Would you use a File conversion API with a generous free tier? (Lots of formats)
As part of another project, we developed a file conversion api and we thought it might work well for others but we're not sure if there's a market. We know there are a couple out there such as convertapi.com but generally there are no free tiers and they are quite expensive.
Ours works with many file types - arw, crw, dng, heic, heif, ico, jp2, mef, mrw, nef, nrw, orf, pef, psb, psd, raw, sr2, srf, dfont, otf, ttc, ttf, ai, eps, pdf, csv, doc, docx, xls, xlsx, ppt, pptx. It can also take screenshots of websites and resize images.
Has anyone used a service like this? Or would you try it?
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I'd be cautious about offering a huge free tier, imho the free tier should only proof the functionality of your service to a potential customer.
Had your exact idea a few times never really went through with it because I couldn't find a good market, but I'm pretty sure there needs to be one. Zappier customers for example, SaSS Ecommerce Product users e.g. Shopify, (they install plugins, and discover them from a plugin store). Also small (marketing) agencies they often do a lot of tedious things because they can't afford the "real" tools but could use all kind of tools for example to establish smoother workflows in communication with there customers.
I think you need to market just a small part of your api for one specific use case and then expand from there, as a "i can do everything" api is hard to market.
i've used tinypng.com, which compresses you images on color level with pngquad in the backend, i used them for a clients platform to keep his employees from uploading 3mb for real estate offerings. Worked perfectly but they didn't make to much money of it as there free tier was to huge : (First 500 images per month free Next 9 500 image compressions $0.009 per image)
Hope this finds you well, good luck to you mate !
Yeah good point about the free tier! Doesn't make sense..
Expanding from one use case makes a lot of sense. I guess I need to talk to several different groups of people. Analysing ourselves as a user and asking what we needed isn't particularly useful because we needed an api for all of these different formats and use cases. I don't know how big that market is - and even then it is probably established enterprise so I reckon it would be hard to compete with incumbents who already do a good job and are already well known and trusted. Splitting it to focus on niches might work. I'll have a think. It's possible offering this as an API isn't the best angle..
Thanks so much for your advice anyhow!
The idea is cool, but I guess 99% of people wouldn't use it. Who is your primary audience? I once had a converter endpoint at my job and we built it in house for privacy reasons.
Edit: it's not to discourage you, but you've got to find where your audience lives.
Yeah really need to find who that audience is or as @marv suggested, niche it down.