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Comment by typicalrunt | Hacker News Reader

I would like it more if this were not a free service. By making it a free service, that means we (the users) are the product being sold. I'm guessing people moved away from Facebook because of the constant encroaching of user privacy so that Facebook can monetize each user.

Instead of making it free, if each family member paid $10/year for a FamilyLeaf account, that would (hopefully) allow the company to put forward a policy where users never need to worry about their privacy being violated for the sake of money.

I'm not saying that FamilyLeaf is doing this, but the need to monetize a free service drives companies to do strange things.

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I don't know about your family, but there's no way I would expect my parents, my sisters, their spouses and their kids to pay $10/ea for a service like this. Someone just wouldn't show up, which kind of defeats the purpose.

If it was valuable enough to us, I could imagine paying a reasonable monthly rate (say, $25/mo or less) to host our entire family... but disposable income varies wildly in our (and I'm sure most) family.

Thanks for giving us a shot! We definitely are not going to sell out our users and have other plans to monetize and move the company forward. We plan on providing value-added services for families such as helping families plan vacations, buy gifts for each other, order cards/pictures, etc. We've already been doing a few experiments with some of our families and things are going well!

In addition to that, we'll never charge any of our current users for what we are already offering them though in the future we may have additional features or plans that could be subscription based.

I think you should call that out on your site with a "Is it actually free?" or "How do we make money?" section.

Thanks for the suggestion. We do have an answer on our FAQ page: https://familyleaf.com/faq but it might be a little too hidden.

Just an FYI, your layout seems broken [1] on the FAQ page. I'm on Windows XP, Firefox 14.0.1.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/4gGz2.png

--edit: I just tested it on Firefox 17 and I'm seeing the same thing.

Uh oh - thanks for the bug report. Looks like it works in Chrome and Safari but not Firefox. Will get on that soon, appreciate it.

Just an update - should be fixed now! Thanks again.

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