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.
Thanks for your comments - PAYG is something that we can offer - feel free to drop me a message at chris [at] the domain and I can provide some more details.
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.
In a world where people trade time for money, they effectively collect time as money, and money can be used to buy back time through the correct conveniences if they choose to buy back the freedom in their time, first through high leverage low cost items, and then over time more.
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!
It’s a beautiful story. Having a business like this in the AI era is VERY inspiring. I see you as a small business, like the butcher or the fishmonger, selling good products to the public. Congratulations, and keep it up.
Respectfully, it sounds as if your assumptions about the market for LLM/Agent tools is out of date by a long way.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.
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.
> There is probably a power advantage of being able to convert n filetypes to m different formats where n and m are very large.
If they've been in business this long, they must have, by now, internal filetypes for specific classes of formats. For example, all rgb files first convert to an RGB format, and then to the destination format. Or, all transcription first convert to an internal format, and then to the destination format.
Not sure how you'd handle .ps or .pdf files in this way, though.
There are two threats from AI to this kind of business: 1) that they lose their users because their users use AI themselves to do their conversions and 2) that they lose their users to a wave of similar, shinier, more featureful competitors that spring up because suddenly the suite of features that took years to build in the Before Times can be built with AI. The extra competition could be consequential. I wish them the best, but the task ahead may not be easy. In this post they talk about how their work is meaningful because they feel they are touching people's lives behind the work they do. Will the vibe-coded competitors feel the same? Are we better off now that their paid services can be had for too-cheap-to-meter?
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...
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.
Frank answer: I'm far too lazy, it's outside of my general skill set of what I could confidently develop (or oversee hired people to build an equivalent service), and running a consumer SaaS with $10 to $30 monthly subscription/services or ad supported sounds like like a new level of personal hell for me.
try .scn files from SoftImage XSI. Need a way to convert them to a format that can be used in Blender or Maya/FBX without losing any of the structure. Autodesk basically told the old users to bugger off leaving them with Gigs of files they can't use anymore.
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?
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's pretty obvious from the wording and the context that it's not 550 million unique visitors.
API request is not the same thing as conversion event. You typically hit several API endpoints to carry out a single workflow (listing, authentication, upload, processing, etc).
> It's pretty obvious from the wording and the context that it's not 550 million unique visitors.
The precise wording, again:
> Over 550 million people have used Zamzar since launch
How is "over X million people have done ..." making it obvious that they were not unique?
If you go to a Taylor Swift concert and the newspaper next day headlines "over 60000 people were in the audience", does that mean to you that it was obviously just a handful and they were counted multiple times?
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.
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.
"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.
?
https://www.zamzar.com/converters/audio/mp3/
Great job and thanks!
[edit: what’s with the downvotes? I love the story and am curious if Claude etc have affected their business.]
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.
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.
If they've been in business this long, they must have, by now, internal filetypes for specific classes of formats. For example, all rgb files first convert to an RGB format, and then to the destination format. Or, all transcription first convert to an internal format, and then to the destination format.
Not sure how you'd handle .ps or .pdf files in this way, though.
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...
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?
> 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
The precise wording, again:
> Over 550 million people have used Zamzar since launch
How is "over X million people have done ..." making it obvious that they were not unique?
If you go to a Taylor Swift concert and the newspaper next day headlines "over 60000 people were in the audience", does that mean to you that it was obviously just a handful and they were counted multiple times?