
Ask HN: What's an app you'd pay $5/month for? - stopachka
I'm looking to build apps and learn as much as I can about programming, rails, APIs etc.<p>HMers, what's something that's been bugging you?<p>I'd love to make something here, for All HN to see.<p>Why $5?<p>Anytime someone is willing to pay any sort of money, it becomes a clearer problem :P. Plus it's a lot more motivating to make money + program<p>---<p>Edit : There seem to be some really good ideas here! it might just make a nice resource that new hackers can use to start and Show HN
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damian2000
Anything that will save me more than $10 per month. E.g. could save me money
on bills, fees, government charges, tax, anything. But it has to be on
something I am already spending money on (e.g. a recurring spend).

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stopachka
Interesting. What are you currently spending money on? Is there a process you
hate to do, that you do anyways on what you're spending money on?

These are pretty loaded questions, but even a brief answer will be very
appreciated :)

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damian2000
Some examples ... insurance, mortgage, car loan, internet, mobile phone,
usenet, web hosting. Maybe an app could help in finding better/cheaper deals
with some of these... probably difficult to automate much of that though.

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OafTobark
Who do you use for usenet? What for primarily? Any good?

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damian2000
Astraweb - no complaints - $10 a month. Never hit any limits yet. I download
TV shows and such like (via NZB) that I can't find anywhere else. Much better
than torrent.

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DanBC
A subscription to something like Longform - curated stories of interest to me.
For $5 per month I'd like to have ad free versions of the stories, with better
than normal styling.

~~~
stopachka
Very interesting as well! I took a look at their site, and it did seem hard to
parse with the styling.

So the current reason you aren't happy with Longform are the ads and the
styling?

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DanBC
Oh,I'm happy with Longform.

But I'm happy to pay for great content. I think that's a clear signal to
producers to keep making great content. Until micropayments are sorted and I
can pay each different newspaper for every article I read I guess it'd make
sense for users to pay the aggregator who then pays the papers based on
article read rates.

There's some thorny problems there to be sorted out.

The styling thing is mostly my personal preference; I like big san-serif dark
fonts on a light yellow (#ffffcc) background. I use browser plugins at the
moment.

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jeffool
A service that did bandwidth intense tasks for me. If I'm on my cell phone,
I'd like to be able to take a link to an mp3 file hosted anywhere, and have an
"upload to Google Music/Amazon/etc" option. The key would be to have you, the
service provider, download and upload the file. Send me an email when it's
done. This would be infinitely convenient for me when it comes to podcasts,
videos, large DJ sets, conference footage, etc.

I say this as someone on America. I imagine you could find a few users in
nations where virtually all services are metered. And once you program your
tool once, it's automated.

The work is finding what services allow this, and adding then to your
framework as requested. And, of course, your own bandwidth/storage bill...

Maybe this is best as a feature for existing data lockers.

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jeffool
In the exceptionally rare case someone comes across this in the future, I've
been informed that someone is doing this with DropBox! It's called URLDroplet,
and is at urldroplet.com!

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venomsnake
I am already paying that for Backblaze.

Okay - here are some services that can be automated. Deal hunters - I say I
want 240 GB SSD or 7970 for x, you scrape regularly some interesting places
(newegg, ebay etc) and if something drops - notify me and charge me a dollar.

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alpb
I covered this in my blog and it has many answer comments:
<http://ahmetalpbalkan.com/blog/the-5-saas/>

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joonix
There are plenty of things I would, and do, pay monthly for. An app still
isn't one of them.

My point is there's opportunity everywhere and people these days think it's
only in software.

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murtza
Exactly. Two examples for inspiration: Manpacks and Candy Japan (the owner is
on HN). There is also a startup based out of Mountain View that delivers new
games and puzzles for kids every month, but I cannot remember the name of it.

<http://www.manpacks.com/> <http://www.candyjapan.com/>

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thekillerdev
Do you, by any chance, knows who is the owner of those? i would like to be
able to contact him directly.

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bdr
A web service that makes it easier to debug problems that users of my website
are encountering, by recording all console log statements and letting me
filter and search on various dimensions.
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4081806>

I'm not sure how many other people want this. But you'd be saving developer-
hours, which are worth a lot, and could charge accordingly.

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zengr
Something like a combination newrelic and keen.io?

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anywherenotes
How about a coupon manager. For example I scan all the items I'm buying at a
store using the app, and it finds all the coupons available from that store or
manufacturer. Than I hand over the phone to clerk, who scans it, and all the
coupons are applied.

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eytanlevit
These guys are doing EXACTLY what you just described, great idea!

<http://www.saverrapp.com/>

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r00fus
An feed (RSS/twitter) reader that takes voice (or wand-like) commands, reads
me the entries so I can commute and listen to meaningful news without blind
tapping my phone.

This is worth $5/mo to me.

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stopachka
That's really interesting! It could be cool to learn how to interact with
Twitter, as well as Voice API's. The only downside I forsee is that hearing
the news might be unbearable, with the text-to-speech type of stuff.

Thanks for the suggestion r00fus

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murrain
Try <http://voicebunny.com/>. They have an API, or listing the jobs on
Mechanical Turk to be read by a human.

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qweasd321
A fart app.

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jorts
Someday I'll be able to downvote you.

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mdonahoe
Would you pay $5 a month for the ability to downvote?

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shanelja
I would pay $5 per month to be able to down vote, to be honest.

