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Comment by VWWHFSfQ | Hacker News Reader

Bro.. you gotta pay $15 a year. That's $1.25/month.

I would like to see you make a website like Couchsurfing that can operate for free forever.

Just pay the $buck 25 and keep using the site and go on with your life. This is not a Capitalist Conspiracy to rob you of your hard-earned $dollars

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This is addressed in the article:

> In contrast, BeWelcome, a similar but much less popular platform, covered their finances with less than $10,000.

The costs of running such a platform are not high. And Couchsurfing operated for free for at least a decade: they relied on donations and volunteer work.

In the end, some of the founding volunteers decided to sell out the Couchsurfing code and community to investors. These investors want their money back. Of course Couchsurfing now has paid staff, but it's not required for operating the website: it's required for userbase growth. And neither the new user fee is about the operating costs: it's about investors getting their money back.

/s?

I almost wonder if you've ever met anyone in need. This brand of smug entitlement preceeds revolutions ...bro.

Nope, stop right now. Anyone in America can come up with $25 of disposable income a year.

There is a world outside USA also ;)

And you don't need money to travel.

You don't need money to travel beyond your front door/neighbourhood but come on, you need "some" money to travel. You can't travel without a penny in your pocket.

You can. On expense of other people good will. And give them something in exchange. Good company, manual labor, songs, whatever. Of course we need to agree on definition of "travel" first ;)

You can do pretty well with next to nothing. I spent three months hitchhiking and couchsurfing my way through the US and Canada, covering roughly 20,000 miles and staying with dozens of hosts. I started with $700 in my account, and still had a few hundred left by the end of the trip. Had I wanted to be more frugal, and not get 'local food' when someone suggested something especially good, I probably could have gotten by with less.

So it's true that you need something....but you can do it with little enough that $25 can be a significant part of your budget.

And it doesn't really seem exactly dispensable if you are using it for housing

Therefore, by induction, infinite subscription services at $25/year can find customers! Convenient for pitching to VCs no doubt, and how fortunate for us that no-one ever wants to travel to America from anywhere else, because that would be unthinkable.

If you are in need why on earth are you couchsurfing and traveling at all? If you cant afford $15 for the site what happens when you get sick or any emergency whatsoever forces you to shell out money?

Maybe a relative gets sick in a foreign country and you'd like to see them? Maybe you can't afford health care and you just get sick and die if you're in a first world democracy with American-class health care, or if you're in a civilized country, maybe they just treat you? I don't know, man, use your imagination.

In America hospitals and emergency rooms are required to treat you.

Then you are not "forced to shell out money" in such a case, yes?

It’s like any debt collection negotiation.

My brother had a $10,000 surgery. He works a minimum wage job so they tried to get him to agree to a payment plan. He didn’t think he could afford that, so offered $2500 as full repayment and they accepted.

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