, maybe this solution is not suitable for subscriptions. Instead, it's better to charge a much higher one-time fee for occasional users who have no chance of converting to permanent subscriptions anyway? It enables you to focus on real ones.
Regarding selling it as an API. In Europe, PSD2 is the standard to provide third-party read-only access to banking data. I am using this to make my business bank account accessible to accounting SaaS. PSD2 requires renewal access every 3 months. At the same time, I have a summary of transactions in my e-mail every, so I would rather set forwarding once than keep to renew PSD2 (I set it, it expired and I do it manually).
I am working on a PSD2 / Open Banking solution to aggregate bank statements into a single CSV / webhook response. I think the target audience is business having multiple bank accounts and not only wants to have a CSV version, but also aggregating may be a large number of bank accounts their are using. https://www.bankaccountchecker.com
That's awesome!
I wonder if you could make this an API you could sell to devs/businesses? It's a different customer, but maybe something you could expand into.
Thanks for sharing the details!