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Comment by fliesblackflags | Hacker News Reader

I like the idea, I could really make use of it. But have a concern on how prices are presented. There's big (font) monthly prices, and the text saying it's annual is low contrast, and partially obscured by the try it now button.

This is a huge red flag to me. What other fine print can't I see? I don't have color perception issues, but the background/text combo gives it the appearance of that light-grey text that's impossible to read.

Also, why not just give the annual price if that's how it's charged? (Admittedly, I don't know how it's charged. When I clicked the try now button hoping for an upfront number, I was prompted to sign up. I closed the tab.)

I know these aren't huge issues. But, you are selling a service to track people. For me to trust a service like this, they can't come out the gate looking like they're hiding their price.

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Re-reading this, I sound fairly negative. I do hope this service does well. I'll likely end up taking another look at it down the road.

Hi! This is Martijn, maker of History Search. I’m glad you like What we’re doing.

I’m going to review these confusing things. The reason why it says try now is because we offer 3000 pages free, most recent visited webpages, and offer a 30 day money back garuantee.

We’re not hiding anything, the pricing does say when billed annually. Also our privacy policy is super clear, also I answered this answer in more depth below.

On the free plan you can keep using it even when you cross the free search limit. Because Older records are archived and will become available once you remove more recent records, or upgrade. Not a lot of services do this.

Keep in mind this price isn’t very steep if you take into account it isn’t just cloud storage, most cloud solutions charge this or more and don’t include the entire app, cross-browser extensions and service. Also don’t worry, we’re far from profitable and don’t drive ferraris in the valley. We work day and night, and pay server expenses out of our own pocket.

We aren’t Google and don’t show advertising to further ensure user privacy. Taking this into consideration, we believe users who see the value in History Search won’t expect us to starve and pay the hosting expenses all on our own.

Our mission is solving how hard it is to retrieve digital information online, but to keep doing so we need our users’ support, also financially. We have choosen annual billing as preferred and advertised pricing because its a low cost subscription, and it would be a waste to spend around 2,9%+$0.29 per month. Thats a lot a waste of funds, since its not going to solving the problem or providing you a valuable service but to a transaction fee.

Hope this straightens things out, looking forward to seeing you aboard this movement.

Kind regards, Martijn

Hi Martijn, I find it encouraging how engaged you are.

I believe you aren't trying to hide anything. The formatting does make it hard to read though. For me, the button to try a charged price was covering up part of the notice that it's billed annually. The layout really ought to be adjusted so that the button cannot cover up the fine print. The font ought to be a color with more contrast from the background so it's easy to read.

The level of service you offer for a free plan is impressive. Kudos on giving users a full featured trial, I agree that most services don't do that. For instance, I skipped over Tutanota because basic features like filters required a paid subscription. Filters are important to me, I'd like to test them before I upgrade. On the other end, msgsafe.io offers enough of their features on a paid account that you can test the service before committing. (Though their page suffers from the same problems I initially mentioned about yours, I can't read it at all. I don't have time to screw with the CSS to make it readable, which is why I've yet to sign up.)

I agree about your prices. Less than $50 annually for the lowest paid tier is a bargain for what you provide. I really do hope you become profitable enough to drive Ferraris. The tech sector needs more companies that put their customers before profits.

I appreciate that you're not Google. I wholeheartedly believe that you and everyone else working on this should be making good wages. It's only fair. I intend to try out your service as a way to see my phone's history from my computer. If it works well for me, I'll upgrade to whatever plan meets my needs. Your prices are more than fair. (It'll be sometime in the next week or two. I screwed up my phone by kneecapping some Google packages, I haven't had time to fix it yet.)

I completely agree with what you're saying about annual billing. Transaction fees can be outrageous. I would prefer that the price is presented in a way that clearly communicates what I'll be charged before I get to the checkout (of course taxes wouldn't be added till then, but that's standard). If you put something like "$x per year" in big font and "$y per month" as the smaller print, I'd know ahead of time that the billing is annual.

Personally, I don't do money back guarantees on trials anymore. A few years back I signed up for a 30 day trial of Amazon Prime while going through the checkout (I had never had it before). Three days later my credit union's fraud department called, Amazon had charged for the full year two days into my trial. The fraud department told me it wasn't an authorization. I went back and forth with Amazon to cancel Prime, they made it a real pain. Ultimately, I had to cancel my card, get a new card, and have my credit union place a block on any transactions from Amazon. That 30 day "trial" wasted at least 40 hours of my time.

As a suggestion of a great trial experience, look at Mullvad (https://mullvad.net/en/). You can get started on a free trial in less than 60 seconds if you have VPN software installed. I tried it once, halfway into my free three hours, I signed up for a paid account. Personally, I would be more comfortable with your service if I could sign up without giving personal data like I did with Mullvad. You seem trustworthy to me. However, I think your service has the potential to be huge. Sites like Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook could really benefit from buying a company that provides a service like yours. I wouldn't want my history to end up in their hands with my name attached (I don't use any of the three sites). Even if you don't plan to get bought, it isn't impossible. (After all, Michael Dell went public.)

I know I sound picky, but I feel feedback should be. Then you can decide which gripes are worth addressing and which ones are just me being a grumpy SOB.

Haha, that last paragraph made me laugh. I sincerely appreciate candid feedback, and fully agree there shouldn’t be any confusion regarding pricing. I’m going to look into this asap.

I do think I realize where the confusion is coming from; you are seeing the pricing page from mobile? You mentioned being able to search the things from mobile, this sadly isn’t possible yet. Mobile browser extensions are only slowly evolving (but we’re on it), so for now History Search is desktop only.

Will look into the examples you provided, thank you, and see how we can use it to make History Search better.

History Search is not intended for sale. Like I said it’s just our first step, plus I don’t believe in our current leaders - Apple aside, I’m impressed by practically everything they do. Also users have complete control over what History Search indexes and stores. So if a sale would ever happen you can always export and remove any or all data in History Search-but again a sale isn’t the goal, we aren’t even funded at moment (well, self funded). Ontop of our intentions and perspective of what the web should be, privacy regulations are finally getting better, this gives companies who choose a straightforward business approach a chance. A better paid Facebook wouldn’t have stood a chance 10 years ago. Luckily this is changing.

There are over 3 billion internet users. 500 million would be able to benefit from and can afford History Search. Reaching these numbers is our goal.

I didn’t go into everything you mentioned in this message, but it’s all noted and I would like to thank you for the kind words and your time to help us improve.

Kind regards, Martijn

I did forget something. Your site works with uBlock Origin set to block all third party stuff. It is astounding to me the number of sites that can't load their content without what feels like terabytes of external libraries. (I have limited bandwidth, so my default is to block.)

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