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Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

There are 7.8 billion people in the world. If you can get 1% of them to pay you a penny once a year, you're making $780k/year. You can make $100k/year by getting $0.10/year from one person in every 7800. If you can get people to pay you $0.01/week, you can make $100k/year from less than 200,000 people.

But not if your $0.01 transaction has a $0.30 minimum transaction fee.

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I’m not particularly convinced consumers want to pay with micro-transactions nor that it makes financial sense for producers. What’s the experience? Do I need to click a button to commit to paying someone $0.01/week or is it somehow automatic? Because if you can get 200k people to make the decision to pay you a penny a week I think it’s likely you could raise your price and get 50k people to pay you a dollar a week.

My issue with microtransactions is that the cost of making the decision seems like it outweighs the currency cost. Like, I used to buy computer games (e.g. from Steam) when they were on sale. Now I ignore any sale which has a price greater than $0.00, because if a game is free, I don't have to spend any time figuring out whether I will like it.

Where do you see microtransactions being applied in practice?

Everything you say makes sense, except the last line. I dont understand my the minimum transaction fee matters -- as long as you have a middle-person (such as Apple Music or Apple News), they can charge $15/mo or whatever, and do the many-to-many disbursement in bulk, right?

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