Their Boring Lookup Tool Hit $80K Per Month

Michele and Mathias Hansen run Geocodio, a service that turns street addresses into map coordinates 📍

Developers plug it into their apps, and analysts upload whole spreadsheets of addresses.

The couple built it after hitting Google’s daily limits on a map app of their own. Mathias explains…

So either there was a free tier with some very hard limits, or you had to pay $10,000 a year as a starting point…

Google’s terms also banned storing the results.

So in 2014 they launched a much cheaper version with no storage restrictions, and it paid its own server bill from the first month.

Indie Hackers lists Geocodio’s peak revenue at $80K+ a month 🤑

Plenty of their big customers started small…

One developer on a team tried us out for free, found that it just worked, and spread the word within their organization. As their needs grew, we grew with them.

Today the first 2,500 lookups a day are free, then it’s $1 per 1,000, and a dedicated enterprise server starts at $3,250 a month.

It took the Hansens three years to go full time, though.

Brian Fritz built a much smaller version of this, an API called OMDb that developers use to pull movie info into their apps.

About 3,900 people pay for it monthly through Patreon, from $1 a month for 100K requests a day up to $25.

Graphtreon estimates Brian’s earnings at $6K to $33K a month, but with most people likely on the $1 tier, I’d guess more like $5K to $10K 🤔

Find a data lookup developers keep needing where the big provider’s pricing or terms get in the way, then sell it pay-as-you-go with a free daily allowance.

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