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.
theanonymousone 12 hours ago [-]
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.
CalRobert 11 hours ago [-]
How is it a business if not for money?
theanonymousone 9 hours ago [-]
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
j45 5 hours ago [-]
Time isn’t money, money is time.
Money that doesn’t need to be spent is freedom of time.
andsoitis 2 hours ago [-]
Money is valuable partly because it can buy time, but time is valuable independently of money.
throwaway83772 11 hours ago [-]
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
teiferer 10 hours ago [-]
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.
andai 10 hours ago [-]
I don't think that means paid users.
They also have a paid API.
weird-eye-issue 7 hours ago [-]
Is this your first time encountering a freemium business model?
j45 5 hours ago [-]
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.
chanux 3 hours ago [-]
Wow I have used this a long time ago and happy to find the origin story on HN.
Great job and thanks!
kubbity 12 hours ago [-]
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!
timcobb 11 hours ago [-]
> I needed an .mp3 to .txt conversion
?
guydoom 10 hours ago [-]
Also known as transcription, I suppose.
andai 10 hours ago [-]
Does it give you the tabs?
guydoom 5 hours ago [-]
Only speech transcription, probably.
voidmain0001 7 hours ago [-]
Their web page provides a list of ‘convert mp3 to’ formats
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.
oxedom 8 hours ago [-]
I know for a fact that these honeypots exist.
j45 5 hours ago [-]
Yet some people still use them.
Why don’t you create an alternative?
sevenzero 8 hours ago [-]
Well this is what people do with AI. Uploading their whole life with no second thought. But surely we can trust big tech, right?
hn_submit 6 hours ago [-]
Are you guys using CGI-BIN or some other technology?
andai 10 hours ago [-]
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...
piker 11 hours ago [-]
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.]
elantis 1 hours ago [-]
Yeah, for example there are dozens of vibecoded file conversion tools being launched on Product Hunt every day. Most are free to use and supposedly work in pure js and files never leave your browser.
This is a case study of how a software company can still make money in the age of ai.
My guess is that the impact of ai on the business won't be too much as they have a good brand and a loyal customer base whereas the vibecoded ones will have a hard time getting noticed by customers. They will also have a competitive advantage by being able to handle so many different types of files, by being a one-stop-shop if you like. They will be able to attract more customers by handling really obscure file formats and in some cases by being able to do a better job of the conversion (desktop publishing and vector formats are an example). There is probably a power advantage of being able to convert n filetypes to m different formats where n and m are very large.
f311a 11 hours ago [-]
I’m pretty sure more than 90 percent of their audience never heard of Claude.
They are regular users, not developers.
FearNotDaniel 11 hours ago [-]
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.
adastra22 9 hours ago [-]
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.
martyvis 6 hours ago [-]
Claude etc have been on mainstream national news here in Australia multiple time in the last few months
andsoitis 2 hours ago [-]
ChatGPT can also convert between files.
Jtarii 7 hours ago [-]
>I don’t have any stats
ok.
embedding-shape 5 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Only a tiny amount of people use ai this productively or know its possible
gosen 9 hours ago [-]
Great and very motivating story, thank you for that!
teiferer 11 hours ago [-]
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.
sakjur 11 hours ago [-]
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.
throwaway83772 11 hours ago [-]
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
MiscIdeaMaker99 11 hours ago [-]
Who cares?
txtlog 11 hours ago [-]
Maybe because it smells like self promotion? Anyway, good work if it's actually true
stevoski 4 hours ago [-]
It’s a website for a commercial product. Of course it is self-promotion! How could it possibly not be so?
teiferer 11 hours ago [-]
You don't care whether an article that ends up on HN front page contains legit information?
ov3r45 10 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
beaker52 7 hours ago [-]
Judging by the nature of the site (file conversion) and comments — has HN been invaded by bots here?
keyle 5 hours ago [-]
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?
Group_B 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah this one looks very boted. Not typical HN comments at all
arbor-group 4 hours ago [-]
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aitin 4 hours ago [-]
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hamzaalibasra 8 hours ago [-]
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jamiegodwin 11 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Yash16 8 hours ago [-]
[dead]
umeshc7 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Rendered at 18:51:12 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
"Side" in the sense that my main income coming from somewhere else, aka my "normal" job
Money that doesn’t need to be spent is freedom of time.
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
They also have a paid API.
Great job and thanks!
?
https://www.zamzar.com/converters/audio/mp3/
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.
Why don’t you create an alternative?
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...
[edit: what’s with the downvotes? I love the story and am curious if Claude etc have affected their business.]
This is a case study of how a software company can still make money in the age of ai.
My guess is that the impact of ai on the business won't be too much as they have a good brand and a loyal customer base whereas the vibecoded ones will have a hard time getting noticed by customers. They will also have a competitive advantage by being able to handle so many different types of files, by being a one-stop-shop if you like. They will be able to attract more customers by handling really obscure file formats and in some cases by being able to do a better job of the conversion (desktop publishing and vector formats are an example). There is probably a power advantage of being able to convert n filetypes to m different formats where n and m are very large.
They are regular users, not developers.
ok.
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.
> 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.
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