Cards Against Humanity: Results of "pay what you want" - <AUTHOR> http://www.cardsagainsthumanity.com/holidaystats/ <comment><USER2> It seems like one takeaway is that a significant portion of people will just pay the default as stated, even if given a choice. I think people just have a hard time deciding what something is actually worth, so they'll take whatever advice is given. So, when pricing your products, if you're wondering if you should charge more, the default answer should be "Yes"

<comment><USER3> So, a couple months back I released a WebGL Enabler for iOS with a pay-what- you-want model: <http://demoseen.com/webglenabler/>

I keep meaning to write a blog post about the results, but ~99.5% of people paid $0. Of the people who paid, probably around 50% paid the $1.99 I had as default, but what's really interesting to me is the way people priced it if they changed the value. I got a number of payments for amounts like $1.25 and $1.50, and I remember looking at those completely baffled -- who cares enough to pay anything for this (you could just download it for free -- I don't mind) but not enough to pay an extra $0.49? Really wish I had an answer there; maybe people just like 'getting a deal'?

<comment><USER4> aren't a lot of people who have jail-broken iOs devices, already by definition people who want paid apps for free?

I'm an Android guy myself so I might be wrong here (and your app is an example of non pirate usage for jail-breaking), but I often hear young relatives talking about jail-breaking their iPhones to save those $1-2 on apps, which to be honest, is pretty shitty behavior IMHO (yeah, I lecture them, they look at me like a crazy old person)

<comment><USER5> >aren't a lot of people who have jail-broken iOs devices, already by definition people who want paid apps for free?

Careful not to fall into the trap of conflating jailbreaking with piracy. There are many, _many_ good reasons to JB not even counting apps that end in -ous. Google voice and SMS extensions, f.lux, theming support, wifi tethering, and a great deal more low level customization than Apple gives you.

<comment><USER4> As I said, I'm an Android user primarily because it gives me much more freedom without rooting, and the few iOs devices I have (and hardly use) are not jail- broken. But people I've met who jail-break their iPhones do it mainly to pirate apps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I ordered this pack and paid the default $5 by mistake (with a bit of laziness), and would bet quite a few others had the same experience.

When ordering, you had to enter your amount before adding it to the cart, with $5 as the default. There wasn't an option to change it later that I could find. By the time I realized it couldn't be changed, I was through most of the ordering process and didn't feel like starting over.

It would be interesting to see how much better they would have done with either a more intuitive checkout (assuming I missed an option) or had more options in the process.

<comment><USER7> Developer for the site here. We definitely talked about this in the post mortem. Do you have any specific changes that you would have made to make the process more clear?

<comment><USER6> I don't remember having any trouble with actually ordering the pack.

I do remember trying to bump the payment to $10 and not being able to. Adding an option to change the amount paid during checkout or making it much more obvious if there was one may have helped your "haul".

<comment><USER8> Note that the humble bundle actually lets you increase your contribution "after" you've paid as well. They might be worth emulating there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think it's absolutely great that they've donated all the proceeds to Wikipedia :) Congratulations. It's heartwarming to know that although there are some free loaders, you were still made a pretty penny.

On the other hand, how come all the design work, copy writing, etc are considered free? That's just masking the actual cost of the product.

<comment><USER10> We made those things with our own hands.

<comment><USER11> But surely your time was worth something. Isn't that the first lesson of running a business -- pay yourself first?

<comment><USER12> If you're doing something you really love, money is just a side effect.

<comment><USER13> Loving what you do never bought groceries. So the actual answer has to be 'I have enough money from other sources to live on'.

<comment><USER14> The money spent on essentials may also be essential, but things can both be essential and the side effects of processes which have some other primary intent.

<comment><USER13> Doing something for free doesn't get you any cash as a side effect.

<comment><USER14> I'm not sure why you don't get this, but there's a huge gap between not having money be the primary intended result of your actions and having money not at all be a result of your actions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hey guys,

I developed this site. I'll be around for a little while if you have any tech questions.

Edit: Please note that this pay what you can was just for the holiday-related expansion set, not the full game.

<comment><USER15> One comment: Myself and others were initially confused by the layout of the page into thinking that CAH had turned a massive loss. It's only when you get to the bottom that there was any indication of sales.

<comment><USER7> For the infographic?

<comment><USER16> I am not the parent poster, but for me, yes, the infographic!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I am surprised there were jerks that paid 0. Really? You can't afford give them five bucks? You spend more on beer OR lunch OR coffee in Starbucks if you feel kinky. At least humble bundle not allow you to pay 0 :)

<comment><USER16> You are a jerk for calling them jerks. If it is "pay what you want" then you are invited to do exactly that. If you want to pay nothing, you may do so. It is perfectly inside the rules of the event.

<comment><USER18> Yes, it is within the rules of the event. There are lots of ways to play within the rules and still be a jerk.

Everyone who bought the cards for under $3 was faced with a decision: do I want these badly enough to literally cost the people who make them money?

Did you answer yes? Cool, you probably acted selfishly. Own it.

<comment><USER19> Yet they did not cost these guys money. The game's creators advertised a pay- what-you-want event because they had a reasonable expectation of making a profit (for charity) even though many people would pay $0.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Argh, I saw this two weeks ago, did a "remember to buy this when you get home" thing, and then forgot. I hope the expansion cards are made available somewhere. I enjoy CAH and am glad to send money as new bits are made available.

It'd be interesting to see if the "pay what you want" strategy works for you guys a second time now that you released such detailed data. You'd think it might make people more likely to pay exactly your equilibrium point just to see if they can get away with it.

<comment><USER21> I made a similar mistake. I saw it, but saw no clear way to post different addresses for shipping and billing. I asked if there was a way on their facebook page, figuring that if I got an answer explaining how, I would pay (was planning on a $10 payment actually), and than if I didn't get an answer, I would just opt for $0 payment and put in my shipping address.

I then went about my business, completely forgot about the question I asked on facebook (because they never answered), and never ended up submitting the form.

Oh well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Little Monkey Caye (Caribbean island for $55K):

[http://www.caribbeanislandbrokers.com/islands-for- sale/Littl...](http://www.caribbeanislandbrokers.com/islands-for-sale/Little- Monkey-Caye)

<comment><USER23> here's what it looks like at high tide: <http://bit.ly/R2WTFc>

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I wonder what the effect would be if you'd simply state the production cost per unit on the ordering page, while still allowing people to pay zero $.

<comment><USER25> They did, several times (breaking it down in to the $1 for production and $2 for processing/shipping like on that page). They also suggested $5 as a fair price, and pointed out that it cost them $3 to make the set one last time on a nag screen if you tried to pay $0 (fun fact: the site wouldn't let you donate anything greater than 0 but under fifty cents, since they would lose money on credit card fees).

<comment><USER7> Correct -- we used Stripe, which has a minimum charge of $0.50.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Interesting. Even though around 20% of people didn't pay anything, they were still able to turn a profit.

I'd love to compare the results of this with other 'pay-what-you-want' schemes.

Edit: _"We did all of the web design, video production, motion design, and copy writing ourselves, so these were free."_ I wonder if the cost of this would technically have put them at a loss (I suspect not).

<comment><USER27> It would almost have to. $70k is not even one man year's worth of effort from someone skilled at any one of those things individually.

<comment><USER28> Why are you considering a year's salary for a holiday pack/site? It's hard to imagine 2,080 hours (40x52) went into the entire thing.

<comment><USER27> "We did all of the web design, video production, motion design, and copy writing ourselves". Doesn't seem that hard to me. And we're talking less than a year's salary for someone skilled at any of those things, let alone all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> CAH is one of the funniest and most enjoyable games I've ever played. I was shocked to discover it was pay what you want, and the cards were completely open to print for myself.

<comment><USER30> Only the Holiday pack was pay what you want. The base game is $25 or free to print.

<comment><USER29> My bad, I was referring to the base game. Since it was out of stock at the time I wish I could have sent it to a print-on-demand place for delivery, even if it cost more in the time being.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> It's a sad day: I am starting to realize I am old.

I went to the website, saw it was a card game and thought I would learn more about it as I like card games. I play card games.

