Ask HN: Why aren't you charging money for your side project?
I see many side projects that don't charge their users and was wondering why that is.
The beauty of having a side project is that you can work on it whenever you want. By turning it into a business, you can no longer work on your own terms. (To some extent)
I use gitlab pages for my project, it works well enough. Nothing to worry about except to make sure the domains are paid.
The part that I really enjoy about it now is helping users by adding features and helping them and how excited they are when I deliver exactly what they wanted.
- An expectation of support which is likely based on the purchaser's subjective past experiences in receiving support, rather than on what's available in your support section
- Pushback from your new customers-who-are-always-right
- Passionate and very specific suggestions for improvement, _for free_, from people who paid and therefore believe they are your target audience
- A complimentary covert contract governing the vendor-purchaser relationship, to accompany whatever you previously made very clear, which they did not and will not read
- A noticeable dilution of others' perspective on your personal values--"ah, they are just sharing that link with us because they make money off of it"
These are just some of the possible outcomes...
Which is not to say it's not worth doing, but there are lots of important factors.
If I am going to write code in my free time, for the sake of something I feel personally motivated to create, I would rather share the results back to the world under an open-source license.
When it’s free, easier to ignore those things.
I put a little custom app I wrote for my wife on the App Store, mainly as a learning experience. And I decided to charge a buck to keep the riff-raff away.
But that $1 makes me feel a real obligation to my users.. I've put in maybe 6 hours of work over ~5 years updating and supporting when a new OS update breaks something, all for an app that has generated about maybe a bit less than $100 of revenue.
I don't exactly mind. This is the learning experience I wanted. (I have other, more successful apps on the store, but as the programmer of a small team who didn't deal with the App Store beyond getting builds uploaded.)
Whenever someone pays for something, theirs an expectation of support.
Hell, even open source projects will have entitled brats opening up issues.
I have a job, I have no interest in you badgering me with complaints since you spent 15$. My next project is going to be free, I'll just ask for a retweet ( I hate Twitter and all social media, but it's the only way to promote projects now ).
I imagine if it becomes widely successful I'd sell it to a company which can do whatever they want with it.
edit: and of course engineers, you can maybe pay people to come and work with you..which can be alot more fun and extend your reach
To counteract my own snark - there are two reasons to work on something and mixing them can pervert either of them alone. I wish I could mix my passion and my income, but I am grateful I can experience passion on its own, as a graceful failure.
A dollar, euro, naira, deutschmark, ruble, yuan or yen has an imprint of life and context based on its' cultural origins (and the minter who produced it).
My business project (still a side-project at the moment, effectively) is imprinted -- to the git commit-level -- with the authorship of myself (and hopefully other contributors in future).
Given the choice between offering that software DNA (including, admittedly, plenty of faults) to other people to use and remix as they like, or to trade it for monetary units that are relatively-characterless in compensation -- even a billion such monetary units -- well, it's not really a choice that requires much consideration.
(regardless of the choice, the two options are equivalent at a technology/runtime level; they're a series of compute instructions that run locally or over a network to achieve result(s))
Why should we monetize any side project?
Why should we not have activities we do without aiming to extract value out of them?
I have had several people comment that I should develop my side project into a commercial product. I’ve demurred because the cost benefit projection doesn’t wow me, and the tech isn’t anything that couldn’t be copied if it was seen as successful.
On the other hand I am interested to connect with more like-minded developers. Maybe it will end up on GitHub.
1. Charging then creates an expectation that doesn't otherwise exist. That may not be something you can or want to commit to;
2. There is an overhead in charging. Payments infrstructure, billing and so on. This isn't "free";
3. Earning an income from your side project may well violate your visa status (particularly appropriate for those on US temporary work visas);
4. A side income may violate your employment conditions; and
5. Contributors may be less willing to volunteer their time to a paid product.
more importantly customers only ever want products that's are adjacent to the systems they already use. systems haven't changed that much in a long time and I'm really bored with chipping away at the edges when there is so much more interesting space to explore
At some point you realize that you have to ramp your business up, just so it pays for the cost of accepting money. Then it's no longer a side project.
I'll just leave this here:
For a project that wants growth, even requiring signup is a big drag.
My project: https://eventcount.io/
By definition, you don't earn money from a side project.
And you need a business model to make money from something. Usually side projects don't have a proper business model.
Since I'm on Linux, I use a lot of software from people outside the big tech camp, such as the awesome kitty terminal.
There was a bug in it which unreported and when the developer fixed it in less than 24 hours, I signed up to give him 10 dollars per month. About 800 other people were already signed up and giving donations (possibly smaller).
People just like to give back, so make it easy to do and they will. But you need to make a product they use every day.
They give me exposure; I got my current job partially by being “known” in a particular area.
The most important aspect of my side projects is that they let me relax and be myself. And I have discovered that chasing money doesn’t motivate me. I already do it 8 hours per day. That’s more than enough for me.
Charging people money increases support costs (people get more upset if things don't work right). Getting paid 'beer money' to deal with additional support load isn't worth it to me.
Getting users IMHO is more important than bringing in minimal revenue (that an early state company would).
- you have taxes, accounting, support, legal documents, incorporation issues, paid assistance for bookkepping and other non-core things, etc etc ad nauseam.
(And I also hate ads)