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Comment by empressplay | Hacker News Reader

Your "bootstrap" level should be free. I don't see any bootstrapping startup paying for a service they don't need / can build themselves for free (if they're really desperate for it.)

You want to capture that potential future business, and hope that you can convert them to paying customers as they become profitable; you don't want them to go "hey, great idea, but I'm not paying for that" and then implement their own solution.

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Isn't it better to just sell to people who can pay? I mean, why being so against asking for money? Its strange how you say that if they really needed it they could just build it. That's a bit of a stretch. Why build something you can pay for and focus on making money instead? Dunno. I'm just confused.

You barely have to build it, there is a great open source project already available. Not sure if it does everything diff.io does but it's a great resource to do a lot of it.

https://github.com/webdriverio/webdrivercss

https://github.com/webdriverio/webdrivercss-adminpanel

You are severely limiting them if they don't pay. So I guess hooking them (or at least letting them try it) and then upselling sounds better for both parties.

I have the hardest time upselling from free. But its pretty easy to go from $300 to $500.

Maybe, but many people (myself included) may be reluctant to use it if they can't even try it out without paying for it.

Especially if the core product can be replicated with 3 lines of code using open source libraries.

Three lines of code? Is this something you could do in three lines? I mean, only deploying this live requires way more than that. One thing people seem to forget is that building your own tools means that you also have to deploy, maintain, and fix them. If programmer time is > $100, how much will it cost you to deploy something like this? I'd rather pay the money and move onto building products that make me money.

True, but this is just a service, you're going to have to write code to integrate with it anyway, why not just call ImageMagick (or whatever) directly?

I agree that a very limited, free tier should help the product gain traction and let people try it out. But:

> can build themselves for free

Bootstrapping startups should not be focused on trying to save $10/month here and there by recreating microservices. A startup may decide to build their own solution for valid reasons, but it most certainly is not "free".

I don't know... I see your point, but people really need to learn that stuff isn't free.

If you do a free tier, you run the risk of having to support infrastructure for people that will never need to exceed whatever you free limit is, just because they couldn't be bother to do the work themself, even if the tools where free.

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