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Comment by mkinsella | Hacker News Reader

With the signup fee currently at $9.25 and a pricing scheme of

  fee = (number of users * $0.001)

that means there are currently approximately 9250 registered users. Who remembers calculus and can calculate how much revenue they have generated, assuming their signup fee started at $0.01?

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The pricing scheme is (number of users * $0.001 * C) where C is a multiplier that has changed with time. On top of that a significant portion of total revenue comes from archival accounts.

This urge to reverse-engineer our total number of users when I actually share that information in the post baffles me.

Reverse-engineering is much more fun

"where C is a multiplier that has changed with time"

Well, there's your bug :D

maciej has stated previously[1] that his revenue is greater than the $42K-$47K being approximated:

> Right now it's 18k users, with 11k active. The signup fee has brought in just over $120k, most of that coming in December (thanks, Yahoo!).

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2205417

You don't need calculus. The mean price per user is $9.25 / 2, so they have taken in about 9250 * $9.25 / 2 = $42,781.25.

Not bad!

Deleted comment

Some small corrections:

- Pricing didn't start at 0.01

- We don't have 9250 users (hint: see the linked article!)

- The price doesn't go up by $0.001 per user

Other than that, you're dead on.

Let U = Users

Let Price = U / (1000 x (LOG(U) - 2.44))

Disclaimer: $fuzzy_math_fudge_factor = TRUE

Assuming the fee as a function of users is linear and started at zero, the average user is paying 1/2 of the current price. So if the current price is $9.25, the average user is paying $4.625 per month. So they have made 9250*$4.625 = $42,781.25.

It isn't per month -- it's a one-time signup fee.

Archiving is annual.

I didn’t realize it was a one-time signup fee. Thanks for pointing that out.

You don't exactly need calculus for that one, just n*(n+1)/2. That works out to $47,785.875. Assuming they round up to the nearest penny on each transaction you get $42,827.50.

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