Your next SaaS sells OCR, powered by Tesseract
Here's an idea from the recent issue of Unvalidated Ideas:
OCR SaaS powered by Tesseract (Tier: A)
Technology is generally considered a deflationary force -- fancy money words for "good tech makes stuff easier and cheaper". A couple decades ago it was hard for computers to "read" information off of dead trees, even when that information was printed by another computer (assuming we're not using QR codes).
Tesseract is an open source Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engine that has grown in leaps and bounds over the years, it's made this problem so much easier to solve that there's likely still a market dislocation given how cheap it has become to use.
It's so widely used that people have ported it to pure javascript (see tesseract-js)!
And some links to go with it:
https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/tessdoc/#introduction
https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract
https://tesseract.projectnaptha.com
If you liked this idea, you should probably make sure you get emailed the next batch.
old news, these are already free services
Do you have some examples?
One of the great things about building and launching businesses is that it's about finding the right market -- a market that isn't technical enough or doesn't know how to use the free services (that often require effort).
SSH, rsync, FUSE existed before Dropbox existed and were free, that doesn't mean that Dropbox wasn't worth building.
Even today, there are 10s of note taking apps that all have the same value proposition when Google Docs is free.