I released Humm[1] last week. Realtime speech-to-text with a focus on privacy. No backend, no telemetry - just a fast, nicely designed app wrapping local stt models.
A project that I launched on HN that became a business. Simplescraper rode the no-code wave of a few years back ('instant structured data without parsing html').
Now working on increasing the surface area for AI agents: MCP support, screenshots API, and (experimentally) x402[1]
> I'm always a bit wary of approaching these ideas though because I feel like nobody would ever pay for small web stuff?
Build them and find out! There's almost always room for something better, and if what you build is that, then some people will pay.
Unless the tools have large running costs, consider offering them for free (at least at first).
A few things are likely to happen:
Nobody cares enough to sign up – fine, zero users, zero costs.
People use it but don’t stick around – ask them what would make the tool more valuable.
People use it a lot – great, now you can charge for the value.
Two examples come to mind: spaced repetition app Mochi and markdown editor Typora. Mochi is $5 a month, I think. Typora was free and is now a $15 one-time purchase.
Both compete with free alternatives and still have many paying users.
1. Clicking the box programmatically – possible but inconsistent
2. Outsourcing the task to one of the many CAPTCHA-solving services (2Captcha etc) – better
3. Using a pool of reliable IP addresses so you don't encounter checkboxes or turnstiles – best
I run a web scraping startup (https://simplescraper.io) and this is usually the approach[0]. It has become more difficult, and I think a lot of the AI crawlers are peeing in the pool with aggressive scraping, which is making the web a little bit worse for everyone.
[0] Worth mentioning that once you're "in" past the captcha, a smart scraper will try to use fetch to access more pages on the same domain so you only need to solve a fraction of possible captchas.
[1] https://humm.so/