This post is obviously quite biased towards join.app.net, which I'm not entirely against but some of the arguments are very weak.
> The current price of $50/year for users and $100/year for developers is fair,
Not when you have no details over what the service is going to offer, what control you're going to have, and how the price may change in the future. Essentially, people have no idea what they're buying. You're asking for a $50 dollar a donation and offering WAY less information than any kickstarter campaign that I've seen.
My thought process when looking at join.app.net
1. Who the fuck is Dalton Caldwell?
2. Why can't they just use kickstarter?
3. Who do they think is going to pay $50 a year for something that Facebook and Google give away for free?
4. Why is their campaign page so saccharine?
5. Why go from having no control to having implicit control (because you're paying for it), when clearly the best solution would be to have full control (and pay for it)?
5a. I can get hosting for $60 a year, $10 more than join.app.net is going to cost me. I'm sure if it caught on, I could get a 'join.app' instance hosted for much less than that.
So here's the solution - write a spec for a protocol that lives on top of HTTP. Polish the spec. Publish the spec. Write to the spec, be first to market, and sell 'join.app' instances at $12/year. Profit wildly.
We all know an ad supported Internet cannot thrive, but free-to-fifty is not a jump that 99.99% of users are going to be willing to make.
I think $50 is fair for a yearly subscription to a service such as Twitter, which has no other source of revenue. I spend way more time on Twitter per day than watching Netflix and Netflix costs almost twice as much per year.
The article addresses the price with a number of different solutions to lower it, in one case to $1, initially, as to gain critical mass.
Haha, very true. That's why it isn't working. The initial price needs to be much lower to reach their goal. Over time, as the service grows, I think $50 is eventually a fair price. But, way too much for a fledgling service with unclear benefits to the user.
Fully agree with these suggestions. Plus the the big question is still why the end product should be more successful than Diaspora, which apparently attracts only a very niche audience. Some sort of freemium model could probably work well and I am surprised that very few (non-work) related social networks have made used of that.
Comments
This post is obviously quite biased towards join.app.net, which I'm not entirely against but some of the arguments are very weak.
> The current price of $50/year for users and $100/year for developers is fair,
Not when you have no details over what the service is going to offer, what control you're going to have, and how the price may change in the future. Essentially, people have no idea what they're buying. You're asking for a $50 dollar a donation and offering WAY less information than any kickstarter campaign that I've seen.
My thought process when looking at join.app.net
1. Who the fuck is Dalton Caldwell?
2. Why can't they just use kickstarter?
3. Who do they think is going to pay $50 a year for something that Facebook and Google give away for free?
4. Why is their campaign page so saccharine?
5. Why go from having no control to having implicit control (because you're paying for it), when clearly the best solution would be to have full control (and pay for it)?
5a. I can get hosting for $60 a year, $10 more than join.app.net is going to cost me. I'm sure if it caught on, I could get a 'join.app' instance hosted for much less than that.
So here's the solution - write a spec for a protocol that lives on top of HTTP. Polish the spec. Publish the spec. Write to the spec, be first to market, and sell 'join.app' instances at $12/year. Profit wildly.
We all know an ad supported Internet cannot thrive, but free-to-fifty is not a jump that 99.99% of users are going to be willing to make.
I think $50 is fair for a yearly subscription to a service such as Twitter, which has no other source of revenue. I spend way more time on Twitter per day than watching Netflix and Netflix costs almost twice as much per year.
The article addresses the price with a number of different solutions to lower it, in one case to $1, initially, as to gain critical mass.
> I think $50 is fair for a yearly subscription to a service such as Twitter,
Now you just need to find 10,000 other people that feel the same way as you do.
Haha, very true. That's why it isn't working. The initial price needs to be much lower to reach their goal. Over time, as the service grows, I think $50 is eventually a fair price. But, way too much for a fledgling service with unclear benefits to the user.
Fully agree with these suggestions. Plus the the big question is still why the end product should be more successful than Diaspora, which apparently attracts only a very niche audience. Some sort of freemium model could probably work well and I am surprised that very few (non-work) related social networks have made used of that.
To address #2, they explain why they can't use kickstarter in the FAQ.
I read the Kickstarter ToU, and I didn't see anything that would explicitly or implicitly prevent a campaign of this nature.