Plausible started in 2019. Not sure when [name redacted] started. Clicking on "blame" for the readme file in the repo, I see a commit from 5 years ago.
I can very much empathize that adding a "buy" button is a hump to get over when you just wanna build something cool and share it with like-minded people. I have the same issue with every project I build. I guess one should train to jump over one's shadow in this regard.
Plausible also has a co-founder who does marketing, and is evidently very good at it. That's perhaps a more important factor in success than simply offering a paid plan.
It looks like success was far from guaranteed before he was hired ($400 MRR and not growing). https://plausible.io/blog/open-source-saas#february-looking-...
It undermines the nominal reason for the enterprise's existence (competition) but once a single competitor begins practicing it, everyone else also has to- not to any benefit, but just to maintain their status quo.
This is far, far too cynical. Marketing is not cheating. To keep the sports metaphor, marketing is training. It's unglamorous, time-consuming, and (for most) not fun. But, if you want to succeed as a professional, you have to do it.
If no one was paying, but people were still writing, the best solutions would likely bubble to the top. But as soon as someone pays for placement, everyone needs to. You end up with a new normal that’s the same as before (modulo those products that are better at marketing) but everyone had to pay a bunch of money.
Short of literally banning advertising, there’s no way around it/any serious business needs to do it. But I get the take that it’s a cost that is only necessary because everyone else is doing it.
I think that's far from guaranteed. It could very well be the case that the oldest, most established, solutions would dominate the top, for instance.
I think the situation is almost guaranteed to be worse because there are now stronger incentives to manipulate and deceive.
Product, price, place, promotion.
All of those are marketing. Yes, even the product itself is marketing. When people claim they are not doing marketing, but going by word of mouth, they are using the product itself as marketing.
I would argue that customer service and the actual job done are part of the product, since they’re part of the value you’re delivering to the customer. By that logic one could include the warm fuzzy feeling they get from some really slick copy, but to my mind it feels different. I’m having trouble formalizing the line here.
I’ll also concede that there are things that fall under the aegis of “marketing” that are not direct transfers of money for placement - e.g. cold calling, content marketing, SEO, etc. many of them are zero-sum games, a few are not.
Being able to find customers and explain your products value to them, that being marketing, is an essential part of producing a product.
Flipping the microscope, paid promotions distract from honest testimonials with no profit motive.
"We are improving your search results by prepending sales brochures."
Also it seems like your gripe is actually with advertising, which would be more sensible. Simply being against marketing is merely proof that you can't possibly understand what marketing is.
- "Hey, here's something interesting you might be interested in!"
- "Drink Coca Cola"
The second type of marketing is the sort of zero-sum game you're talking about. Everyone already knows about this, Coca Cola and Pepsi spend phenomenal amounts of money, and it kind of just cancels out.
But the first type of marketing is rather different. The simplest kind is making something and then telling people that you made it.
Sure we could guess and randomly reach out to companies to ask if they provide it. Answering those inquiries could easily be considered marketing, though.
When you are tapping a new market, absolutely nobody knows about your company, your product and the problems it solves. In fact, often you even have to educate your customer that they have an opportunity to improve their business/life with your product.
Yes, I agree. This is also what I told the NLnet people a few years back, but while there's a lot of budget for specific technical things, there isn't really any money set aside for more "soft" aspects like this.
Giving it away for free didn't help, but "making money" was never really a goal as such. I think "being free" is important if you want to be a viable alternative for Google Analytics. €9/month is nothing for a business, but who is paying that for a blog or hobby site (or even some small businesses)?
I already decided a few years ago that "covers hosting" is good enough. It's just that circumstances conspired to put in this rather uncomfortable position.
To be fair, not sure if this is a pro or contra: [name redacted] wouldn't need to exist, if google didn't find the way they did, to make money.
Anyway, cool product. Love OSS but don't mind paying for simple solutions as a business. It's not only about saving time but also about keeping focus.
I was trying to. I highly recommend you to bring back the paid plans. Just leave it as it was. Opt-in for personal and for small commercial websites, paid plan. Like someone else mentioned, for a business, invoices helps a lot to bill as expense if they want to pay you.
You don’t need to optimize to earn tons of money, but minimum threshold should more than just good enough. So, if things go wrong, you can spend that reserve and actually be on a “good enough” position until you figure things out
This also validates that maybe something like Setapp for SaaS or Spotify for SaaS might be a good business model.
"Hello, world" - [name redacted] committed on May 28, 2019 - [link redacted]
Plausible:
"Initial commit" - ukutaht committed - on Sep 2, 2019 - 779d64e19a26a4e4944d4f0d7d9e280a27fbc6e5 - https://github.com/plausible/analytics/commit/779d64e19a26a4...
I don't see to choose this over various alternatives.
[link redacted]