I clicked on "How do I play Cards Against Humanity" under the "Your dumb questions" but quickly lost interest when I would have had to click on "Read the fucking rules" to learn more about the game.

I get it... it is probably an edgy game... it probably is not for me. I guess I will never know as I just don't want to "read the fucking rules".

EDIT: Fixed typo.

</comment><comment><USER32> What these stats don't show is how many people will go out and buy a full $25 set or have already done so. The expansion isn't particularly useful without the main set, so even if everyone paid $0, it would still probably be a good promotional tool.

Plus the cards are awesome, I don't see how anyone could not want go out and buy the full set and the expansions after seeing this pack.

</comment><comment><USER33> They should have randomized the default value within a range that automatically narrowed / increased proportionally against the trending of people accepting the default. They could have optimized their return pretty quickly. 'Pay what you want' can be used for both publicity AND pricing optimization.

</comment><comment><USER34> You know I never thought too much about Cards Against Humanity before this, it always popped up as a best seller on Amazon but I didn't feel like giving it a whirl. This story alone, is making me very intrigued on what the game is like to play.

<comment><USER35> It's an adult version of Apples to Apples. Think MadLibs, except one player readers the "madlib" and the other players draw from their hand to answer.

Example:

"Alternative medicine is now embracing the curative powers of ______ " was read aloud in my group.

I played the card that reads "Literally eating shit" and won the round, because the question reader liked my answer the most.

<comment><USER36> Played this for the first time on Saturday.

I had the "Haiku, pick 3" black card

which resulted in <http://imgur.com/pcfgJ>

I was laughing so hard that I was crying, just trying to read them out loud.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> How the heck did I miss this

</comment><comment><USER38> I wonder if they could have made more by using Humble Bundle's model of unlocking an extra if the buyer pays more than average. Keeps the attractive flexibility of pay-what-you-want, but actually incentivizes people to pay up.

</comment><comment><USER39> I really enjoy the flow and layout of this site. Is is a bootstrap derivative?

<comment><USER10> Nope, I made it by hand!

<comment><USER39> Looks great. You know how to tread the fine line between 'minimal' and 'too minimal'

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I would have tossed in a few extra bucks if I knew it was going to charity!

<comment> qu4z-2 So just donate a few bucks to charity...

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> It'd be awesome to post the names of all of the freeloaders or just choose some random ones and put them on cards in an expansion pack to server as a warning to other "freeloaders".

<comment><USER42> If you want to go that route, just don't offer your product for $0.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Cards Against Humanity did something pretty amazing for Humanity.

</comment><comment><USER43> They need to change their name with all this awesome contributingness to Humanity... well Wikipedia anyway.. I'm sure its helped us all at one point or another.

</comment><comment><USER44> It seems that most people do not mind paying a bit more to great products, which is great news for individual businesses.

</comment><comment><USER45> > We did all of the web design, etc. so these were free.

That's not entirely true. Opportunity cost is still a huge cost.

<comment><USER46> Yeah but you don't quantify it after the decision is made (or the opportunity is chosen).

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Burst out laughing at the cricket section! Read the comment, then scroll through all the crickets.

</comment><comment><USER48> Please at least open source the web design part next time so we can all contribute!

</comment><comment><USER49> $36,550 to the credit card companies against $70,066 profit?

</comment><comment><USER50> Why did they not donate to Wayback Machine instead? Wikimedia is doing just fine and their fund raising is mostly for advertising and marketing. The site is at zero risk of running out of operating funds. Personally, I'd rather see money go to historic records than revisionist, popular encyclopedia.

Source: [http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Plan/Movement_P...](http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Plan/Movement_Priorities)

Last financial report: [http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Financial_Reports/Financ...](http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Financial_Reports/Financial_Statements_Ending_June_30_2012_and_2011)

<comment><USER51> Because they already donated to Wikimedia.

Two good times to recommend alternative charities: (i) on threads where people ask, "where should I donate my money", and (ii) on threads about disasters, when you have an opportunity to spur donations to targeted charities.

You almost certainly didn't mean anything by this comment, but you generally want to avoid the appearance of litigating someone's good deed as a missed opportunity to do a better deed. Donations to Wikimedia are a good thing, worthy of congratulations.

<comment><USER50> Certainly, if I was in politics, I'd take your advice. I think it's fair to question where donations go and the decision process, even after the fact. There's always next year.

<comment><USER52> It's not a fair question. It's a terrible question because every charity has their own merits, and any ensuing discussion is not fruitful and only causes conflict. What's makes it even worse is your self-righteous tone.

Your unfair question basically boils down to "My worthy cause is more worthy than your worthy cause!"

<comment><USER53> I believe he's actually arguing "Regardless of which cause is more worthy, my cause needs the money and Wikimedia doesn't."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Lol best graph ever, "% of the chart that looks like Pacman"

<comment><USER55> Reminds me of this: <http://xkcd.com/688/></comment></comment>


Show HN: YouTube video content extractor - <AUTHOR> Scan.video is a Youtube video content extractor (early prototype). Looking for your feedback.
http://scan.video
Thanks for trying. F <comment><USER2> This is actually really cool, but it took a while for me to figure out what exactly it does. Perhaps you could emphasize the fact that it allows you to preform a text search on the text of the video?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your comment. First time use is key so I'll definitely work on that! I put up an "about" page but it's not easily accessible (bottom of the page).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What are some use cases for this?

<comment><AUTHOR> "Search" is the use case.

For now it's just a Proof Of Concept that looks like a video search engine. But here is a list of use cases we could think of:

A Social Platform to share a specific scene from a video (not the whole video like you see on FB, etc). A video bookmark tool to bookmark your favorite lines in a movie. Or even your favorite scene. A content manager for Youtubers to help their followers browsing their content faster. A media tool to quickly collect a bunch of video content for a given news. Think of it as a Twitter for video content.

Search engines are looking for text and meta data only. We focus on digital content, which requires some extra steps...</comment></comment>


A new SAAS project management, please review my SAAS app - <AUTHOR>

This is the url of my SAAS App<p>www.projectstrap.com <comment><USER2> Reason I wouldn't us it:

the domain registration points to Tunesia (Name matches HN user name). The company address on the website, all social links and other contact methods are fake. And I believe "Used by thousands of people" is just a lie.

(I have nothing against Tunesia. It's the fact that I feel being mislead that's bothering me.)

<comment><USER3> I think he got a template and forgot to edit the footer. Address is fake, telephone number es 1234567890, and the text at the left is Lorem Ipsum.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> clickable URL [http://www.projectstrap.com/](http://www.projectstrap.com/)

You should follow the instructions on [https://news.ycombinator.com/show](https://news.ycombinator.com/show) to get greater exposure.</comment>


Hadoop at Twitter  - <AUTHOR> http://www.cloudera.com/blog/2009/11/17/hadoop-at-twitter-part-1-splittable-lzo-compression/

<comment><USER2> Has anybody here used Avro?

<comment><USER3> Do tell, I hadn't heard about it until now.

<http://hadoop.apache.org/avro/docs/current/> "Avro is a data serialization system."

<comment><USER2> I have a project, <http://elev.at> \- it's a web API to convert data from HTML tables, Excel spreadsheets, CSV files, etc. into XML - the premise is to make information that is published for humans eyes, into computable form so that other apps can consume the data.

So far I'm only supporting XML as the output, but am wondering about other outputs. One obvious format would be JSON, but I'm also wondering about others, such as Avro. It is similar in purpose as Thrift or Protocol Buffers, but unlike these two, you don't need to pre-gen the code files to process the resulting data sets, i.e. the generation and consumption of Avro data sets can be more dynamic than with Thrift or Protocol Buffers.

I was wondering whether anybody here has experience with Avro.</comment></comment></comment>


The Journal of Open Source Software - <AUTHOR> https://joss.theoj.org/ <comment><USER2> Interesting concept but what's the difference between this and GitHub or the multitude of other similar websites?</comment>


Memorialized Accounts - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/help/1506822589577997/ <comment><AUTHOR> Is there a space in this market? Can someone take my entire online life and store it somewhere for my descendants to read in 1000 years time?

