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Comment by Knee_Pain | Hacker News Reader

I think the biggest problem is the financial infrastructure.

We pay for software almost exclusively through digital means, but the fees are too damn high.

Imagine if transaction fees were zero.

Imagine if a piece of software you used costed 10 cents per months. Or someone's patreon or github sponsor was 5 cents per month.

And then imagine if starting and stopping the subscription was intuitive and super easy with any digital payment method you happened to use.

I could see the flood gates open and now developers who got basically nothing will get a ton of small contributions that together would make up quite a nice lump sum every month

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A former company I worked for started having a larger Indian userbase. We experimented with supporting them more and it would be similar to what you said - significantly lower prices for them. We chose to mostly ignore the Indian userbase and let them use the product as is without catering to them

The reality is that just because someone pays less doesn't mean they cost less to support. And then, if you support a large number of cheap users, it's even more expensive to support.

As a business, you'd rather have 10 customers paying $10 dollars each instead of 100 customers paying $1 each. Larger businesses can overcome this with economies of scale, but smaller businesses cannot

you can make people pay 10 cents a month for the software but the support is a separate subscription

Support includes things like "I paid and my account doesn't work". In addition, you simply can't provide a good service without support. Being able to answer questions like "I'm trying to do X with your tool, how do I do it?" leads to better customer engagement and retention. It's part of the cost of doing business. The marginal benefit of doing that to microrevenue customers is not worth it financially, and as a result, you will never get as good of engagement nor retention from them.

One of the strengths of small business over a big co like Google is your support is NOT automated and you take the time and care to talk to and answer your customer's questions. You can't do that when you charge 10 cents a customer

On top of that, you still need to market/advertise to those users.

It's less time consuming, causes less friction, and is more profitable to just charge $10 dollars instead

From experience I know this truth: Somebody who won't pay $5 per month will never pay $1 per month nor will they ever pay 10 cents per month.

Something in the mind switches and people turn full on psychotic when it comes to paying for digital services, and there's not much that you can do to fight it with logic.

Just look at Github projects for some really good stuff that are used by thousands or millions. At most the developers will have received 10-20 donations. Almost all of the commenters here on HN have never donated a single dollar to the projects that they love and enjoy.

At the same time cost gates are quality gates quite often.

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