Idea: Web archive as a service
jasonleow • 7 Jun 2023 •
Here’s a dopey idea:
A micro-SaaS to help you regularly archive your favourite projects and websites in the Wayback Machine.
The problem
This had happened to me before: I write blogs on platforms for a time (e.g. the now-defunct xanga.com). I stop blogging. I don’t care about the blog. Platform shuts down. I lose all my writings. I start to care about the blog, but too late.
Another scenario: I wished I remembered to take screenshots of my earliest MVP versions of a website or app, so that I can look back and reminiscience, or share/tweet about it. But once past, you can’t retrieve it, unless you roll back the website to that state. Or it’s a project you’re shutting down, or a domain you’re giving up, but wished there was a way to reminiscience about it for free without needing to pay for domain or web hosting to keep the website up.
Third scenario: Maybe this isn’t your own project but another website which you’re a huge fan and want to archive it for memory’s sake.
Right now, to archive it you got to go the the Wayback Machine website and paste the URL in to save it. Manually. I wished there’s was a way to set and forget. Kind of like third party automated offsite backups of your database where you don’t have to remember to do it.
The solution
So what if there’s a micro-SaaS that provides regular archive snapshots? Three pricing plans - daily ($10/m), weekly ($5/m) and monthly (Free). Login, pay and save the URL you want to archive, and forget. You get to toggle on or off a monthly email update of how many snapshots it captured.
The tech stack
I could do the archiving manually at the start. So all I need for an MVP would be a landing page, payment link and a form. If I get more than 10 customers, then start creating automation around it. Apps like Browserbear and Crontap, or even Zapier, could be the services I use to build it quickly, rather than coding up my own.
What do you think?
Comments
@therealbrandonwilson That’s an interesting use case that’s outside of what I was originally thinking about. That can be mostly accomplished by creating an account in Wayback Machine, and saving every post you write on any platform into Wayback Machine (which you can then reference via your own account on the Wayback Machine platform). But doubt Wayback Machine allows for SQL querying…
I am your target customer. I have written in various places: Substack, Medium, LifeLog, Adagia, Writestreak, and Github archive of 200WAD. I want one place that pulls in all the archives and adds to them as I continue to write daily. It would be nice to have it in a database that I can use SQL to query against.