Original Summary

I have a day job and wanted a side project that could earn without me running servers or doing support at 11pm. So I built a portfolio of small data APIs on Apify Store: they host the code, meter usage, invoice users, handle tax and pay out monthly. I write the code and answer the Issues tab. Nine of them, all deliberately boring: tech stack detection, bulk PageSpeed audits, App Store and Play reviews, remote job listings from five boards, screenshots, Google autocomplete, PDF text, sitemap URLs, RSS to JSON. https://apify.com/josh99smith The pricing model is the interesting part. Instead of a subscription, users pay per delivered result: $0.005 a screenshot, $0.008 a tech stack lookup, $0.00015 an app review. Failures cost nothing and every run has a hard cost cap. That constraint is good for the code, because it forces you to define what a result is. A 200 response full of junk must not bill, so everything validates the payload before charging. Three things I learned: Marketplace rank is almost entirely usage-driven. A brand-new listing starts at the bottom no matter how good it is, and the only way out is traffic from somewhere else. I am at position 5 for one query and position 161 for another, purely because nobody has run them yet. The value is in boring reliability, not features. Same output schema across sources, failure records that say why in a fixed vocabulary, and a budget guard that survives concurrency. Mine did not at first: a stress test delivered 1,000 items while charging for 501, because concurrent handlers read the same remaining budget. Took a day to fix properly. Open sourcing everything cost me nothing and removed the "what is this doing with my URLs" question entirely. Current status: four days live, zero external users, $0 revenue. I will post real numbers monthly whether they are good or embarrassing. If you have sold on a marketplace like this, I would genuinely like to know what got you your first ten users, because that is the part I have not solved.   submitted by   /u/josh99smith [link]   [comments]

  • 情报分类：工作与职业机会
  • 分类依据：内容涉及招聘、求职或职业发展
  • 信息来源：Reddit · SideProject
  • 发布时间：2026/9/22 21:46:20