<comment><USER2> This English from about 1000 years ago: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English#/media/File:Beowul...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English#/media/File:Beowulf.firstpage.jpeg)

Despite being an important part of English literature and history, very few people will ever make the effort to read it. Most people's Facebook posts don't rise to that level and assuming a generation every 25 years, that's 40 generations and that means that I would be one of ~2^40 ansestors (certainly fewer since there were necessarily be cross linkages in the hundreds of billions of ancestorial chains)...so the odds of a person identifying with me in particular are pretty low.

On the other hand, there probably is a business that involves taking people's money for something that they won't be around to see not live up to its advertising pitch.</comment></comment>


Semantic Versioning Is Not the Solution - <AUTHOR> http://avodonosov.blogspot.com/2014/08/semantic-versioning-is-not-solution.html

<comment><USER2> Pretty sure NPM handles this scenario just fine and it uses semantic versioning.

Edit: I see you addressed that at the end. Carry on.</comment>


The interspecies internet? An idea in progress [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.ted.com/talks/the_interspecies_internet_an_idea_in_progress.html

<comment><USER2> I've always found it difficult to communicate IPv6 addresses over the telephone, or type them in manually, when compared to IPv4. IPv6 does have abbreviation built in, but "2001:db8::ff00:42:8329" ("2001:0db8:0000:0000:0000:ff00:0042:8329") is still much more difficult to use than, say, 126.96.36.199.

Has anyone created an easier way to communicate IPv6 addresses, or is this something we'll have to learn to live with?

<comment><USER3> That's what DNS is for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> AMS-IX IPv6 Traffic Statistics: [https://www.ams- ix.net/technical/statistics/sflow-stats/ipv6...](https://www.ams- ix.net/technical/statistics/sflow-stats/ipv6-traffic)

<comment><USER5> And Google's: [http://www.google.com/ipv6/statistics.html](http://www.google.com/ipv6/statistics.html)

We seem to be doubling yearly, which means we'll hit 50% in about 2018.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wish some of the biggest country should mandate all router and ISP to have IPv6 by 201x.

Otherwise we are just not getting anywhere.

<comment><USER7> Are we really not getting anywhere? (Serious question, not something I know much about.) Is there anywhere that significant progress is being made in IPv6 usage? If so, is it isolated to particular kinds/parts of networks?

<comment><USER8> Yes, progress is being made. Software, network backbone, and data center support is all pretty good now. Last mile access and content are the main areas now where you can't expect support by default.

Many of the largest content providers (Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube, Netflix, iTunes, CloudFlare, Limelight, Akamai, 40% of the US government) have deployed IPv6 in production. Many of the largest ISPs have as well (In the US: Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Google Fiber).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This more about non-human intelligence than about IPv6. I was hoping Cerf would go into why IPv6 is better for the "internet of things" or "interspecies Internet" than IPv4. Also, maybe an explanation in layman's terms why IPv4 won't scale further, even with the workarounds that are currently in use.

<comment><USER10> Hey there. I work at ARIN. An explanation of why IPv4 won't scale any further: (Please note that any opinions expressed here are my own and not of my employer)

Of course, we have a currently limited amount of IP addresses that can be given out. When IANA/RIRs were formed, IANA gave allocations of /8's (the largest groups of IPv4 addresses) out to all of the RIRs, who then assigned them to organizations within their respective areas. (For example, APNIC - Asia Pacific, AFRINIC - Africa, ARIN - North America) The problem now is that we are simply running out of addresses with the current number of internet connected devices.

Now, we resolve this within our own homes by using routers that support NAT (Network Address Translation) which is fine for our own local sites. However, a large amount of ISPs want to enable something called CGN (Carrier-grade NAT) which will take what happens on your own local router and blanket it over their entire network. This is where a large group of customers (including you) would have one single (or a handful) of IPv4 addresses that represent you on the public internet, but each site/home/office would have its own internal IP address to that ISP's network. Most cell phone providers actually already do this (although I'm not sure if we can call it CGN) where your phone has a Class C IP address assigned to it when you connect to the network, but all traffic goes through a single IP address.

Now there are problems to this:

1\. It is hard to track who is doing what. If a customer of an ISP performs some sort of illegal action (bomb threats, hacking, etc use your imagination here. ;) ) It is hard to track down who is exactly doing what without your ISP simply logging all requests that you make. Instead in the current form, your ISP can be simply asked "Hey, who had this IPv4 address at this time?" instead of "Hey, what sites was this person looking at?"

2\. Let's say that you were a member of some sort of forum or new site (take HN or reddit for example) and someone sharing your IPv4 address did something that caused that IP address to be banned. Now, you cannot access the site. This allows your access to the internet to be dependent upon whoever else is using that same address. Of course, this can (and has happened) already by sites blocking entire subnets (a lot of IRC networks do this for overseas networks that usually harbor abuse.)

3\. It simply becomes confusing security-wise. Take into consideration that you had a VPS or server with a provider like Digital Ocean or Linode. You set up a firewall on that server to allow only your IP address in. Now, you've allowed everyone else sharing that same IP address to access your server if they knew the credentials.

With IPv6, we have more addresses than there are grains of sand on Earth (as the saying goes.) We also said that we'd never run out of IP addresses with IPv4, but the growth of the Internet was seriously underestimated!

Some ISPs will run dual-stack (I believe Comcast does now) where all users now have IPv4 and IPv6 addresses!

<comment><USER11> How do you think the move to IPv6 will affect the VPN market?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Tell that to my ISP. :(</comment>


Ask HN: Did offering a money-back guarantee help your business? - <AUTHOR> I assume it will boost initial conversions significantly, but does it produce a long term net gain?
As a consumer, I've seen approaches ranging from very generous "no questions asked", to "you can have a refund if you jump through 100 hoops", to "all sales are final". Are there any guidelines around which approach to use?
I'm specifically concerned about one-time digital purchases, where once the customer has the file/valuable info there's nothing to stop them from keeping it and requesting a refund. <comment><USER5> I was the CMO for a unicorn CPG[0], so slightly different take since we sold a physical product.

We went crazy with our money back guarantee. We had countless people whose 'dog' ate their product while still on the doorstep. One person said their cows ate $250 worth. Another person bought a few hundred dollars worth used from someone on a random forum. They all wanted a full refund. A newly hired email marketing coordinator mistakenly sent an offer for free product to 50,000 existing customers that was meant for a small group of new customers.

In every instance, we didn't think twice and gave them what they wanted. The outlier bad actors didn't make a dent when you looked at the entire business.

The philosophy that they were exploiting is what made us worth $1bn.

[0][https://www.inc.com/profile/quest- nutrition](https://www.inc.com/profile/quest-nutrition)

<comment><USER6> You'd be surprised how few people are willing to be bad actors.

The other thing is that tests have proven people trust more if you offer a warranty or even a money-back warranty.

Skullcandy headphones are a great example, they're budget headphones that are nothing out there, a little pricy but they have a lifetime warranty. What's a lifetime warranty? They'll replace them as long as you are alive.

<comment><USER7> You just have to be careful if the bad actors start to recruit other bad actors. There are discords and Facebook groups that are dedicated to sharing where you can exploit a generous policy or error.

<comment><USER6> There's a difference, I've seen plenty of people pile into pricing errors on websites.

Noone's buying 500 headphones just to return them a money back guarantee.

The only issue you'll have is people abusing the crap out of stuff and expecting a money back guarantee.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Waaaay back in the day, when I was running my game development company [1], I put that on the website - an unconditional, no questions asked money back guarantee. As you said, nothing stopped customers from keeping the game. However, in 10 years or so selling games, only a handful of people ever asked; and I complied, of course.

Focus on the customers who _are_ willing to pay. Invest the time and energy you'd spend fighting pirates, fraudulent requests for returns (as defined in this post), etc, in making a better product.

I do have some really fun stories about antagonising the pirates - but do it as a hobby, not as part of your business strategy.

[1] [http://mysterystudio.com](http://mysterystudio.com)

<comment><USER9> Besides, you can ban credit card number of abusers. It's easy to create an email, it's harder to get a new credit card.

