Would you consider a pay-as-you go option, perhaps with a deposit?
Right now, I won't subscribe for $12 per month (or $25 for API). But I have some use for both the interactive and API conversions and am happy to pay per conversion, so a pre-paid version (like OpenRouter) would be great.
I interpreted it as "enough to live a comfortable life".
Money is part of how you get there, but it is not a goal in itself. Many start businesses where money is the main goal, and where the amount that you are satisfied with inevitably shifts once you get richer
Considering that their cheapest pricing is $12 (per month, 1 month minimum) and they claim 550 million users, either they made tons of riches or the numbers are to be questioned. I leave it to you to estimate which is more likely.
Hi. Congratulations and thanks; it just happened that today I needed an .mp3 to .txt conversion and used your site. Nice to see it here now. All the best!
My first thought was "imagine the astonishing amount of private documents and PII you could collect and store if you ran something like this for free as a honeypot". People just blithely uploading any document from their personal data to convert to another format.
And if I would have to guess it's less technical users who aren't going to try something like opening a document in the latest Libreoffice (or gimp, etc) and then exporting it to another format, using local software on their computer, first.
I use this all the time, especially for epub to pdf.
Tried doing it with pandoc and the result was similar but less good. (I like it when the result is more good.)
It's amazing how many formats they support. It's kind of strange that this isn't built into the computer, though. Without Zamzar, the computer still lives in the pre-Babelfish era...
Respectfully, it sounds as if your assumptions about the market for LLM/Agent tools is out of date by a long way. I don’t have any stats but it’s easy to observe that Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT et al are aggressively marketing their products to non developer business users, and pretty much everyone I know who is non technical has heard of at least one of those and uses it regularly in their work.
They said Claude. I'm pretty sure most normies have never heard of Claude. ChatGPT, yes. It's shortened to just "chat" now. But most people have no idea what Claude is.
> pretty much everyone I know who is non technical has heard of at least one of those and uses it regularly in their work
Rather than using this as your world-view, I think you should take this as a signal to expand the current bubble you live in. I'm guessing most of these people you refer to as "non technical" are still white-collar workers or similar?
Most people in the world, even with all the marketing towards "non developer business users", has never heard of "Claude", "Gemini", "Grok" or anything else LLM-adjacent like that, but will have some light understanding of "ChatGPT", and might actually be using some AI service via their phone or whatever, but still call that "ChatGPT" as that's essentially synonymous with "AI" in common parlance.
Always glad to see success stories. But some stuff does not check out.
> Over 550 million people have used Zamzar since launch,
There are 8.3 billion people on earth. You are saying that about 1 in 42 have used your service? I had never heard of it and I don't know anybody who had. And that's a sample that should be biased in your favor. Sorry, does not pass the smell test.
Or maybe they were not unique visitors, containing duplicates? How many? This makes me skeptical of the remaining statistics on the page.
> converting over 766 million files. We now process over 1 million API requests per day.
1 million per day now and 766 million over 20 years? At the current rate you'd achieve that in about 2 years. This would indicate a rapid growth in the last couple years or even just months. It is unclear why that would be reasonable. Especially since you'd probably have emphasized this explosion more if your service was essentially dormant for 19 years and just recently went through the roof. (Sth like "how we handled 100x growth of our SaaS business over 3 months")
After these two data points I stopped reading. Something doesn't feel right.
Each file should be represented by at least three API requests, one to upload the file, one or more to check whether it's done, and one to download it. Together with the other calls of their API, I'd guess a files-to-API request ratio in the order of 1:10 rather than 1:1.
Looking at their website they support file uploads and API. They probably count those separately.
The numbers make sense to me, because I assume an API is used for high volume processing by other businesses and manual upload of files is done by individuals
They may have been inaccurate in their description, but that's what happens when regular people write articles and not scientists, engineers or LLM
It is a little over the top and something is off with some of these accounts. Maybe there is a market to get yourself pushed to the front page of HN for money?
45 comments:
Congrats!
Would you consider a pay-as-you go option, perhaps with a deposit?
Right now, I won't subscribe for $12 per month (or $25 for API). But I have some use for both the interactive and API conversions and am happy to pay per conversion, so a pre-paid version (like OpenRouter) would be great.
Wow I have used this a long time ago and happy to find the origin story on HN.
Great job and thanks!
Really happy for you. It's my dream to run such a business for so long, as a side, with a real user base, and not for money.
How is it a business if not for money?
Let's say money as a proxy for "being non-trivial" or worth enough for someone to pay for. I don't know how else this can be signalled.
"Side" in the sense that my main income coming from somewhere else, aka my "normal" job
Time isn’t money, money is time.
Money that doesn’t need to be spent is freedom of time.
Money is valuable partly because it can buy time, but time is valuable independently of money.
I interpreted it as "enough to live a comfortable life".
Money is part of how you get there, but it is not a goal in itself. Many start businesses where money is the main goal, and where the amount that you are satisfied with inevitably shifts once you get richer
Considering that their cheapest pricing is $12 (per month, 1 month minimum) and they claim 550 million users, either they made tons of riches or the numbers are to be questioned. I leave it to you to estimate which is more likely.
