Running a bootstrapped SaaS for 20 years with my brother

I use this all the time, especially for epub to pdf.

Tried doing it with pandoc and the result was similar but less good. (I like it when the result is more good.)

It's amazing how many formats they support. It's kind of strange that this isn't built into the computer, though. Without Zamzar, the computer still lives in the pre-Babelfish era...

Really happy for you. It's my dream to run such a business for so long, as a side, with a real user base, and not for money.

Hi. Congratulations and thanks; it just happened that today I needed an .mp3 to .txt conversion and used your site. Nice to see it here now. All the best!

Great and very motivating story, thank you for that!

Is it bad that taking a look at the homepage: https://www.zamzar.com/

My first thought was "imagine the astonishing amount of private documents and PII you could collect and store if you ran something like this for free as a honeypot". People just blithely uploading any document from their personal data to convert to another format.

And if I would have to guess it's less technical users who aren't going to try something like opening a document in the latest Libreoffice (or gimp, etc) and then exporting it to another format, using local software on their computer, first.

How has revenue changed during the AI period? Are you guys able to maintain or grow with the rise of coding agents?

[edit: what’s with the downvotes? I love the story and am curious if Claude etc have affected their business.]

Always glad to see success stories. But some stuff does not check out.

> Over 550 million people have used Zamzar since launch,

There are 8.3 billion people on earth. You are saying that about 1 in 42 have used your service? I had never heard of it and I don't know anybody who had. And that's a sample that should be biased in your favor. Sorry, does not pass the smell test.

Or maybe they were not unique visitors, containing duplicates? How many? This makes me skeptical of the remaining statistics on the page.

> converting over 766 million files. We now process over 1 million API requests per day.

1 million per day now and 766 million over 20 years? At the current rate you'd achieve that in about 2 years. This would indicate a rapid growth in the last couple years or even just months. It is unclear why that would be reasonable. Especially since you'd probably have emphasized this explosion more if your service was essentially dormant for 19 years and just recently went through the roof. (Sth like "how we handled 100x growth of our SaaS business over 3 months")

After these two data points I stopped reading. Something doesn't feel right.

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