<comment><USER10> It's not hard at all to get a new credit card. Report it lost and get a new one. In the US I've never seen a bank charge for it, and several times have simply gotten a new one sent to me unprompted because the bank had been informed the card was compromised. Sure it's not the same as creating a new gmail account, but it's still incredibly easy.

Also, banning credit card numbers is going to be problematic... most smaller operations are not (and should not) be handling their own payment processing and should never have access to card info. Even if you do and you hash it to match against that's iffy from a security perspective and would likely run afoul of any decent PCI auditor.

<comment> vertex-four Stripe will give you a "fingerprint" of a card that you're allowed to do whatever you want with, and recommend that you use that to block cards.

<comment><USER11> Yep. You can either write code for it or use Radar to block the charge by fingerprint (write a rule once in your Stripe dashboard to block cards on a blocklist, add a fingerprint to the list when you identify an abusive customer, done). This lets you block a card without ever contaminating yourself with knowledge of its number (we expose the fingerprint in a variety of places to you, like API responses or on the charge detail page in the Dashboard).

[https://stripe.com/docs/radar/lists](https://stripe.com/docs/radar/lists)

<comment><USER9> French here, but isn't it a typo ?

"Use this list with so payments by these customers are always allowed automatically."

<comment><USER11> Thanks, will get it fixed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As a consultant, offering a limited money-back guarantee was a huge boost to my business. I'd offer something like "if after 2 weeks, you don't like my work, we can cancel the contract and you don't have to pay anything."

By doing this I was able to charge literally twice as much – one of people's biggest concerns with a freelancer is that they have very little idea of how skilled you actually are. And no one ever asked for a refund.

(I was also pretty careful with my client selection though – I'd bring this up towards the very end of a negotiating phase, to avoid adverse selection.)

<comment><USER13> > As a consultant, offering a limited money-back guarantee was a huge boost to > my business. I'd offer something like "if after 2 weeks, you don't like my > work, we can cancel the contract and you don't have to pay anything."

> By doing this I was able to charge literally twice as much – one of people's > biggest concerns with a freelancer is that they have very little idea of how > skilled you actually are. And no one ever asked for a refund.

Not doubting you but how were you able to tell that was the influencing factor? Did anybody hint they were concerned they might not be happy with the final product?

Do you ask for any money upfront? I've heard of some people asking for 100% upfront with a refund guarantee.

I'll usually get some portion upfront and the rest on completion so they know they can withhold something if they're not happy.

<comment><USER12> Well, I can't know for sure. I went from charging $X/week and getting lots of resistance to charging $2X/week with the guarantee and getting almost no resistance, and several clients specifically mentioned the guarantee.

I didn't ask for anything up front then, but I probably would now that I have an established career and more options (although I'm not consulting anymore.)

Edit: also, $2X was honestly well above my market rate at that point, I charged that much initially because I was already booked. But that's more evidence that the guarantee tactic worked.

<comment><USER13> You should consider charging fixed costs instead of hourly as well. It's easier for clients to make a business decision of your cost when they've got a guaranteed outcome.

<comment><USER12> I actually tried that! Then a project took 5x as long as I expected, mostly due to problems outside my control. Never again.

<comment><USER13> Why did it take 5x longer and why was it outside of your control? Could you have changed the terms about which part was fixed price to fix this?

<comment><USER12> Note that I charged by week, not by hour, which eliminates a lot of these issues.

The problem with the project was essentially that the data was incredibly messy, and by the time I found this out the project was already well underway. So I could have abandoned the project, lost the fee, and screwed over my client...or put in a bunch of extra work to get the project over the finish line. I chose to do the latter.

I'm not confident enough in my ability iron out all such uncertainties in future projects – software is already hard to predict at a job, and even harder with new clients. Charging by week seems like the best compromise overall.

<comment><USER13> > Note that I charged by week, not by hour, which eliminates a lot of these > issues.

A fixed number of hours per week? How did you keep the client happy when they wanted to know how many weeks?

One issue is if you work smarter or faster is you're not going to earn more and there's only a fixed number of hours in the week. Your client is likely to be unhappy in the end when the costs get out of control too.

> The problem with the project was essentially that the data was incredibly > messy, and by the time I found this out the project was already well > underway. So I could have abandoned the project, lost the fee, and screwed > over my client...or put in a bunch of extra work to get the project over the > finish line. I chose to do the latter.

\- Could you have asked to see the data first to avoid this?

\- Could you have offered an initial paid discovery phase that would have given you time to go over things in more detail first and even prototype it?

\- Could you have broken the project into chunks where some parts were fixed price and the really unsure parts were hourly?

<comment><USER12> Not a fixed number of hours per week – more like "Here's the project proposal, I estimate it'll take 5 weeks, here's roughly what I expect to get done each week." Some weeks would be easier than I expected and I'd get ahead, some weeks would be harder and I'd end up working more. If a major event happened that would make the project take a lot longer, I'd renegotiate.

> \- Could you have asked to see the data first to avoid this?

> \- Could you have offered an initial paid discovery phase that would have > given you time to go over things in more detail first and even prototype it?

> \- Could you have broken the project into chunks where some parts were fixed > price and the really unsure parts were hourly?

I could, but (1) most of my projects are quite different from each other, so the risks change, (2) the benefit seems pretty small. My clients weren't clamoring for more predictable costs – mostly they wanted transparency if a project was going to take longer than expected, as well as the ability to wrap up or cut scope if that was the case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think this comes in different flavours.

(1) Sales Channel Flavour. This is a guarantee you use to improve conversion rates, by trying to remove any reluctance possible. This is usually where you find the "hoops" to lower the number of actual claimants.

Generally, highly optimized sales "funnels" are found in segments with high margins & high advertising costs. A 5% return rate is no big deal if you spend 40% on media/advertising.

(2) Heirloom Product. Say you sell a $500 camping knife. It's designed to last generations. Besides marketing, a lifetime guarantee frames the product mission in nicely concrete terms, with natural feedback mechanisms. IE, guaranteeing the product for life helps ensure you make it to last a lifetie.

(3) Just-easier flavour. This is more common now, with amazon/yelp/charegbacks/etc. Money back might just be the easier way of dealing with unhappy customers. For a mature company easy=cheap. For a startup, easy means minimizing "escalations:" Chargeback disputes, Let me speak to your manager, etc.

You need to watch out for no. 3. It could be in the "do things that don't scale" category.

<comment><USER6> For physical tools, you can make the lifetime warranty basically reliant on returning the product.

'Return your grandfather's knife and we'll send you a new one you can pass down to your kids... because family matters'

<comment><USER15> That worked for Sears' Craftsman line-up but they wound up selling that business and I dunno how it's worked out for the acquiring company since.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think so. I'm very happy with my return rate percentage.

My video courses (tech courses on programming / ops) are a one time purchase and I offer a 1 year money back return policy, no strings attached. The only reason I even put a time limit on it is because without putting one, then it's not clear on how returns work or would require too many words to describe a lifetime return policy.

I'm a developer myself and having a 30 day return policy for information seems like a high pressure bullshit tactic. People live busy lives and trying to force someone into watching a 10 hour course RIGHT NOW otherwise they can't get a refund later on feels dirty.

In other words, I optimize for the happy path. I want to focus on making the experience as good as it can be for people who are interested in learning whatever topic they signed up for and aren't the type of person who will buy it, consume it and then return it.

The dishonest person who will buy your stuff, consume it, and then ask for a refund will do that with a 5 day, 30 day or 365 day return policy. That's just the type of person they are.

<comment><USER17> > People live busy lives and trying to force someone into watching a 10 hour > course RIGHT NOW otherwise they can't get a refund later on feels dirty.

Absolutely. This is something I think companies get wrong so often.

As an example, Country Road (a clothing store in Australia) offers loyalty discounts based on your purchases - $10 reward voucher per $100-249 spend, or $35 per $250+ spend. Except, those vouchers expire after 30 days.

If I've just spent $250 on clothing, I'm unlikely to make additional purchases in the next 30 days. Their reward system doesn't encourage me to buy more clothes (there is only so much I can buy in a short period of time), and it does the opposite of encouraging my loyalty - it just makes me 'bitter' that I'm missing out on rewards.

