Starting a developer API business in 2026. Here's week 1:
Shipped:
- PDF API (merge, split, compress, convert)
- Image API (resize, compress, watermark, convert)
- Billing system (Stripe subscriptions)
- Rate limiting per tier
Numbers:
- APIs live: 2
- API endpoints: 10+
- Waitlist signups: growing
- Revenue: early stage
Goal: $25k revenue in 6 months through API subscriptions
Tech decisions:
- SQLite over PostgreSQL (no ops overhead until 10k users)
- Node.js + Express (fast to ship)
- Stripe (best developer experience for billing)
Following along? I'll post weekly. Ask me anything.
Top comments (1)
Following this one - I'm running a similar experiment (launching one commercial API a day for 60 days) so the week-1 numbers are relatable. One thing worth weighing early: I went marketplace-first instead of building billing, and the tradeoff surprised me - you give up ~20% and pricing control, but you skip Stripe integration, key issuance, rate limiting AND get some organic search traffic. Your SQLite call is right though, wish more people resisted the day-1 Postgres reflex. What's driving the waitlist signups so far - SEO, socials, or directories?