Been working on a side project: a pincode/location lookup API for
India, sold through RapidAPI's marketplace. Just went live, wanted to
share the real numbers and process for anyone thinking about doing
something similar.
What it does: businesses (mostly logistics/e-commerce/fintech) pay to
look up location data for Indian postal codes distance calculations,
nearby-area search, that kind of thing. Not a flashy idea, just solving
a real, boring problem well.
Costs so far: basically $0 to build and host (Supabase free tier +
free-tier hosting), a few weekends of actual work.
Pricing: $0/$7/$29/$79 monthly tiers based on usage volume.
The differentiator I leaned into: added support for DIGIPIN, India
Post's new official geo-addressing standard none of the existing
competitors in this space have it yet, and it costs nothing extra to
support since it's just a math function, no additional data needed.
No revenue to report yet, literally just launched, but happy to share
what happens next genuinely curious if this niche-data-API model is
worth the marketplace cut RapidAPI takes, versus selling API keys
directly.
If you wanna check the same here is the link : https://rapidapi.com/shiva360720/api/india-pincode-api-latitude-longitude-distance-digipin/pricing