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Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

It looks like you are mostly targeting big customers (200k pageviews/month is already way beyond most private websites). I am skeptical whether that's the right demographic for such a service. The larger the website the less likely they use some turn-key solution. I would expect a much larger demand from small blogs.

>But the catch is that I don't have a free plan (yet) since I can't make any money off of users on the free plan

Free plans are there to provide marketing and free publicity, not direct income ;)

Just my two cents, obviously I haven't done any detailed market research.

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Though I should have done this before starting development, I need to figure out the positioning of this product. Like you suggested, maybe I should be talking to smaller bloggers to start with.

Based on the initial feedback, there's serious demand for a free tier and people don't need much convincing to switch so I think it makes sense to have one for non-commercial personal blogs and websites. Once I have at least a few paying customers I plan to rollout the free tier with a focus on tech blogs. The idea is to avoid a situation where I'm supporting free tier users and footing non-trivial server bills without having any revenue.

What would your longer-term plan be for the free tier? If it doesn't eventually turn into revenue, it doesn't make sense to support. And Disqus seems to think the only way to monetize the free piece is through lots of tracking and ads.

I want to limit the number of free tier users to ensure that the cost of servers+support of free tier users is a small fraction of revenue. Since the backend does not do much beyond just serving comments and reordering the comments tree, it's pretty lean.

> If it doesn't eventually turn into revenue, it doesn't make sense to support.

I'll have to consider it a marketing expense.

There is always demand for a free tier, after all its free. Don't listen to this feedback, freemium is a marketing tool that requires a lot of capital for scaling and additional support, nothing available when bootstrapping. 2usd / month is hard too, because you will loose most of it to transacrion costs. Maybe a yearly or one time fee for up to x comments? The free version could be a trial of sorts, the first 50 comments free.

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