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Comment by bliti | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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?

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.

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