What Happened When I Topped Hacker News and Pulled in 12,000 Readers Overnight | HackerNoon

About 2 weeks ago I decided to launch a small project I made on Hacker News. It was quite simple, just a website with a single page that displayed a table of the current per dollar prices of the major LLM APIs. It’s called Price Per Token and an image of what it looked like when I launched is below.

I made the website to be a small, longer term SEO bet. I did research and found people often would search things like “GPT 4o price,” so thought consolidating prices in one place and making programmatic webpages for each model could work on Google.

I made the website in a couple hours, collecting the prices for each token manually and entering them into a csv file. The image above is just a simple Nuxt app on top of that file. That was on a Thursday and I decided I would try to get my first backlinks on Hacker News the next day.

I put a link to the site with the headline LLM API Pricing Data at about 8AM EST and checked back an hour later and was surprised to see my post racking up upvotes and surging to number 3 on overall leaderboard. I checked my traffic on PostHog and saw that in the past hour 1000 visitors had come to the site in the past hour with no indication of slowing down.

I had to think quick about how to capitalize on this traffic to get some lasting value out of it that day. I figured the surge would only last for the rest of the day at most, which did not leave time for me to offer an actual free or paid service around the data. So I figured I could at least try to capture people’s emails and created a newsletter sign up form using Tally and put it under the pricing table.

While doing that my Hacker News post was starting to spread over to Twitter (the footer of my website had my Twitter username, @aellman) and comments on the post itself were growing. On twitter I was being tagged in posts asking for an API of the data. On the post itself there were comments coming in asking me to include providers in the data, to make changes in the UI and even that some of my data was inaccurate. I responded with updates to the website in real time: fixing the data, adding Xai models and responding to comments about what UI changes I would make in the future.

By the time the next day arrived I had over 100 newsletter subscribers and 12,000 unique visitors had come to the website.

I quickly learned that getting to the top of Hacker News does more than just get you traffic from the post itself. By the next day I had acquired over 100 backlinks from websites that pull popular posts from Hacker News, leading to a quick climb to a Domain Authority of 13 on Ahrefs. Throughout the week my website would also be featured on several Podcasts and Newsletters, helping sustain my traffic at over 1000 visitors per day. You can see my to date traffic below:

Over that week I acquired 250 newsletter subscribers, updated my site to include image models and made my first free tool, an AI Coding Tracker which has about 20 free users. I plan on continuing to ride my Hacker News success and growing the site’s authority through backlink optimization and making SEO focused pages like the new token counter and pricing calculator. In the long term, I see this site becoming an API that helps lower the LLM usage bill for API apps. The success on Hacker News and the site’s growing Newsletter confirms this is a point of interest for devs. I’m not exactly sure what that will look like but hope to learn from the site’s growing audience what the biggest pain points are.

I’m not exactly sure what the lesson from this story is. I have posted to Hack News since, about the coding tracker I made, and didn’t get a single upvote. Maybe it’s that the internet is random and that if you want to go viral you need to just post a lot to make your own luck. Or that unless you have a big following that going viral is rare and you should be prepared to take advantage of the moment when it happens. In either case I am looking forward to building more sustainable traffic to Price Per Token and making it more valuable than just a table of token prices.