How would you monetize a reasonably popular free (dev) tool?
I built and run https://reqres.in/ Reqres - A hosted REST-API ready to respond to your AJAX requests . It receives millions of requests a month (the devs using the tool), and the homepage itself gets 20-30k unique visitors a month.
I run ads on the homepage which generates $200-300/month.
I also have this advertising proposal linked to on the homepage: https://www.dropbox.com/s/2w7gaeydx02qs40/Reqres_Advertising_Proposal.pdf?dl=0
I'm looking to add a Pro tier to the service to start generating monthly income (through subscriptions) from it. I have a mailing list of ~200 people who clicked "I'm interested in the Pro tier" button, and sent them a survey to try and dig into exactly what devs would want from a Pro tier. I got 4 responses back.
What would you do to find out what people want from a Pro tier? Would you even add a Pro tier? How would you monetize this free service?
Any guidance you all can give me is appreciated!
I've heard before that the dev tool market isn't kind to paid products. Developers don't like spending money on these kinds of tools.
Perhaps an alternate approach would be to create social media accounts or newsletters for reqres that you could later use to promote other (related) products. I'd say any following in general is valuable, and you should be able to obtain that with the traffic you're getting.