<comment><USER18> But they're not after you - they're after people that absolutely will get an "itch" to buy more clothes within 30 days, and they want to be the retailer picked.

Now, CVS receipts on the other hand -- often discounts expire within a couple days and I don't know anyone who shops for toiletries that often. I don't get it.

<comment><USER19> Pass it on to a friend who will now shop at CVS. Primitive (but I think effective) viral marketing.

<comment><USER18> They have a system where the receipts are married to your account so you also need to give your phone number to your friend.

It's a maniacal system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I work in customer service at a medium sized food company. We have a no questions asked guarantee. I'm somewhat torn on the money-back guarantee philosophy. I hear people say that it ends up being profitable at the end of the day. But, it entitles people to complain (and expect compensation) about every last little thing. I have customers that call and ask if one of our products is Gluten Free. Nowhere on the label have we stated that it is. Yet, they are beside themselves to hear that it is in fact not gluten free. I then have to either send them a refund or a replacement for their own negligence. I've had to do this for people who have bought our whole wheat flour, expecting it to be gluten free, because we're known as a company that sells some gluten free items. Rewarding this kind of behavior, while reinforcing the BS "customer is always right" philosophy, must be to the detriment of society. I wish that we (USA) would do away with our conception of customer service and would adjust to something more akin to what you find in Europe. No facade, just people interacting, for better and for worse.

I'm ranting now, I guess I say all this to say, I could see having an absolute guarantee being profitable in the long run, but as the person who has to deal with entitled whiny consumers, I absolutely hate it.

</comment><comment><USER11> Ran a business selling one-time digital purchases for years and have talked with many, many other people with similar businesses. We're basically unanimous on this: offer the guarantee, reap the marketing win, pull less hair out when dealing with very annoying customers. They have an attractive backstopping option if you don't offer the guarantee, which is calling up their bank and saying "Internet merchant didn't deliver as promised, give me the money back", which will get the refund anyhow _and_ ding you on a fee (for processing the chargeback) _and_ increment a counter at the payment processor that you very keenly do not want incremented above a certain number.

(Above comment in my personal capacity, not speaking as someone who is very professionally involved with that last clause.)

<comment><USER21> How does this work in line with your views on registration systems? I'm about to be releasing a product which also is a one-time digital purchase and I plan on just having a generous guarantee. I was planning on having no licensing system because frankly it's more headache than it's worth - the target audience will be happy to pay for the product and people who don't want to pay won't be paying anyway. Do you think this is a fair assessment? Do you think it's worth having a very basic registration system or none at all?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Yes. There are a few advantages to offering a money-back guarantee for your product. Especially for a one-time digital purchase:

\- As you correctly assume, conversions will be higher with a money-back guarantee than without (although you do have to make it obvious that there is one in your marketing)

\- More importantly, unhappy customers will get their money back either way. If you don't offer a refund, you'll just have customers making charge-backs via their credit card provider. These chargebacks are pretty much impossible to combat for digital products, and can cost you $15-$100+ _on top of the refund_ per chargeback.

Even worse, too many chargebacks can lead to your payment processor freezing/closing your account.

<comment><USER23> > customers making charge-backs via their credit card provider. These > chargebacks are pretty much impossible to combat for digital products

It's not impossible. Companies such as Chargebacks911 worked with Clickbank which is an affiliate program selling digital content to reduce their chargebacks quite significantly.

More information here: [0].

Some credit card companies are now electing to work with both Kount and CB911 into their stack.

[0]: [https://www.kount.com/case-studies/clickbank- chargebacks911](https://www.kount.com/case-studies/clickbank-chargebacks911)

Disclaimer: I don't work with either company but spent the last 2 years looking at the whole fintech stack for my startup and know (almost) all the players in the space.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I run my own consulting firm and I offer a money-back guarantee.

I had one very short-term client who was dissatisfied with our service in spite of very clear deliverables. Nonetheless, I didn't hesitate for one second to give them back their money.

In simply offering to give them their money back, they refused the check and completely shifted their mentality towards us. They became _advocates_ for us and then said they appreciated our work.

I've never had to give money back with a money-back guarantee and it has only strengthened our brand.

</comment><comment><USER25> We had a policy of "we only want satisfied customers". Being very forthcoming and easy-going with a return policy makes support super easy. When people complained, we pro-actively offered to reimburse them (sometimes they would even decline). This resulted in three things: It got rid of the cheapskates/difficult customers early on. It combatted negative reviews. It pleasantly surprised a few customers enough for them to put in free word of mouth or add positive reviews, sometimes adding up to 20 new customers. (The default is for customers to have to jump through hoops, excellent support can knock them off balance).

We started out with the guarantee and used it prominently in our marketing copy, so I don't have numbers on conversion rate improvement.

</comment><comment><USER26> When we first launched [https://www.Feastflow.com](https://www.Feastflow.com), a handcrafted lead gen service for freelance developers, we didn't offer a free trial or a money back guarantee and we got a lot of feedback that it was necessary. This might be a different perspective since we are a subscription service but having a "no questions asked" 30 day refund policy has definitely boosted our conversion and led to a much larger userbase. We found that our biggest sticking point was getting a user to give us a try and after experiencing the quality of our leads there is very little chance they ask for a refund.

</comment><comment><USER27> What seems like such a simple question unfortunately is probably quite difficult to answer. At best you could find someone who ran a high quality A-B test where the result showed something interesting. But you still have no idea whether that changed over time after the A-B test finished.

I think the main question is was the number of refund requests significant? If it was trivial then any marginal benefit is very low risk.

Patio11 has written quite a bit about his experience. Worth having a read of his blog if you haven't already.

[https://www.kalzumeus.com/archive/](https://www.kalzumeus.com/archive/)

</comment><comment><USER28> As a customer: if I am on the fence about a product, I will rarely buy anything that does not offer some kind of money-back guarantee, even if the cost is only 10 dollars. I've been burned before by buying products or services that turned out to be trash, and offering a guarantee shows some level of faith in what your company offers. I've only requested a refund a small handful of times.

Most recently I bought a $550 dollar online course and the 1 year unconditional money-back guarantee was 100% the deciding factor for me to try it. I ended up loving it and will not be requesting a refund.

<comment><USER29> What course was it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I don't run this sort of business but I recall reading in a book (I believe Tim Ferris' 4 hour work week) that he offered a 110% money back guarantee and in the entire history of his business only one person took him up on it.

I've not seen the 110% money back guarantee in the wild however but it feels like a memorable offer. You'll have to carefully figure out how to avoid getting taken advantage of but I feel it might be a worthwhile risk.

<comment><USER16> This is an old copywriting tactic that has been around for decades. It's the "too good to be true" policy. It's just a way to make people think "wow, how does he stay in business!". It really makes you think that their product is very good.

I vaguely remember some book author having an interesting typo related policy. His claim was, for each typo reported in his book, he would start out by paying 1 penny, and for the 2nd typo he would pay 2 pennies then 4 pennies then 8 pennies and so on. It was a crazy claim because if you double your pennies 30 times, it's over $5 million dollars. I can't remember who did this, but how's that for an incentive to buy the book haha.

<comment><USER31> Are you thinking of this?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth_reward_check](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth_reward_check)

<comment><USER16> Yep, thanks.

Kind of scary how inaccurate my memory was on the exact strategy, but that's definitely the one I was thinking of.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Every marketing tool has it's place.

A guarantee is only useful if:

1\. You need to lower perceived risk of using your product. 2\. You need to demonstrate confidence in your product.

There are dozens of other conversion problems that won't be addressed by a money back guarantee.

<comment><USER33> 3\. You need a tie-breaker between your product and your competitor's.

<comment><USER32> Perhaps. If customers are really doing their research and there is no other way to differentiate, sure. In a perfectly rational world for sure.

But there is a real cost of offering a money back guarantee: it may be distracting you from other issues. It may encourage a "throw stuff against the wall and see what sticks" type of mentality. Which can get you started, but random experimentation based on "best practices" and "do what the others are doing" is not the shortest path to very high conversion rates.

The real way to increase conversions is to "sleep with your customers". Get to know them so well, you know what their heart wants. You know the real reasons why they want your product or a similar one.

