Some people like to pay. Let them. | Hacker News Reader

Some people like to pay. Let them.

sivers.org

74 pointssivers20 comments

I feel this way about Mint.com. They're a great site, but I would gladly pay a premium to not be offered "deals" and to be given features (like advanced envelope budgeting and the like) that may be at odds with their advertising interests.

The only problem is that there's no place for me to put my credit card. Why not, Mint?

Could this be a good opportunity for a Mint competitor? I know there's a couple of them out there, but unless I'm mistaken they're completely pay only or they're free only like Mint.

a startup that was filling the gray because black and white were taken, isn't going to fare well especially in such an expensive market to get into. Mint has gotten 17.8mm in its 3 year existence

Completely agree.

He mentioned Pandora and that was the first service that came to mind for me. I wanted a way to donate to them, but couldn't find it (frankly, I didn't look very hard either, I'm sure if I sent an e-mail they'd find a way for me to send money).

A year ago I purchased a "registered" copy of 7-zip for $20 some odd dollars because I wanted to support the development of that application. It afforded me e-mail support or something like that, but I have never bothered the developer. I just loved the application.

I don't command a six figure income. I'm also the sole financial provider for a family of four. I recognize value when I see it. It is a sort of "tip" to the people who I'm reaping benefits from and I have no problem showing my gratitude monetarily.

So ... another way to look at this is ... you have a winning product if people are asking for ways to pay you for what you're giving away.

This is a really fresh approach to asking for money, and also can be applied to art. It reminds of what my hero, Richard Feynman, who was reluctant to ask for a price for his drawings, later said about art:

"I understood that to sell a drawing is not to make money, but to be sure that it's in the home of someone who really wants it; someone who would feel bad if they didn't have it."

There are too many free services and free apps and not enough good ones.

There's nothing wrong with asking for money -- it does the world a great service if you've got something that can perpetuate itself and has to improve to stay alive. (As opposed to something that sucks that's defensible because it's free)

I think Derek Sivers has a lower marginal utility of income than your average schmo. :)

well, thats a simple consequence of having more income though!

Question: what is the right decay rate for the utility of each additional dollar of income in terms of overall buying power (assuming sane spending habits/hobbies)? I'd think it be zero up till some range, then sublinear, then some moderate polynomial, then a slow exponential?

Any thoughts?

I would say some kind of second derivative positive, quadratic function.

              /
             /
            /
  _________/

(That's the best I can do for the -decay- rate).

"some people want to pay" is not sufficient to justify implementing a "freemium lite" (term is my own) version as advocated in the article. How many people will pay? How much will they pay? Is the product of those two figures in the same ballpark as the cost of developing the "freemium lite" differences, accepting payment, dealing with support emails from people who expect things they pay for to Just Work, etc.?

This made me think about this post:

http://jlouisramblings.blogspot.com/2009/04/premise-as-soon-...

But there are probably other applications where there is an obvious customer demand, but no one seemingly interested in collecting money or operate the business the way customer demand is.

Tipjoy! http://tipjoy.com/

I don't think that's a good solution for a lot of cases. When a service is free and everyone gets the same thing, something usually has to change if you're going to get anything for it. It doesn't have to be a lot -- could just be to remove advertising or offer one or two extra-but-useful features -- but I don't get the sense that most users will give their money to get the exact same thing (for Web-based services, at least).

If your service is always free and you're looking to benefit from the people who are willing to pay to get the same thing -- even though they don't have to -- then TipJoy is a good solution.

Shoemoney had a great post about how blogs and small businesses should be using Amazon Wish Lists to let people with the money be able to pay more than a couple bucks in a "tip jar".

http://www.shoemoney.com/2008/12/23/income-from-donations-am...

I think this is less wacky than it sounds at first (I have a friend who pays for his hotmail account). Perhaps this model could save/revive professional journalism, by letting readers voluntarily contribute on a per-article basis?

Some journalism requires more resources than one person can usually command. Perhaps celebrities could step in to raise funds in those cases?

There is a silly amount of $$$ spent by the military/industrial complex on PR. (Several years ago the $ spent on armed forces bands was about the same as NPR's budget.) Much journalism seems to be an arm of PR. Seems like PR is replacing journalism. This only makes sense -- apparently there's a lot more money in PR than journalism!

Independent journalism is vital for real democracy. Perhaps democracy is doomed because journalism can't survive free information?

No, that's exactly my point; perhaps independent journalism, which doesn't seem viable given current economic patterns, can become self-sustainable through internet publishing and voluntary contributions by appreciative readers. There's plenty of good journalism to be done with just an internet connection, a phone and an inquiring mind, as long as you know you will be reimbursed. At least I'd like to think so :-)

That only goes so far. And if you have people sitting in their apartments, living off contributions and tips, isn't it going to be easy for the powers that be to pay off a large number of bloggers? Won't the situation be manipulated to recreate the one we have today -- journalism as just an aggregate of PR from various sources -- just delivered more efficiently at lower cost?

Good point. Show people what good their money can do, like finance good music, high quality open source software, and some people will actually donate money.

This reminds me of this time in college when I was looking for the cheapest legal copy of windows I could find. A fellow student kept insisting I pirate it, and I told him I did not want to.

He could not understand why I did not want to pirate it and kept badgering me to the point where I seriously considered reporting him for piracy (I didn't, but it was tempting).

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