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Comment by danenania | Hacker News Reader

To be honest, I think you have a bit of a self-defeating attitude. Building an open source project and then building paid tiers on top is not "slimy". It's one of the best and most sustainable ways to keep a project going. The alternatives are that it gets supported by a large company, in which case it becomes subservient to that company's needs, or it eventually gets abandoned because people need to eat.

I really don't understand the mindset that it's slimy. I get the "rug-pull" thing, but just because you made a project with features a, b, and c that are free, why does that make it slimy to add paid features d, e, and f on top? People are still getting a, b, and c for free, so what's the problem? There's no rug-pull there.

Would it be better if a, b, and c never existed? It just seems like such a clear win-win to me.

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I can see your point, and it seems less slimy in that context. But every time I see a paid subscription for more features, it feels to me like just paying as a means to an end, rather than supporting something bigger than myself. Yeah I'll pay for the features if I want them, but that's because I want them; not because I want both the features and to support the developers. It's so impersonal. I think there is much more money to be made when you make users feel like part of the family (and not by just putting "Join the <app_name_here> family!" in a subscription prompt ) I understand this is significantly more difficult as your app scales, but that's a node of the problem I'm wanting to solve. And I cant relate to what constitutes a self-defeating attitude— I understand well enough that I could walk the well-travelled path that others have paved in order to make money from an app. My incentive here is to get help brainstorming novel methods of getting revenue in such a way that users feel like theyre actually contributing instead of just buying stuff.

Fair enough, it sounds like you are looking for more of a sponsorship/patronage model than a product-based business. I understand, but I think it could be a more challenging model to make sustainable.

I'd also just say that selling a product doesn't have to be impersonal, and in fact you will get much better results if you do it in a more authentic and human way. It's not actually so different to a patronage model when you are small. Part of the reason many people who are early adopters like buying from small startups or solopreneurs is that it's much more relationship-based and the founder will listen to their needs and concerns.

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