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Comment by mtlynch

7 days ago

Not making a living, but I make about $200/mo from an API that parses recipe ingredients like "2 cups finely chopped onions" into structured JSON.[0]

I put it in maintenance mode in 2019, so it's about 99% passive income, as I spend only about an hour or two on maintenance per year.

I'm surprised all my clients haven't switched to LLMs, but maybe I still outdo LLMs on price/accuracy since it's so niche.

I'd like to sell it to someone who wants to do something with it, but it would probably take me 30-40 hours to package everything up to hand off to someone, so I consider just the opportunity cost there to be around $5-10k, and I don't think anyone wants to pay $10k for an API that makes $200/mo.

What I wish I knew: don't use RapidAPI. They charge 20%, they have a terrible interface, and they let customers run up huge charges and walk away without paying anything. I wish I'd just rolled my own simple thing with Paddle.

[0] https://zestfuldata.com/

9 comments

mtlynch

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soared  7 days ago

I made this exact website with ChatGPT’s API to prep for an interview a couple months ago! Biggest hurdle I ran into - asking chatgpt for help on using the chatgpt api was completely useless, as it was trained on a deprecated version of the api so none of its examples even worked.

tkiolp4  7 days ago

In my country it costs around 200 euro/month to be a freelancer (I think most of that money is for health insurance). So making $200/month would be a no go for me. How do people manage to legally earn that money when the margins are so low?

  • mtlynch  7 days ago

    In the US, it doesn't really cost anything to run a business as a sole proprietor. So, I can't live on Zestful, but it's definitely more profitable than not having the business.

  • Suppafly  6 days ago

    >In my country it costs around 200 euro/month to be a freelancer (I think most of that money is for health insurance).

    You get a real job to have health insurance.

  • selcuka  7 days ago

    > it's about 99% passive income, as I spend only about an hour or two on maintenance per year.

    Looks like that $200 is just side income, not their main job.

philipodonnell  7 days ago

What kind of customers are using this API? I’ve had many similar thoughts but I get hung up on the idea that customers are “developers” from a marketing standpoint, because those developers are developing something and that something is probably a bigger driver of utility that a truly generically developer tool like Cursor.

  • mtlynch  7 days ago

    It's generally apps that let users import or enter recipes. The apps want to do more with the recipes like create shopping lists or provide nutritional information.