2 boring APIs printing $5K/mo while LLMs quietly sell them

The Case: $5K MRR from two developer APIs

What he does. Ships boring developer APIs behind a .dev domain and lets programmatic SEO plus LLM citations pre-sell them.

Backstory. Six products in, two exits ($15K + $7K), one flop. The unfair window: LLM answer engines are actively citing "alternatives to X" pages in their responses, and small .dev sites are getting quoted before the incumbents rewrite their SEO for the AI era. That window closes the moment every VC-backed API tool ships an /alternatives folder — right now, it's wide open.

Product. - SocialKit: social media scraping API, 18,500+ signups, ~$3,300 MRR - PostPeer: social posting API, 3 months old, ~$1,700 MRR - Free tools (YouTube transcript extractor, etc.) that rank and funnel - Feature LPs, use-case pages, and competitor/alternative pages per API - MCP + skills integration so AI agents can call the APIs directly

Pricing. Usage-based freemium. Free tier converts a fraction to paid, MRR scales with API call volume, not seats or clients.

Key numbers. - SocialKit MRR: $3,300 - SocialKit signups: 18,500+ - PostPeer MRR: $1,700 (month 3) - Combined MRR: ~$5,000 - Prior exits: CaptureKit $15K, LectureKit $7K - Products shipped: 6 - Blog cadence: 1-2 posts/week from day 0 - Paid ad spend that worked: $0 (Google + Meta both failed) - Support reply time: minutes - ICP surprise: built for devs, no-code/automation users pay

Stack. Next.js on Railway, Fastify APIs on Railway, MongoDB, Redis, BullMQ, AWS.

Why this works (and what most readers will miss)

1. APIs are LLM-quotable in a way dashboards aren't. A model can articulate "GET /transcripts?url=... returns JSON" in one line. It cannot describe a 40-button admin panel. When someone asks ChatGPT "how do I scrape TikTok comments programmatically", the model reaches for whatever it can phrase cleanly. API-shaped products win the phrasing lottery every time.

2. 18,500 free users is a link corpus, not a conversion funnel. Every dev who signs up eventually pastes the tool into a GitHub README, a Stack Overflow answer, a Notion doc, a tutorial. Those mentions get scraped into search indexes and, more importantly, into next year's LLM training runs. The free tier isn't leaky money. It's buying training data with server costs.

3. The alt/competitor pages he mentions in passing are the actual money engine. "SocialKit vs Apify" ranks on Google AND gets cited by Perplexity when someone asks for Apify alternatives. He's built a mirror network that intercepts demand aimed at competitors' brand names. Lateral capture: paying almost nothing to appear inside someone else's search intent.

The Distilled Read

Ship the endpoint, skip the dashboard. An API is the cheapest possible SaaS. No admin panel, no user roles, no billing UI beyond a Stripe portal, no design system. You write documentation instead of doing customer success. You email nobody monthly, so it stays a product instead of becoming a job. If your MVP takes more than one weekend, you're building the wrong thing — and if you're not sure what to charge, meter it per API call from day one and let volume find the number for you.

Six products from one skeleton is a factory, not a portfolio. Every product he ships uses the same stack, the same .dev domain pattern, the same page template: feature LP, use-case pages, alt pages, free tool, blog. The naming even templates the brand — the -Kit family reads as one company to a human and to a model. This is why the 6th product ships faster than the 1st, and why PostPeer hit $1,700 MRR in 90 days when SocialKit took years. He's not building products, he's re-running a script with new input.

The economics only make sense because the users don't cost anything. 18,500 signups converting to $3,300 MRR is a rate that would incinerate a paid-ads business. But paid ads didn't work, which is exactly why the model works — every user arrived through content he'd already written, and the marginal cost of the next signup is a database row. Score this bet honestly: capital at risk is $40/mo of Railway, time-to-revenue was measured in weeks, and the exit floor is $22K per product baseline he's already hit twice. That's not a lottery ticket, that's a printing press with a slow warm-up.

Your customers are searching, but half of them are searching inside a chatbot now. He noticed it — paying users tell him they found him through ChatGPT and Perplexity. He hasn't repositioned around it yet. The distribution playbook of 2023 was "rank on Google". The playbook of 2026 is "get quoted by the model". Same content, different reader. The dev communities where his ICP actually lives — r/webscraping, dev.to, Indie Hackers, n8n forums — are where the seed mentions happen, but the amplifier is now a model that read those forums six months ago and will surface his name unprompted.

The real moat, and nobody in that thread saw it, is corpus. He's not ranking on Google. He's training the model that will replace Google. Every alt page, every free-tool subdomain, every "how to scrape X in Python" tutorial is a vote in a model election that hasn't happened yet. When agents become the buyers — and his MCP bet says he sees it coming — they'll recall "SocialKit" the way a person recalls "Stripe", because they were trained on a web where SocialKit was mentioned in ten thousand places. That kind of recall takes 18 months to build and cannot be bought. Eighteen months from now, the operators who started seeding their corpus in 2025 will look like they got lucky. They didn't. They just knew which index to rank on.

Steal-the-Playbook

1. Pick one API wedge, not the category. "Social scraping" is a category. "TikTok comment scraping for e-commerce teams" is a wedge. Wedges rank; categories bleed.
2. Buy a 4-6 letter .dev, ship the endpoint + docs page in one weekend. Fastify + Railway + Stripe metered billing. Skip the dashboard. Documentation IS the product.
3. Write 20 pages before you launch. 1 feature LP per endpoint, 5 use-case pages, 8 "X vs [competitor]" pages, 6 how-tos. Three days of work if you draft with Claude and edit hard.
4. Ship one free tool that consumes your own API. Something like "free YouTube transcript downloader". It ranks, it links back, and it dogfoods the endpoint you're selling.
5. Wire an MCP server for your API in month 2. Publish it. Write one post titled "Use [YourAPI] inside Claude Desktop". You're now on the shortlist the day agents pick tools autonomously.

Stack: Next.js + Fastify + Railway + MongoDB + Redis. ~$40/mo infra. 72 hours from domain purchase to first paying call.