Original Summary

I run TranscriptYT, a small API that returns YouTube transcripts for developers and AI agents. It's usage-based: one credit per transcript. Here are a few lessons I wish I'd known before pricing it. Work out your real cost per request before choosing prices. My biggest variable cost is proxy bandwidth. My first estimate was about 5x too high because I was measuring bytes wrong. The real figure is about $0.35 per 1,000 requests. I almost priced the whole thing around the wrong number. Only charge for successful requests. Failed requests cost the customer nothing. That makes my margins depend on my reliability, which is pressure I want anyway. It's also the first thing people ask about. Small credit packs shouldn't be cheaper than your cheapest plan. I added one-off credit packs, and my first pricing made a small pack cheaper per credit than my $3/month plan, so nobody had a reason to subscribe. Now small packs cost the same as the entry plan, and cheaper rates only come with large purchases. Don't build on a free tier you can't upgrade. My AI transcription relied on one provider's free tier, and that provider closed upgrades when I needed more. I moved to a paid provider at about $0.0002 per minute and kept the old one as a fallback. Now every paid feature has a second provider behind it. Cheap infrastructure fails in strange ways. My Redis cache hit its 250 MB quota. The rate limiter then failed closed, and every free user got "too many requests". Now big objects go to Postgres, cache entries expire after a day, and I get an email when Redis errors. Bill AI features by actual cost. Summaries reserve credits up front from an estimate, then settle to the provider's reported token usage. A long video can't cost me more than it earns. Still early: a handful of paying customers, mostly developers building AI tools. For other usage-based founders, how did you decide between subscriptions and pay-as-you-go?   submitted by   /u/fedit2508 [link]   [comments]

  • 情报分类：技术学习与提效
  • 分类依据：内容涉及技术、AI、软件工具或工程实践
  • 信息来源：Reddit · SaaS
  • 发布时间：2026/10/19 12:28:29