And then fulfill those desires. Give them what they want and explain it in a way that they understand.

But if you don't know your customer, which takes just a few days of conversation...well, you're throwing darts on at a "best practices" dartboard.

If you do your homework, you can narrow it down to:

I don't understand your product. I understand your product, but I don't see how it would help me. I don't trust you. I can't figure out how to do X on your website. Your product is priced too high/too low.

A money back guarantee does nothing to address to above 5 objections.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> We sold some physical products offline and online with 100% satisfaction guaranteed. Meaning that if they were unhappy with anything at all - quality, damaged packaging, or just isn't what they expected, we return all their money. And we empowered/encouraged customer service to give full refunds whenever they felt necessary.

The people who we offered to return rarely took the offer - they just wanted someone to listen to complaints. They also ordered 3 times more than the average. Out of the thousands of customers, nobody abused the system although we probably should have been more open about the policy.

I've done this earlier offline as a barista. We sold to a target market that wasn't familiar with overpriced coffee. We didn't want to give free trials, but every time someone is deliberating on it, we offer to return their money 100% if they buy a cup but didn't like it. No abuse, but it created a lot of fanatically loyal customers.

Tim Ferriss recommends doing a 110% return policy instead, which is probably more well suited if you expect them to do returns.

</comment><comment><USER35> I'm gonna flip this on its head a bit; I've been that "bad actor" in the past, when I honest to god could not afford a course/book/whatever. Not "This will cut into my entertainment fund", more "I won't be able to pay rent if I pay for this".

I'm not in that position anymore, but a lot of my later purchases were based on what I learned while I was broke. Now I naturally default to O'Reilly books, for example, if I want a technical manual. Mostly because I downloaded a handful when I was in college.

If you're expecting your company to be around a while, there's a section of customers which will "abuse" your money-back guarantee, then later buy products from you legitimately, that wouldn't be accessible if you made it difficult to abuse the guarantee in the first place. And as many people have stated here, the "abuse" ends up being only a handful of people to begin with.

<comment><USER36> This reminds me of Bill Gates comment that went something along the lines of "If they are going to be pirating software, I want them to be pirating _our_ software."

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I've always promised a refund to any customers asking in good faith. I run a podcast hosting company, and not every solution out there is right for everyone.

Most users requesting a refund made a mistake. I'm happy to refund them or offer credit, and the reputation I've built for customer support is well worth the cost. It comes out to tens of dollars a month in exchange for priceless unsolicited recommendations on social media (even from former customers and folks who haven't used the service).

There have been a few bad actors. One user demanded a refund for six months of service (we bill monthly) after finding that the service did not meet his needs. He did not receive the refund that he demanded. Of the hundred or so refunds that I issue each year, maybe one or two are not what the customer asked for.

</comment><comment><USER38> A lot of good answers already, but to add a slightly different perspective:

I'll always add a money back guarantee to any SaaS product where it makes sense. I believe it helps conversions, but I don't have data to back that up.

What it really does is help more easily identify the type of customer who would be a pain in the ass and costly to support, and give an easy way to fire them without it being a straight up "we don't want your business". Instead, its a "we're sorry we didn't live up to your expectations, per our guarantee, we're refunding you your last month and deactivating your account." or something to that effect, with variations based on circumstance. It turns a likely negative customer support interaction into a potentially positive one.

</comment><comment><USER39> > "all sales are final"

If you take credit cards, no sale is _final_ until the CC company finalizes settlements. The times for this can vary depending on card handler.

I know I use this to defend myself against unscrupulous or otherwise questionable merchants. But this can be easily turned to a bludgeoning weapon for customers to get their own way.

Anecdotally, I know over on reddit /r/ulpt "buying" and disputing or chargebacks are seen as getting free swag. Unethical in the extreme, but it works. The CC companies don't want to alienate customers from legit and bad transactions.

<comment><USER40> The Consumer Rights Act in the UK limits claims for refunds for supply of defective goods to 6 years IIRC, so it's not just credit card companies who will reverse a transaction _ex post facto_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Several brands got famous doing this. One of the earliest that comes to mind is Craftsman. You could return anything they made even years later, without a receipt. Nordstrom is also famous for this same policy. Amazon basically has this policy today, as does NewEgg. So does the kitchen goods company Zwilling J. A. Henckels.

Even though it seems like digital products might be easier to rip-off, they have nearly no cost to produce -- so the risk is higher for a seller of physical goods. They'll incur the cost of giving you a second product or refunding your money after you've used up a product so that it can no longer be sold again.

In selling services, I've always offered this policy. Few very people will take me up on it -- far less than 1%. Probably 0.2% in total. Knowing they can get their money back if not satisfied gives new customers the confidence to try me for the first time and encourages existing customers to spend more.

Studies have shown that most of your new business will come from existing customers. In this case, the cost of acquiring that business is probably less when it's just giving them a product (or a refund) vs. trying to acquire them from the market as a new customer through advertising.

</comment><comment><USER42> this is my money back guarantee for my workshops[1]

      >If you state after the workshop:
      >
      >that you care less about SEO now - <USER4>
      >that you learned nothing new - <USER4>
      >that your understanding of SEO has not been improved - <USER4>
      >that you have the feeling that you have wasted your time
      >then i will not take your money! I will even invite you for lunch that we can talk about why i failed you.
      >Note: that's a logic "and" (think &&, not an ||)

i never had to pay anything back and it takes some preasure out of the investment - if it's a private person wher the invested money matters. i got some positive feedback for it and it's another marketing opportunity.

for books sold over the internet there is a 14 days money back gurantee anyway in the EU, but nobody ever used it anyway [2]

[1] [https://www.fullstackoptimization.com/workshop](https://www.fullstackoptimization.com/workshop)

[2] [https://www.fullstackoptimization.com/b/understanding- seo](https://www.fullstackoptimization.com/b/understanding-seo)

<comment><USER43> I like your intent, but speaking as a social hermit, if I read this, I would just be scared to ask. To me, it reads as an entrypoint for an uncomfortable pressured sales pitch.

What I want to hear is:

"If you finish the workshop and you feel like you wasted your time, I will give you your money back."

And then feel free, after politely saying, "I'm sorry this wasn't your thing, here's your refund", please do ask some "why" questions. If I'm eager to talk about it, then feel free to ask me to lunch.

Just don't make it sound like my refund is walled behind a lot of conditions and even more effort.

<comment><USER42> most of the time it's actually a good starting point for discussions after the workshop, as they can tell me what they found valuable and what they not found valueable.'

additionally my audience is devs, so the && vs || distinction makes it clear that we (can) use the same language

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I've often wondered which is better for a saas to offer...

Money-back guarantee for x days

-or-

x day Free Trial

...I would think the first would be easier to manage, but will the free trial pull more people in?

<comment><USER45> Speaking for myself, the free trial will always win. If I've paid, that means they have my credit card number, and it can be hell getting some companies to stop charging. Of course, that means I only go with free trials that don't require a credit card number. I know why companies do the things they do, but I don't care, I'm not going to get sucked into a lengthy, multi-call game to get them to stop charging my credit card.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Money back guarantee is a good thing, go offer it. For a customer, it makes a purchase a no-brainer. For a seller, this is a good way to get rid of a toxic transaction early without loosing a nerve.

There will be some dudes who will try to exploit your pledge. But there is a trick: detect them early and use a more aggressive tactics.

For example, when someone claims your product does not work and needs an immediate refund after 5 minutes since the purchase and getting a license key, you can politely suggest them to do a chargeback themselves via the bank, because well, the product has a trial and it just cannot stop working just after entering the license key.

More often than not, such a customer will restrain from getting a refund and you will even get some respect points from them for doing a no-shit business.

</comment><comment><USER47> I am running SerpApi ([https://serpapi.com](https://serpapi.com)).

We do offer money back guarantee, but no free trial. Yes, it does increase conversions but not in a significant way. It's also an effective way to avoid chargebacks and keep poeple happy.

</comment><comment><USER13> > I'm specifically concerned about one-time digital purchases, where once the > customer has the file/valuable info there's nothing to stop them from > keeping it and requesting a refund.

It's highly dependent on the product and who you're selling to. What are the specifics?

