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Comment by fixie | Hacker News Reader

It would be nice to see how much 1 credit costs before having to sign up. For example, over at PeepCode (http://peepcode.com/) I can immediately see how much a screencast costs without having to click around. Good luck with your startup.

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Hello, thanks for the feedback. We've decide to go with the credit system because it means that we can charge less for shorter, more concise screencasts and it's less confusing for users. Consumers are aware of and understand credits because many services implement them - the Xbox Live system is a great example of this.

You can also head over to the about page ( http://binarycake.com/about ) and see a list of credit bundles you can buy and the costs.

Thanks for the feedback! Jamie

In what way are credits less confusing for users? If anything I would label them as more confusing, as they're a level of abstraction on top of money. They can make good business sense, certainly, as you'd rather hold on to the customer's left-over credits. And consumers can be more likely to spend credits due to the mentioned abstraction layer.

That said, they're a firmly consumer-unfriendly model, for those very reasons. And even then, the "more likely to spend credits" factoid only comes into play once they've actually bought into the system - seeing that it's Yet Another Credit System can be a slight added barrier to entry.

Expanding on this, if every place I spend money online worked with its own "credit" system, I would have upwards of 20 idle balances of my own money earning interest for someone else. Not a very palatable future.

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