I don't think that means paid users.
They also have a paid API.
Is this your first time encountering a freemium business model?
Doubt worshipping finds ways to not find a way to make something happen. Just because one person can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not possible.
Hi. Congratulations and thanks; it just happened that today I needed an .mp3 to .txt conversion and used your site. Nice to see it here now. All the best!
> I needed an .mp3 to .txt conversion
?
Also known as transcription, I suppose.
Does it give you the tabs?
Only speech transcription, probably.
Their web page provides a list of ‘convert mp3 to’ formats
https://www.zamzar.com/converters/audio/mp3/
Is it bad that taking a look at the homepage: https://www.zamzar.com/
My first thought was "imagine the astonishing amount of private documents and PII you could collect and store if you ran something like this for free as a honeypot". People just blithely uploading any document from their personal data to convert to another format.
And if I would have to guess it's less technical users who aren't going to try something like opening a document in the latest Libreoffice (or gimp, etc) and then exporting it to another format, using local software on their computer, first.
I know for a fact that these honeypots exist.
Yet some people still use them.
Why don’t you create an alternative?
Well this is what people do with AI. Uploading their whole life with no second thought. But surely we can trust big tech, right?
Are you guys using CGI-BIN or some other technology?
I use this all the time, especially for epub to pdf.
Tried doing it with pandoc and the result was similar but less good. (I like it when the result is more good.)
It's amazing how many formats they support. It's kind of strange that this isn't built into the computer, though. Without Zamzar, the computer still lives in the pre-Babelfish era...
How has revenue changed during the AI period? Are you guys able to maintain or grow with the rise of coding agents?
[edit: what’s with the downvotes? I love the story and am curious if Claude etc have affected their business.]
I’m pretty sure more than 90 percent of their audience never heard of Claude.
They are regular users, not developers.
Respectfully, it sounds as if your assumptions about the market for LLM/Agent tools is out of date by a long way. I don’t have any stats but it’s easy to observe that Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT et al are aggressively marketing their products to non developer business users, and pretty much everyone I know who is non technical has heard of at least one of those and uses it regularly in their work.
They said Claude. I'm pretty sure most normies have never heard of Claude. ChatGPT, yes. It's shortened to just "chat" now. But most people have no idea what Claude is.
ChatGPT can also convert between files.
Claude etc have been on mainstream national news here in Australia multiple time in the last few months
>I don’t have any stats
ok.
> pretty much everyone I know who is non technical has heard of at least one of those and uses it regularly in their work
Rather than using this as your world-view, I think you should take this as a signal to expand the current bubble you live in. I'm guessing most of these people you refer to as "non technical" are still white-collar workers or similar?
Most people in the world, even with all the marketing towards "non developer business users", has never heard of "Claude", "Gemini", "Grok" or anything else LLM-adjacent like that, but will have some light understanding of "ChatGPT", and might actually be using some AI service via their phone or whatever, but still call that "ChatGPT" as that's essentially synonymous with "AI" in common parlance.
https://developers.zamzar.com/
Only a tiny amount of people use ai this productively or know its possible
Great and very motivating story, thank you for that!
Always glad to see success stories. But some stuff does not check out.
> Over 550 million people have used Zamzar since launch,
There are 8.3 billion people on earth. You are saying that about 1 in 42 have used your service? I had never heard of it and I don't know anybody who had. And that's a sample that should be biased in your favor. Sorry, does not pass the smell test.
Or maybe they were not unique visitors, containing duplicates? How many? This makes me skeptical of the remaining statistics on the page.
> converting over 766 million files. We now process over 1 million API requests per day.
1 million per day now and 766 million over 20 years? At the current rate you'd achieve that in about 2 years. This would indicate a rapid growth in the last couple years or even just months. It is unclear why that would be reasonable. Especially since you'd probably have emphasized this explosion more if your service was essentially dormant for 19 years and just recently went through the roof. (Sth like "how we handled 100x growth of our SaaS business over 3 months")
After these two data points I stopped reading. Something doesn't feel right.
Each file should be represented by at least three API requests, one to upload the file, one or more to check whether it's done, and one to download it. Together with the other calls of their API, I'd guess a files-to-API request ratio in the order of 1:10 rather than 1:1.
Looking at their website they support file uploads and API. They probably count those separately.
The numbers make sense to me, because I assume an API is used for high volume processing by other businesses and manual upload of files is done by individuals
They may have been inaccurate in their description, but that's what happens when regular people write articles and not scientists, engineers or LLM
Who cares?
Maybe because it smells like self promotion? Anyway, good work if it's actually true
It’s a website for a commercial product. Of course it is self-promotion! How could it possibly not be so?
You don't care whether an article that ends up on HN front page contains legit information?
Judging by the nature of the site (file conversion) and comments — has HN been invaded by bots here?
It is a little over the top and something is off with some of these accounts. Maybe there is a market to get yourself pushed to the front page of HN for money?
Yeah this one looks very boted. Not typical HN comments at all