Comment by ihucos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ihucos | Hacker News Reader

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I am doing this together with my regular job. At the very moment it does cost me about the same as the Netflix account I am paying for my parents. The plan to be profitable is by mass. There was a lot of time and thought spend on making this service really really cheap to serve. Even now with this HN my redis database is two megabytes in size and before this HN post with happy and active users the CPU did not went over 1% usage - on a cheap VPS. So the bottom line is if we can get in only a small fraction of what other services have as a fee I am happy. I think we are talking about less than one cent per user per month. In any case I feel comfortable to get that with Pay as you want and one advertising banner. Don't get me wrong. It is a great product and we do expect users to actually pay for it if they are using it on a commercial project. We just have the luxury to ask for a payment instead of charging it. I also think plausible is a great product. If you are happy with it even better :-)

Worth mentioning that the "pay what you want" business model can be a lot more profitable than people give it credit for.

My hobby photography business, which my wife and I run on a "pay what you want" model, brings more than enough to pay our monthly bills and have some leftovers for savings. While the last time I checked about 97% of photo shoots paid below average, the 3% that paid above average more than made up for it.

We also donate part of the profit of every photo shoot to a non-profit that helps women fight breast cancer, which aside from the good feeling that it give us, also helps with marketing on its own.

It is an interesting business model which not many people take advantage of, and may be perfect for Counter.dev for sure.

That's interesting. Here in Berlin there is/was also a restaurant where you could pay what you want when you leave and it seemed to also work there. I can imagine important is to explicitly state that you do have costs and are expecting payment - it's just not such a strict thing and if you are a student of course you pay less. Let's see how it goes.

Agreed. I got the idea from the Humble Bundle[1] and wondered if it could work with physical products as well, instead of digital. Turns out there are more businesses than I thought doing it, even in the city I live, although it mostly seems limited to be coffee shops and restaurants for some reason.

If nothing else, this experience showed me that people can be pretty generous if you give them the chance, which changed my outlook on life for the better.

I may try offering a plan with this model for a limited time on my hosting business, to see how things go, as an experiment. It may be a little difficult since dedicated servers are not cheap, but depending on how much each people pay, it may offset the costs and turn into a profit. Tom Morkes[2] has a book on this model that might be worth the read as well[3].

Personally, I go with no analytics whatsoever for my business, for personal reasons, but we do offer a GoatCounter to customers to entice them to move away from Google Analytics. I will definitely keep an eye on Counter.dev as an alternative to that, good luck!

[1] https://www.humblebundle.com/

[2] https://tommorkes.com/

[3] https://tommorkes.com/pwywguide/

> I will definitely keep an eye on Counter.dev as an alternative to that, good luck!

Thanks! If you need something, write us an mail.

Also see here: https://github.com/ihucos/counter.dev#how-can-it-be-free

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