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Comment by jmathai | Hacker News Reader

I understand your points. It's why we wanted to give free unlimited lifetime accounts instead of a free year or something else to monetize.

> It's rather useless compared to actual help.

Arguments against helping in ways that have specific impact (providing food, assisting with relocation, etc) are a straw man. It's not better to do nothing than something of small value.

I have plenty of photo albums in my closet and if those somehow got lost or destroyed then I'd be devastated (more than any other physical object in my house).

> If you're still charging them $.01 a year, that's still charging them something. You ought to fix that.

Really? If we get more feedback like that then we're happy to change or give refunds. We're set up for subscriptions so it's the easiest way to do address verification. If a penny a year is too much, we'll gladly fix it.

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> Arguments against helping in ways that have specific impact (providing food, assisting with relocation, etc) are a straw man. It's not better to do nothing than something of small value.

My argument isn't to do nothing - again, this looks like a nice gesture - but that you should do more. Maybe take all your earnings for a month and donate them to help the victims. You can evidently afford to give out almost-free accounts, can you do anything better?

> I have plenty of photo albums in my closet and if those somehow got lost or destroyed then I'd be devastated (more than any other physical object in my house).

Then scan them and throw them on Dropbox. Your service actively costs the victims money, Dropbox does not, so which helps more?

> Really? If we get more feedback like that then we're happy to change or give refunds. We're set up for subscriptions so it's the easiest way to do address verification. If a penny a year is too much, we'll gladly fix it.

These are people who are already financially strained by the hurricane. They may not even have a penny anymore. Did you consider this?

> You can evidently afford to give out almost-free accounts, can you do anything better?

Difficult question to answer as a company. As a company we felt a free account was a good start. We are also a startup.

Personally supporting the cause is another story but they're separate.

> Then scan them and throw them on Dropbox. Your service actively costs the victims money, Dropbox does not, so which helps more?

In case you're unfamiliar with the project it's an open source photo platform. We support Dropbox (and Box.com, S3, DreamObjects, CX, etc) as the place your photos get stored.

Dropbox isn't really free, for photo backup anyway. You'll hit your limits pretty quickly.

> These are people who are already financially strained by the hurricane. They may not even have a penny anymore. Did you consider this?

I have not. But it's a valid point. The subsequent penny each year could be avoided but we're doing it to verify that the person does live in an affected area. I appreciate you bringing this up and we'll see what options we have.

Apparently our database of zip codes isn't big enough though and we're adding them as they arrive.

Disclaimer: I'm from an affected area (but all good now except for cable/internet).

Why should they do more? They already open source a lot of their software (https://github.com/photo) and they are giving free lifetime accounts. Should they also send blankets? Or is that not enough, pillows too (Emmanuel Levinas would take your side).

The penny is their verification method (this has issues I will be emailing them about).

Yes they are seeking some publicity for it, but I'd say that's a fair trade (their site has links to a Scoble video and a Techcrunch writeup so this isn't exactly how they are launching).

I'm not a user of their product yet, but since I am in an affected area (and evaluating options for storing baby photos) I might give it a whirl.

Appreciate the comment. We've already received comments that our list of affected zip codes is not comprehensive enough and are adding more.

Email support@openphoto.me with issues and we'll get them sorted out.

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