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Comment by TrishaK | Hacker News Reader

How long will you be able to sustain this? I have a fairly small site that has virtually no traffic, so I would love to use this but what happens if you end up with a large number of sites using this? And assume that the donations don't cover the expenses. Do you have a fallback plan?

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I've optimized the codebase to scale.

Please use it on your small site with no traffic for free.

My biggest hope is for a large number of sites to use this.

I've been operating Remarkbox for the last 5 years.

Plan is to grow and try not to burn a bunch of money.

Fallback plan is open sourcing the codebase.

Thank you for the follow-up. This + your other comment showing that there is an export to JSON option make me feel a lot better.

I will set it up this weekend and see how it goes.

Awesome. Good luck.

Hi! Sorry if I'm missing something. I do not understand how to pay you? Clicked around the site for a bit and couldn't find some self evident thing I can do to send you any given amount of money; my employers might find the idea of this being a paid service a bit more easy if I try to push this to them for use on some of our microsites

Go to https://my.remarkbox.com and verify your email. From there you should see options.

> Fallback plan is open sourcing the codebase.

I think the main concern for would-be user websites is not the code, but what happens to all of the comments if you shut down.

Worst-case one might not notice you plan to shut down before you turn off the servers and all comments are lost.

Do you offer downloads of comment archives for user websites so that they can download the comments in a convenient format for backup?

That would be a relief for some people to have mayhaps.

Edit: I see that this has been addressed already and indeed you do offer that. Excellent!

Are you trying to make it a business? Or is it more of a hobby project?

It's both to me.

But now it's also hopefully going to be a utility people can count on.

... here's a weird thought. Could you have a free and paid tier split based on overall traffic, but pass the paid tier cost onto the user? ie, when the quota is reached (say an article trends on HN surprisingly), the comment box pops up a paywall, but any user can foot the bill, and then everyone else gains the benefit, including the site owner?

No, no pay walls. No.

You sound like me with every product i try to build.

This idea of anyone can pay is actually really compelling for a service like this.

Not just giving a boost to small passion projects, but I’m thinking about stuff that’s abandoned by the creators for whatever reason. Community could simply keep things going in their absence and that is interesting.

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