Ask HN: Do people actually pay for small web tools?

Perhaps HN is not the best audience to ask this question. A mostly tech savvy audience is more likely to solve their personal needs with a quick script, etc.

From a business perspective, you need to frame your MVP in terms of what problem you are solving? How many people really do have that problem? Of those people how many are willing to pay for the solution?

Whether you use AI or not is largely irrelevant. The knowledge of a specific domain and the typical problems encountered therein are far more relevant.

Personally my gut says no. I personally don't use any tools in that range, but I also think that at first glance the numbers don't add up.

Firstly, people pay for value. You seem to feel your ideas are low value (hence the low price) which means you don't really expect users to use it a lot. And "very occasional use" doesn't motivate me to go to the effort of paying.

Since the absolute number is low, you're either expecting really tiny numbers or you're hoping for really high numbers. The tiny numbers result in tiny revenues and tiny profits, so what's the point?

High numbers of people are likely to consume all that revenue. If you got high numbers you'd like ho the ads based route, with maybe a premium "no ads" subscription. But then you can charge more (getting rid of ads is $20 value.)

But again people dont pay for occasional use. If the use is frequent then it's likely more valuable than 5$.

To answer your root question - people don't "subscribe" to single-use tools (if by single-use you mean one-time-use.)

Perhaps you need to charge more? (People pay $10 for a coffee and that's single use). Or charge per use?