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Built a free tool with my own API

I feel like it's a bit hypocritical to provide an API but not be a consumer of that same API. So I'm fixing that!

Last week I pivoted my business to a pure API model. This week I'm building some things on top of the API to both put the API through its paces, but also to act as use-cases / demos for potential customers browsing my marketing site.

Introducing Tweetagram! Auto generate a visual Instagram post (or story) from a tweet url:
https://www.bannerbear.com/demos/tweetagram/

So far I'm really enjoying my new product focus as an API. It keeps the core product scope manageable, but at the same time gives you license to build some neat apps on top of it. I think those two things are good qualities to have for an indie hacker product.

I don't know if the API product strategy will work out business-wise, it's too early to say. But I can say right now that it is a lot of fun! :)

  1. 1

    Quick idea.

    Drift.com have a really good metatag image, might be worth creating something similar as a demo.

  2. 1

    Hey @yongfook I’ve been following your product for the past few weeks now. I’m curious what your architecture is like (ie. what cloud services you’re using) and what the costs are like. Cheers

    1. 2

      Bannerbear is a Rails app, so I deploy on Heroku as that's the most convenient option.

      In addition to Heroku web and worker dynos, it uses:

      • Postgres as the DB
      • Redis for job queues
      • Memcached for caching
      • AWS S3 for object storage
      • AWS Cloudfront for CDN
      • Stripe for payments

      Costs you can basically infer from the above, it's a pretty standard setup and the pricing is all out there for you to tally up.

  3. 1

    Always a fan of what @yongfook pushes out. Been following since the first post on MojoSaas.

    Super clean design with tweetagram 🎉

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