> The current price of $50/year for users and $100/year for developers is fair,
Not when you have no details over what the service is going to offer, what control you're going to have, and how the price may change in the future. Essentially, people have no idea what they're buying. You're asking for a $50 dollar a donation and offering WAY less information than any kickstarter campaign that I've seen.
My thought process when looking at join.app.net
1. Who the fuck is Dalton Caldwell?
2. Why can't they just use kickstarter?
3. Who do they think is going to pay $50 a year for something that Facebook and Google give away for free?
4. Why is their campaign page so saccharine?
5. Why go from having no control to having implicit control (because you're paying for it), when clearly the best solution would be to have full control (and pay for it)?
5a. I can get hosting for $60 a year, $10 more than join.app.net is going to cost me. I'm sure if it caught on, I could get a 'join.app' instance hosted for much less than that.
So here's the solution - write a spec for a protocol that lives on top of HTTP. Polish the spec. Publish the spec. Write to the spec, be first to market, and sell 'join.app' instances at $12/year. Profit wildly.
We all know an ad supported Internet cannot thrive, but free-to-fifty is not a jump that 99.99% of users are going to be willing to make.