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Comment by anthonyhodlbot | Hacker News Reader

If apps on personal servers can’t collect data, then they will need to charge money in order to have an economic incentive to support the app, ship updates, upgrade UI, etc. If there is a competing “free” option then from a centralized monolith, then it’s going to be very difficult for the PCC app to deal with.

Paid apps are also inherently less viral and can’t tap into network effects as well due to the friction resulting from payments. In order to overcome this, PCC apps need to develop a viable revenue model without putting a paywall.

I see the PCC model work for applications where neither the consumer and the business want to store sensitive data because the security overhead is too high.

E.g. trading bot that doesn’t want to store user’s API keys. In fact, running private servers is something that is pretty common in that world.

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I'm not sure it's so limited.

First this is a great space for open source apps.

Second I think people in general are becoming more aware that free online stuff usually comes with a hidden cost to privacy.

Third there is a whole swath of online services that can't thrive in current situation: services that are too uninteresting (from a data harvesting pov or no tie-in to larger offering) to run for free, and not valuable enough for the user to pay $7/month for, and not worth running as a SaaS at a lower price. Yet if a user had a cloud OS with metered resources, they could run such an app for a few bucks a year (plus a few bucks donation/paid to the app dev). And they'd never have to worry about it shutting down because the dev wants to do something else with their lives.

> I see the PCC model work for applications where neither the consumer and the business want to store sensitive data because the security overhead is too high.

I agree. I think apps that have both a basic and premium version can really thrive on a platform like this where useful apps are not competing with VC-fueled or ad-driven apps and the utility to the user is very clear. Data mining has really gotten out of hand and caused the value-add to the user to become extremely distorted. User attention has been the only metric that free apps are fighting for which is a zero-sum game and not good for anyone.

I'm most excited by the idea of applications being able to be more closely connected and even create new types of apps that just layer on top or extend existing app data.

There's always the App.net business model where some of your hosting fee gets passed on to the apps that you run but the resulting revenue would probably be small.

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