Monetizing Streamlit Apps

Community Cloud
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Has anyone successfully monetized streamlit apps? I know that it’s fully doable with st-paywall, and many other components.

I love the tool but wondering if it’s just better to bite the bullet and go the full-stack path if one is in the path of being a micro SaaS guy.

Is there an inherent bias that users like a custom website with a different domain name, rather than the streamlit.app domain? Not entirely sure, would love to hear from anyone who has been able to monetize streamlit apps succesfully.

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My team has helped others monetize Streamlit apps, so it’s doable. Some thoughts:

  • I think it’s a great idea to start with Streamlit as it’ll help you get off the ground quickly and refine your prototype to acquire your initial customers (once you reach a decent number of customers, you can think of refactoring into HTML/CSS/JS)
  • I’d definitely acquire a custom domain, it has a huge effect
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I recently launched an app with a paywall and have had some sales. I like that it is very easy to do, accelerates time to market, and provides the scalability I need. I did buy a domain but right now it just redirects to the streamlit.app URL. If I get enough sales I may invest to build it out properly.

One challenge I’ve had is that my app - although public - has not been indexed by the search providers. I have no idea why. I’ve asked for help on this but have not heard back.

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SEO is broad, there are a lot to consider. Usefulness, keywords, backlinks, competition, etc.

I have some streamlit apps, the one that ranked higher is this glicko rating calculator. Got around 8k+ unique viewers based from streamlit analytics.

The page title is really that simple.

If you search “glicko rating” it can be in the top 20 google search. If you search for “glicko rating calculator”, it can be at top 1.

Backlinks of the app is from chess stack exchange and github, perhaps there are others.

Glicko rating system is used by two big chess online platforms namely Lichess and Chess.com. There are 10+ million users on these platforms alone. One, two or so users might get interested in checking their rating change given opponent’s rating, expected result, etc even before the game has started.

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That’s incredible, congratulations! Are there any other tips for better marketing/traction?

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Thanks for the reply, but my issue isn’t that it doesn’t get ranked as well as I would like. My issue is that it is not indexed at all. (After more than a month and with a page_title)

This is my forum post on it:

Any help would be appreciated. (I don’t want to hijack this thread which is really more about monetization)

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With those key words, it is difficult for you to get noticed. There are already top sites that uses those. Can you beat them in the eyes of the search engine? Maybe more time and optimizations are required. Check your backlinks, etc.

I also have apps that does not appear in site:...

One area to look is the performance. I run your app in lighthouse.

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See its feedback if you could do something about it on your side.

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Community cloud might be able to help on these feedback being a host. You may drilldown to see the details of the issues. Or find a host where your app can perform better.

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Some tips to get a higher google ranking.

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@ferdy Thanks for your reply and the suggestion to leverage Lighthouse and examine the app’s performance. That said, my biggest concern right now is with getting the site indexed by the search engines. I can do as much as I want with keyword optimization, renaming, etc., but this will only help if the site is indexed in the first place. Since my intent is to commercialize the page I very much want it to be discoverable.

When I query “site:nychsfilter.streamlit.app” Google tells me, “Your search - "site:nychsfilter.streamlit.app" - did not match any documents.” i.e., it will never come back in any search - Top 1, Top 20, Top 200, Top 20,000 because it is not in their index at all.

Given that all public Streamlit apps are supposed to be indexed within a week and I am setting a page_title with st.set_page_config I expect it to show up somewhere. What I am really looking for is a diagnosis as to why it is not being indexed.

@ferdy You mentioned you also have apps that do not appear in “site: <sitename>”. Do you know what differentiates these apps from the ones that do appear?

Google has options to request a site be indexed (Ask Google to Recrawl Your Website | Google Search Central  |  Documentation  |  Google for Developers), but this first requires site ownership verification (Managing owners, users, and permissions - Search Console Help).

Google provides several ownership verification options but they are hard to do with a Streamlit Cloud hosted app. One method is to put a particular html file on the site. But Streamlit apps are written as Python files. I created a subpage to my app whose .py file resolves, when rendered online, to the filename Google expected with the contents it expected rendered using st.write or st.text. This did not work. Another option is to put a particular meta tag in the page header but, as far as I can tell, we do not have this level of control with Streamlit. Other options involve Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager. I do not use these at present but perhaps I will need to.

Incidentally, if I search for “nychsfilter” on Google the first result is my Streamlit forum post above asking for help getting the site indexed. If I search for “New York City High School Filter” on Bing the first thing that comes up is a YouTube video I posted about the tool. So once the site gets indexed I’m pretty confident it will turn up in search results.

Anyone aiming to commercialize a Streamlit Community Cloud hosted app should be aware they may encounter similar search indexing challenges too.

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I appreciate all the responses here, I’ve been following y’alls inputs and have been ever valuable. As a noob microSaaS entrepreneur I’ve loved the concept of Streamlit since it’s so easily deployable but I feel I’m running into challenges to make the prodcut 1.SEO optimized 2. profitable. I’m confident streamlit community will bring it to a place where it’s better and better but at the moment, there seems to be a bit of a gap when it comes to becoming the preferred tech stack for MLEs and Data Scientist to commercialize their knowledge/expertise into a product beyond consulting gigs.

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@Osco I don’t want to sound too negative. I’ve been very happy with the speed and simplicity Streamlit Community Cloud enabled me to deploy my app. I don’t have to do anything to figure out how to ensure I spin up enough instances to handle demand, etc. It definitely improved my speed to market. This allows me to see if there is enough demand to make further investment worthwhile.

I have no idea what is driving my own SEO issues. Clearly some Streamlit apps do get indexed as expected. Mine has not. Since I do not know the root cause I can’t say how likely/unlikely you are to encounter the issue.

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@OkapiSystems Hope you are well. Just curious if you were able to identify the root cause of the SEO issue and you made any traction in the right direction. Please advise.

Thanks,
UC2045

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@K116 In response to my June 2 post (referenced earlier) asking for help, Streamlit Community Cloud engineering addressed the issue sometime between June 28 and July 16. The New York City High School Filter is now properly indexed on Google, Bard and DuckDuckGo. I am very happy this has been resolved. However, I was not told what the root cause was.

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That’s lovely to hear! Congratulations :tada:

Sincerely,
UC2045