Hey all. The founder of Micro here . Micro is a public API platform that puts APIs for everyday use all in one place. One account, one api token, simple, fast and easy to use.

We surfaced on Hackernews maybe 6-8 weeks ago with some really positive feedback however one of the comments that kept coming up was around pricing. Because we're really early in our journey just trying to nail the dev UX we've decided to make the majority of our APIs free during the beta. Right now we're looking for feedback, ideas around the next APIs to offer and the optimal pricing model.

We're not looking to pull the rug out from anyone's feet. When we do announce pricing it'll be after a lot of discovery with existing users and potentially only for new APIs and new users.

Come check it out at https://m3o.com

> We're not looking to pull the rug out from anyone's feet. When we do announce pricing it'll be after a lot of discovery with existing users and potentially only for new APIs and new users.

The problem is that unless you have pricing that you can commit to then you may end up doing so anyway. You can't commit to an unsustainable pricing model that doesn't cover your costs, and everyone knows that. What they don't know if what that sustainable pricing will look like. If you can't even give a ballpark range estimate then you're just punting that risk onto your customers.

This is where I personally believe we need to think about business models differently. It's very easy to just assume things based on per request pricing or creating some form of subscription but often it's just limiting growth of the product. Social found a way to grow consumer use by finding the buyer on the other side. We're hoping to find something similar for APIs.

So you're considering selling the data of people who use your APIs? You may want to advertise that more prominently. FWIW, I'd much rather pay for them and wouldn't even consider using APIs with such a business model. I guess you may find a market for it for non-business use.

I didn't say we'd do advertising. I said social found a business model where the buyer was on the other side. The point is that there are many companies who want to offer APIs or want us to leverage their infrastructure who we can potentially partner with.

Pricing models aside. I think there is some value to a core set of free APIs which we haven't really seen from a single provider like this. Maybe it just ends up with some liberal request limits, I'm not sure but as a user I know I'd not want to be limited by it and most likely pay in a team or company setting.

I previously submitted my text templating language API for you to consider adding but didn’t hear anything back!

Sorry for that. We had quite a bit of interest from people wanting to offer APIs and this just fell through and we tried to evaluate how we were going to do this right now.