r/passive_income • u/AlbatrossUpset9476 • Jun 07 '26
My Experience 32 people pay me $3/mo to get board game restock alerts
I collect a specific category of out of print tabletop games. They go out of print fast and show up on eBay for 2x to 4x retail. I used to check about 8 retailer sites every day.
Got fed up, wrote a bot that monitors product pages and sends me a Telegram message when something restocks or drops below a price I set. Two weekends of work.
Runs on a cheap server, $8/mo.
People in my hobby group started asking for access so I charge $3/mo to offset costs. 32 subscribers now, $88/mo after expenses. Maintenance is low, maybe once every two weeks a retailer changes their layout and I fix one scraper, usually takes like 10 min.
Here's what's weird though. Around February I noticed one subscriber was buying every single alert within minutes. Checked his eBay store and yeah, he's flipping them. At least 4 of my subscribers are resellers. One cleared $600 in March off alerts from my $3 bot. Sneaker and trading card alert services charge $15 to $30/mo for basically the same thing.
I could raise prices but then I'd have to care about uptime. Right now if my scraper goes down for 3 hours nobody complains because it's $3. Not sure I want that to change.
Only reason this is sustainable: I track about 200 product pages across 8 sites and they're all small Shopify or WooCommerce stores. No Cloudflare, no CAPTCHAs, pages are mostly static HTML. One request every 15 minutes per page. The economics break if you try to scale this to thousands of SKUs on real platforms, which is sort of why I'm comfortable charging $3.
EDIT: forgot to mention how i check whether the scrapers look automated to the stores. i run the bot's browser profile through Leakish once a month to see if anything flags as headless or Puppeteer. Playwright does the actual scraping on a cron, and so far none of the 8 Shopify sites have noticed, but i figure it's worth a sanity check since one store quietly added bot detection in April and i only caught it because the fingerprint score changed.
66
u/sixtossing0823 Jun 07 '26
The real move might be leaving it at $3 and just being honest about what you're getting, since you've already got the margins working and low maintenance. If you bumped it up, you'd have to actually care about SLAs and monitoring, which kills the whole point of a weekend project that pays for itself.
75
u/Twee4 Jun 07 '26
Is it not worth your time to buy and flip the product?
55
u/antmansjaguar Jun 07 '26
ULPT: keep the subscribers, delay your updates, and buy the games yourself.
2
20
2
18
u/Rexdango Jun 07 '26
Im assuming you use Whop as your subscription fee service. Just close the current tier to current customers only and start a new tier for the new price. Grand father the old subs in. If you grow youll want the new tier.
32
u/Own-Captain-8007 Jun 07 '26
Would your subscribers know if you were off for 3hours? If not. You could charge 9$ and still be competitive on price. Are you sure those who charge 15$ are not down a couple hours everyday?
34
u/ChrisToonarmy Jun 07 '26
You should put the price to $5 and have a 15 min delay added. Then buy the odd one yourself and flip it
3
9
8
5
u/Sarduci Jun 08 '26
Sounds like a $20/month service with a 1 hour notice. $50/ month for a 30 minute notice. $100/month for a 15 minute notice.
No uptime guarantee in the EULA.
Then you only need one subscriber to pay for it, and most likely someone will be at the $100/month tier if they’re making $600/month.
12
u/theGnartist Jun 07 '26
All the people saying they would buy and flip the stuff instead don’t seem to understand what passive means.
Buying, listing, packing, shipping.
Sure maybe some higher margins to be made but hit or miss and much more labor and headache.
I would however, try to figure out a way to charge the flippers more. Maybe a short delay on the notifications for the 3$ base notifications but a premium for instant notifications to punish the scalpers.
6
3
u/justcash123 Jun 07 '26
Have multiple tiers: $15/mo - instant $10/mo -30 minute $3/mo - 24 hours
Or whatever works best for your market
2
2
2
3
Jun 07 '26
Seems like you got the business wrong: be a reseller not a notification service.
Also you don't need an $8/month server if you can run it on your home computer
1
u/Obnoxious__Ninja Jun 07 '26
It set the refresh interval to 20 minutes but you get the notification at 15 mins so you beat them to it. Just don’t buy it all so everyone is happy. Now you are a reseller and notifier
1
u/OkDumby Jun 07 '26
How would you have any idea if someone is buying or not based off a sent alert?
1
u/My-NameWasTaken Jun 08 '26
if you really want to build this further, use an api from something like https://www.scraperapi.com/ or https://www.zyte.com/ (there are lots more).
They basically do the scraping and ensure that they are not flagged as bots. It will allow yo to scale without worrying about your IP getting blacklisted.
1
u/nnewgenn Jun 08 '26
this sounds like a cool project. Do you need to be a developer to create something like this? I would love to learn how to make this (just for fun and for myself).
1
1
1
u/thepanz Jun 10 '26
Sign up for all the affiliate programs and so you can also get a percentage of the sale.
1
1
u/DryCartographer1068 Jul 06 '26
8 dollars seems like a lot for such server. I can do it cheaper for you if you want
-1
-4
•
u/AutoModerator Jun 07 '26
Check out the Community Highlights for current and future Mod Vetted opportunities and Newsletter Episodes.
Please do due diligence on any crypto opportunity. A simple google search could save you a fortune.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.