I have a subscription based Chrome extension [1] that will stop working if you refund. I offer 7 day refunds in place of my ability to offer free trials right now. I get minimal refund requests so it's not something I worry about and I'm not going to invest time in winning over people that don't see enough value in the product after seven days.

[1] [https://www.checkbot.io/](https://www.checkbot.io/)

</comment><comment><USER48> I think money back guarantee has proved out to be one of the most important feature that converts fence sitters and eliminates free trial of our service.

I am a co-founder at Draftss ([http://draftss.com](http://draftss.com)) which is a productized graphic design, Web & App UI/UX with code service on monthly subscription. We offer a 7-day 100% money back guarantee if the customer is unhappy with the designs we create for them. Offering a money-back guarantee builds confidence for customer to sign up for our services.

We started 9 months ago and served 100+ customers and received 0 refund requests till date.

</comment><comment><USER49> As a counterpoint to what is seems most people are saying, my friend had a mail order (and internet order eventually) business for 35 years, and they had a big sign on the wall of the sales floor that said,

"If you bought the wrong part, you now have a spare".

In other words, they never offered a refund, only replacement of the same product, and you had to send the old one back to prove it was broken on arrival.

People loved them and almost all of their customers ordered more than once, so it didn't seem to affect them much. But who knows, maybe they could have been a lot bigger offering refunds!

</comment><comment><USER50> I did community/support for an app that had a few thousand paid monthly subscribers.

I made it well know that I would give anyone who asked whatever they wanted for any reason. Just tell me what went wrong, I'll give you your money back and then I'll fix it.

People really seemed to love it. Sure there were the cheats who just wanted something for nothing. But the people who had legitimate gripes ended up being our biggest fans/champions on forums and Facebook groups.

Was definitely worth it.

</comment><comment><USER51> I am running a fully remote, unlimited design agency[0] with about 25 freelancers and project managers in various timezones.

We offer a 14 days, 100% money back guarantee. We do have some bad actors but I think the fact that design is highly subjective, the money back guarantee really convinces customers to try us. Currently we have less than 3% refunds.

[0] [https://www.manypixels.co](https://www.manypixels.co)

</comment><comment><USER52> I saw this question and dug up the following useful excerpts. It includes the 'fail safe' "9 Point Checklist for Implementing Guarantees:"

[https://capitalandgrowth.org/questions/1541/have-money- back-...](https://capitalandgrowth.org/questions/1541/have-money-back- guarantees-helped-your-sales.html)

</comment><comment><USER53> Don't worry about a few bad apples taking advantage of a generous return policy. Keeping customers happy should be your primary concern, even those wanting a refund. They may even still leave you a good review afterwards! Plus, if someone's unhappy and you don't refund, they'll just do a chargeback on their credit card which is much worse than a simple refund.

</comment><comment><USER54> Thank you for asking this! I honestly never considered it before as we offer a free trial up front to combat refunds and make it harder to refund; but it makes perfect sense after reading all the other answers and has changed my mind completely.

</comment><comment><USER55> We have a small low touch SaaS business with a 30 day money back guarantee, We've had maybe 3 people ask for there money back in the year of having it but it didn't affect conversions significantly

</comment><comment><USER56> I think, at least, that it will motivate you and put you in the bet mindset to please your customers.

</comment><comment><USER57> Yes. [0]

[0] [https://www2.bc.edu/thomas- chemmanur/phdfincorp/MF891%20pape...](https://www2.bc.edu/thomas- chemmanur/phdfincorp/MF891%20papers/Ackerlof%201970.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER58> If you are in the software industry a trial is going to be requested. 1st manage expectations example 1user 2 weeks and r u negotiating with a dm Or sponsor</comment>


Light-Weight Identity for the Web Using Browser Sync and Push - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/nileshtrivedi/2ad7fd3be4a231bab08beeaa5ac18de6 <comment><AUTHOR> This is just a rough idea triggered by an observation on how browsers are adapting push notifications to be more user-friendly. See this: [https://www.mobiloud.com/blog/google-web-push- notification-p...](https://www.mobiloud.com/blog/google-web-push-notification- permission-2020strategy/)

We users trust our browsers a lot already. And they've been good stewards so far (such as end-to-end encryption of sync data). This proposal in meant to leverage browser sync and push to replace social logins such as Google, Facebook etc.

<comment><USER2> > If you signed up via Brave, you won't be able to claim that account via > Firefox.

I think you might be underestimating the importance of this. I understand push notification servers are maintained by each browser vendor separately. Perhaps browsers should allow the user to route their push notifications to another browser's endpoint?</comment></comment>


Create your own Yahoo browser - Yahoo publishes private keys - <AUTHOR> http://twitter.com/nikcub/status/205489752684765185/photo/1

<comment><AUTHOR> "...Yahoo included their cert private key inside the Axis Chrome extension.. (means anybody can sign extension as yahoo).. pic.twitter.com/MOPs2mJv "</comment>


Ask HN: Equivalent of TodoMVC for DevOps? - <AUTHOR> In the frontend world, every new framework implements the specification of TodoMVC, in an effort to show how the framework looks/performs.
Does anyone know of a similar thing for devops? Given the dozens of orchestration tools (k8s, swarm, etc) and providers (EKS, ECS, GKE, etc), I think it would be really useful and educational to compare implementations of the same task across different devops tools.
I'm thinking of something like "TodoDevMC" where the challenge is to deploy a specific stack, to spec, using whatever tool(s) you choose, to be accessible on the public internet. By "stack" I mean something like "static frontend + web app + redis + database". And maybe the implementation should also include scripts for common tasks (database backup, deployment, build, test, etc) <comment><USER2> There's generally a lot to setup for DevOps, generally not something one accomplishes in an hour. On top of the many moving parts, there are numerous tools to know. Lots of settings and config to commit to git, secrets to manage, automation to implement. That's all before the application and databases to use.

Kelsey Hightower did a "Kubernetes the hard way." It's on GitHub and like you ask for. You generally have to piece some things together, which is in a way the essence of DevOps</comment>


Adventures in running a free public API - <AUTHOR> http://www.cambus.net/adventures-in-running-a-free-public-api/ <comment><USER2> Well, this is interesting.

I've been running [http://jsonip.com](http://jsonip.com) for 4-5 years.

Right now, it's averaging 10 million requests a day.

I don't do any logging other than total bandwidth usage, in and out. I _have_ been getting numerous noticed from my host because I haven't bothered to update the usage alarm levels. I'll adjust that when it matters.

Basically, I don't give a shit what you're using it for. Only _one time_ in the last 4 years have I had to explicitly take action against an abusive user. If you're the dipshit with the misconfigured squid proxy a few years ago that got the 418 You're a teapot response, you know who you are.

Btw jsonip is a node.js service. It's been working at scale, just fine, and will continue to in the future.

<comment> martin-adams That sounds pretty cool. Out of interest, that works out at an average of 115 requests per second. How many Node servers do you have serving that if you don't mind me asking?

<comment><USER3> Probably one. This means it has roughly 8ms/request and likely works because it's not computationally bound.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have a free API which provides business rating info about the business behind a web site.[1] Try:

       http://www.sitetruth.com/fcgi/rateapiv3.fcgi?url=ycombinator.com&format=json&key=guest

It gets modest usage. We can limit usage based by "key", but currently don't have to. It does have fair queuing; if you submit a large number of requests from the same IP address, you won't delay requests from other IP addresses. This is enough to deal with anything short of a determined DDOS.

[1] [http://www.sitetruth.com/doc/sitetruthapi.html](http://www.sitetruth.com/doc/sitetruthapi.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> How was the service "abused" by malware? There's plenty of other ways to get computer's external IP address from public or private-but-always-accessible sources, and a bit less to get some location data. I doubt the shutdown creates any significant problems for nefarious users.

</comment><comment><USER6> A lot of the history of the internet seems to repeat this theme, idealistic engineers make assumptions that other people are going to be nice and considerate only to discover that there are a lot of assholes out there.

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure that's quite accurate. The assumption that _most_ people are nice and considerate is a fair one; the problem is that engineers often fail to understand how few assholes it takes to ruin something.

