Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

And gives me a feeling that I'm leaving money on the table here.

That is a virtual certainty, considering you are not charging money.

My advice is to consider splitting the service into two levels (does the Maps API let you make money with it? I guess that is moot since you're already doing it) and selling some portion of the people on the upgrade. It is a rare, rare, rare application that will take in more in donations than it will in payments. One useful feature might be allowing embedding in other people's websites. (Remember, with a freemium application you need to make the -mium something that solves a pain point for people. "I want to offer maps" doesn't strike me as an obvious pain point, but given that people are actually using this, "I want people to not leave my site" does strike me as worth paying for for a business.)

Don't be put off by free competition -- I have scads. They're wonderful people, and they display AdSense ads for people charging for similar things. i.e. you.

I actually have the feeling I can make some money because

a) people already donate (the donation ratio is around 10%)

and

b) adsense already generates revenue enough to, at least, pay the service costs and buy beer :-)

The service actually already allows you to embed the map on any site (in an iframe model or just putting a banner with a popup) - the average user of the service has usually not a lot of experience with html, so I provide the snippets on the site itself to make it easier for them.

How do you calculate your donation ratio? 10% seems like a very very good conversion rate.

the number of maps that donated divided by the number of free users. It's not linear, though: there are months when I get a lot of donations (on various sizes). The smallest one being two cents (that was just once, though) and the biggest one having reached 120 usd (yay!!!). The donations are also higher during specific periods of year (like christmas)

If you do go down the freemium route, don't forget to give the people who've already donated free access to the premium features in excess of the amount they donated. Keeping these users happy strikes me as the key to expanding the user base via word of mouth.

"they display AdSense ads for people charging for similar things. i.e. you."

So funny. I thought you could block certain sites from getting impressions on yours, though. Maybe most people don't know about that.

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