Ask HN: Do people actually pay for small web tools?

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.

Currently I pay for LWN, SourceHut, and an email service I'm trying out. I often forget to read LWN for weeks, but I keep renewing it year after year, because I honestly love taking a few minutes out of my morning, get coffee and read an article or two.

SourceHut, I don't use as much as I'd like, but the build and chat services keeps me paying. It's cheap, and I get a lot of enjoyment from using it.

I think if you do these types of services, then you really need to make sure that people feel good about using your service. I know that's a tricky and rather fluffy goal, but you either need to be REALLY good and then you can charge more than $5, or you can make people feel good and if the amount is low, it becomes an easy renewal next month/year.

If you're making a tool, fixed price for the current version, upgrade price for the next version, no subscription. I think we're at a point in time where your target audience would rather fork over $25 right now and then get a license, but would be hard press to give you $5 per month, even for a single month.

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.

It saddens me to read some of the "no" responses, since I just shipped a few days ago exactly the type of small web app that OP speaks of. I personally find it really useful and wished I had this tool every single time at work. And the original version I made for the Mac App Store 10 years ago was a huge hit, placing in the top 5 rankings for over several weeks worldwide.

As I've grown older, I like to pay for things that make my life more efficient. Even if they are a subscription, and even if I feel like everything unfortunately has turned into a subscription and even if I feel like it should be cheaper. Hacking or finding workarounds to achieve the same thing for free is just not worth my time, and I value my time and boundaries more as I age.

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.

You’re going to get very biased answers to these questions because the people paying for tools don’t post on webforums. They’re generally paying because they care so little about the problem they’re willing to throw money at it to make it go away.

That being said, also $5 is a terrible price. People who pay too much attention to people who post on web forums get gun shy and are afraid to discover what people are actually willing to pay for things.

Everyone who has ever raised their prices has said consistently that a) the number of people who left was below their expectations and b) the people who left were overwhelmingly their most complaining customers who caused the most support burden.

$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".

20/year maybe, 5/month very rarely. At 5/month on my personal credit card there are so many tools out there that there is usually something, in a different space, that I could spend on. I don't want to be eaten alive by subscriptions, so I made a budget and I'm at limit for subscriptions.

Obviously I would be better off trying to reduce my grocery costs instead (spend way more), but personal subscription translates in my brain to "I should be using this almost every day" and that is rarely the case for these tools. Exceptions are YNAB, Logseq, raindrop

No, there is a threshold for the amount of subscriptions/SaaS I tolerate, and it’s basically a tiny handful of them and they’re occupied by streaming services etc. So your feeling is right, when it comes to me at least.

The App Store model of small one-off payments works for this use-case. But no matter how useful a web tool is I don’t think I’d ever sign up for a small monthly fee for it. The ”mental overhead” of that is absolutely massive.

Sadly even one off payments for web tools are a poor UX since there is no central broker to take care of it. Next time I visit I (maybe a different browser etc) it’s a hassle.

I’d much rather just use a worse tool that is free. Because SaaS fatigue is real. Sorry hobbyists and startup dreamers I’m not paying money for your SaaS. Not because it’s not good enough but because it’s nearly impossible to be good enough to make me go through a subscription process. Even as an older person who can afford it and is used to paying for things, I’d much rather waste hours of my own time than pay a subscription. Importantly, I’d also much rather pay $100 once than $5/mo even if I don’t foresee using it for more than a year.

Make it an App Store app and you can easily get $10 from me though, is the sad reality of it.

I could probably name like 6 companies of the top of my head, all of them being in the boat of "call us and we give you our custom software for your business need", where any competent developer can probably come in, look at the use case, and probably write the entire backed in about 2-3 months (and now with LLMs, 3-4 months for front end and backed).

The thing about monetization of software isn't about usefulness, its about marketing, which starts with realizing that the things that are trivial for you to do are way less trivial for others.

I built a tool that lets you read any article and especially and newsletter on Kindle. I charge $6-$10 monthly or about $60-$85 yearly for it and >150 active subscribers. The yearly pre-payment that's about 20% cheaper than monthly is by far the most popular plan.

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.