Thoughts on yesterday's paid vs free visitor.js

Visitor.js is arguably not very innovative. The only "added value" that I would consider is having it all in one nice library.

The knowledge necessary to create visitor.js is almost at the level of a beginner. How many 'hello world' tutorials aren't there on the web that display how to use cookies in Javascript by showing the last time you visited the page?

The incentive behind creating something like visitor.js should be community, exposure and input from other developers. What was John's incentive behind releasing jQuery for free, a toolkit more useful, and harder, by far? *

I am not arguing against monetizing. I think monetization is most of the times appropriate, but when any Javascript coder worth his salt can copy your idea and implement it in 3 hours and you have no competitive edge, then monetization is not appropriate.

*: Addendum: John's incentive was probably not exposure, although it probably rocketed him towards being know as a Javascript authority.

A fairly unique aspect of building software products for software developers is that most of your potential customers could probably build your product if they really wanted to. And as was illustrated yesterday, if the cost is of whack with the value created, software developers will just build their own version of it.

Twillio is a great example of the opposite. I don't think Twillio is actually so deep that people don't understand what's going on under the hood. Open source alternatives exist to using Twillio, like Asterisk. But setting them up and maintaining them is a massive time suck. The value Twillio creates is being able to make phone calls and send text messages immediately and never have to worry about that piece of your infrastructure. Additionally their pricing is set such that using them is over taking the time to setup something yourself is a no-brainer.

A nice side effect of making software for software developers, is that if you do open source something simple, someone else will find it when they're looking to save a few hours, and probably spend a little more time adjusting it to their needs and making it better. Then everyone is in a better position to use that code to build something that creates a lot of unique value and charge for it.

Original visitor.js discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3433104

Open Source visitor.js discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3435416

Meh, not true.

I have a friend that wrote a very uninnovative, very shallow app a few years ago in a couple of months and barely works on it nowadays. He thinks he will make $60K this year and there are at least five or six different open source competitors (read last word as Daniel Plainview please.)

I could write something to replace it in a week or two.

Just make sure you know your audience: if you are selling to developers, you are probably SOL. If you are selling to managers, they really don't care whether they pay or not but it solves their problem.

Value and technical difficulty have no interdependence. The fact that this thing could be cloned in half a day doesn't in any way indicate that the original business won't go on to be successful.

I know this because I make a comfortable living on the proceeds of a SaaS product that anybody here could reproduce in half a day. The fact that several dozen of my customers are HN readers (and thus capable of the aforementioned feat) goes to show that even if it's possible to do something, the smart business decision is sometimes to pay somebody else to do it for you.

I actually give a full set of instructions to build your own version of the service on the site, and link to several open source packages that you can install on your server. But still there are plenty of people out there capable of multiplying [hourly bill rate] * 4 to come up with how much doing that would cost. Since that'll buy most shops a couple years of my service, the smart money goes toward the "buy" end of that build vs. buy decision.

I don't know what's all this about. Yes, someone open sourced a service that is providing an all-around solution for data that's easily trackable-- but the user's location.

If you've used free services to convert an IP to location, you know it's not so reliable. And that's the issue with the open-source version, which tracks me to the US, while I'm actually in Mexico City and it's quite accurate (12.8 kilometers off).

Yes, there's a geolocation API, but it needs user authorization and when you're building a service that requires knowing the user's location without them doing anything, visitor.js appears to be both reliable and at a fair-enough price.

When you write software for programmers, you typically are writing it for "ego" or "cred" rather than for money. The money will come when you write software for normal people, either in the form of actual payment, or in the form of recommendations for jobs (contracting or full-time). Therefore, as an author, you are compensated. Just not with money. (What's better compensation for your weekend project: $10 now, or a $10,000 raise tomorrow? That's why programmers advertise themselves instead of monetize their "products".)

Cache link : http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?ix=heb&sour...

I think Pusher is an excellent example of something which can be quite simple to setup and use (socket.io) but people are willing to pay if someone maks it really really easy and just plug and play.

I think if visitor.js came with some nice extra things to do with the data rather than just displaying it (country list with yours preselected, only showing social media buttons from the referring website).

I also believe the pricing for visitor.js was a little off-putting to people but not sure how you would price / rate limit a SaaS like that..

I just wanted to say you guys crashed my site with all your traffic.

Lesson learned: don't send HN to an EC2 micro instance. I upgraded to a medium instance, let's see how it works...

I wonder how peoples' reactions would have been different if the name didn't end in ".js". That sort of implies it's just a bit of JavaScript.

People who want the paid version, which probably comes with support as part of the package, will pay for that service. People who don't can just take advantage of the 'free' version. Even though the complexity of the code was low, there is value in offering a paid version, which usually comes in the form of support. Happens all the time.

I had a similar thought (http://words.bencohen.net/blog/2012/01/06/copy-for-the-peopl...) yesterday, and I wonder if we'll see the same sorts of issues as the fabrication of physical goods becomes easier for individuals.

If it'd been priced at $18 once off instead of $x/month, would the HN reaction have been very different?

A few people have talked about it being trivial to create, but it's obviously not so trivial that people haven't found a free option useful to save them time.

One of the things we hope http://TipTheWeb.org/ will be good for is offering a way for creators of open source tools and useful web services to get money from the people who use what they've created, especially for things that would be hard to build a full business around, but which still have significant value.

Much of what's great about the Web is exactly that: valuable, published for free access, not the basis of a full-time business, yet definitely worth supporting.

tl;dr: making money is hard.