<comment><USER8> Possibly in part because in physical life, the assholes have to show up. While online they just need to be online.

Thus often it seems like a pack of sharks smelling blood in the water from beyond the horizon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There was another post along these lines about running some kind of pastebin clone but I can't find it.

<comment><USER7> Possibly Remy Sharp's "The Toxic Side of Free" series about running JSBin - [https://remysharp.com/2015/09/14/jsbin-toxic- part-1](https://remysharp.com/2015/09/14/jsbin-toxic-part-1)

<comment><USER9> Yes, thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What tools do you use for mobile apps design? - <AUTHOR>

I'm sure every designer has its weapon of choice but what is it in your case? If you're working with an app developer what are the deliverables? How do you manage revisions?<p>I know, there are a lot of questions but I would really appreciate your feedback! <comment><USER2> Used to recommend just paper, but these days my favorite is <http://popapp.in> \- basically you sketch app screens on paper, snap photo of each page and then stitch them together. it's not going to help with process but is a great way to nail down an idea

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice app, thanks for sharing. But that works for wireframing. If you're planning to give a different look and feel than the default iOS or Android theme I'm sure you use different tools.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Well you could use the usual Photoshop, illustrator .... But also check PaintCode it's a mac only app that helps create vector based UI (in objective-c) for iOs only.

Love to have something similar for Android (no sencha) 'cause the UI for android can be a serious pain.

Basically PaintCode can import svg and photoshop layers and convert them into objective c code. Which can be easily reused, and reconfigured for any new resolution that may come out.

It's not perfect but it's pretty neat <http://www.paintcodeapp.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Basically you're saying "multiple apps". Is that cumbersome?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have become a quite a fan of <http://www.bohemiancoding.com/sketch/>. It's more or less a cleaner and updated version of Fireworks which Adobe has left to rot.

</comment><comment><USER5> Inkscape for vector files and Gimp for all other stuff. I create all my own graphics and it looks very acceptable. For repetitive work I use scripts, command line programs via MacPorts, or put together my own from Automater.

</comment><comment><USER6> I use photoshop. I don't manage revisions effectively for PSDs. It hasn't been a concern for me in the past but if there was an easy way I'd probably use it.

</comment><comment><USER7> For wireframes we use balsamiq and for graphics we try to stick with svg, if we cant, png for each screen resolution that we target. Hope it helps!

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually meant what tools you use to create the svg/png files...

<comment><USER7> oh sorry! Photoshop! and Illustrator

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Illustrator.</comment>


Medicating a Prophet - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/opinion/sunday/medicating-a-prophet.html <comment><USER2> Fascinating article. Who decides the mission of a psychologist? Is it to maximize happiness of patients' lives as a whole? Is it to help patients to reach their full potential as productive members of society? Is it to help them to conform to societal standards of behavior or belief?

If I wasn't on guard, prepared to devote thought to the question, I'd have accepted any of those answers - but this article makes it easy to see how those different goals can be in conflict.

If I had to come up with the best answer I could, I think I'd settle on "A psychologist's mission should be to prevent a person from actively harming the physical health of themselves or others, even taking into account reasonable expectations of future harm based on current activities. And additionally to help make any adjustments that the patient requests." So, sometimes it's okay to involuntarily treat, but only if there's a present or soon-to-be present physical danger. Otherwise, only help them with the things they want fixed.

(Note: I once had a long and coherent conversation with a guy who _knew_ he was the messiah promised to the jews, descendant of david, future _king of the world_. It was an unavoidable fact. Him being a young, black presbyterian had no bearing on the issue. He had lots of evidence, much of it delusional, and much of his reasoning was based on bad information that he was _literally_ incapable of doubting. But in the end, his delusion was immensely satisfying to him, and his life was otherwise boring, banal, and from an outside perspective, depressing as hell. And from what I can tell, as long as he doesn't travel to Israel and get a jewish girlfriend, the more dangerously bizarre parts of his prophecies won't begin, so I just decided to wish him well and let it go.)

<comment><USER3> > So, sometimes it's okay to involuntarily treat, but only if there's a > present or soon-to-be present physical danger

If you weren't aware, that is the current standard for involuntary hospitalization, at least in the US. I believe the phrase is "danger to self or others."

<comment><USER4> Sadly, being on the streets and incapable of caring for oneself isn't considered a 'danger to self', at least in the eyes of the hospital that evaluated my former fiancee.

Personally, I think we need to set the bar for involuntary intervention higher than being an active threat. If someone doesn't have the mental wherewithal to not lose their coat in the middle of a cold snap, that seems like a clear indicator to me that they need help and their refusal shouldn't be taken any more seriously than their delusions.

I may be biased and embittered on this subject.

<comment><USER5> To me, freezing yourself to death seems like a case of 'danger to self' but I'm neither a lawyer nor a doctor.

But in other situations, the question arises just like in the article. At what point do you want to dose the individual with a sense of reality? If their mentally-ill self is content with the life they lead and "curing" them of it will leave them empty, sad, and hollow (in addition to the side effects of medication), is the arguably a better option?

If you factor in the fact that the hospital won't be there to help him rehab back into society, I can see the decision being difficult to make, as the author mentions.

<comment><USER6> I mean, it could be interpreted as a 'danger to self', but choosing that interpretation loses the hospital money. I'm saddened but not really surprised.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I once encountered a young man who was reading the Necronomicon, a cheap and utterly fictional paperback put out to tie-in with the Lovecraft mythos. It's a prop to make a few bucks, no more real than a plastic Star Trek phaser.

Something about the way he was reading it caught my attention, so I asked him, "You know that's fake, right?" To my astonishment, he began to protest and describe how "they dug it up in an archeological site" or something. The chilling thing was he really seemed into it.

I left thinking, "There's the formation of a psychotic reality, right there in front of me." Dunno what I could have done about it.

<comment><USER8> How's this any different from people who spend tens of thousands of dollars stocking up on food and weapons because they're convinced we're on the brink of nuclear war, or people who are convinced that Obama is a secret Muslim terrorist infiltrating America, or people who absolutely believe that the (Bible/Qu'ran/Old Testament/...) is the word of god, or...

<comment><USER9> > spend tens of thousands of dollars stocking up on food and weapons because > they're convinced we're on the brink of nuclear war

I mean, I haven't stockpiled anything personally, but honestly that's a pretty reasonable cost-benefit analysis. The world _is_ perpetually pretty close to nuclear war, if you treated the risk like any other day to day risk.

(You probably spend more on health and house insurance than they spend on food, and IMO nuclear war is more likely than a given house catching fire in a year. The unknowable question of course is whether it will manifest in a way that your preparations matter)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > That night 13 years ago, I did hospitalize my patient who thought he was a > prophet, and he received treatment that he had not consented to. I never > found out what happened to him. I think about him often; I question my > decision each time I do.

Regardless of whether she was right to commit the person to treatment -- how did she not follow up on this? That shouldn't be the end of the article. Why didn't she follow up? If she thinks about it she was obviously interested on some level. Was she legally prevented from following up? Shouldn't follow up be required?

<comment><USER11> You expect a resident called into an ER in the middle of the night to follow up on the long-term treatment of every patient?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm often bummed out whenever someone tells me about their problems and I talk to them about solutions or new ways of thinking and they tell me they just want an ear to speak to.

If I weren't empathic I could just shrug but I see people making big life choices over ridiculous assumptions and I'm asked to keep my expert advice to myself.

This article shakes me at my core... perhaps what's best is to be there until things blow up and then swoop in and save the people from an even worse spot.

<comment><USER13> As I've grown older, I've learned that often the best thing is to just listen to people. Sometimes just letting people vent and share their problems is the most you can do (and it _is_ helpful to most people to have an outlet, even if to you it seems like you're not "doing anything" or "solving the problem").

<comment><USER14> Agreed. And if they're looking for help, they'll usually ask for it.

"What's your opinion?"

"What would you do?"

<comment><USER15> I agree, though not everyone does this—it depends on the person and the interaction a lot I think. If I can't tell, I usually just like to ask:

"What do you think you'll do?"

This is often helpful and I sometimes consider it as a listening strategy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There was and is an anti-psychiatry movement[1] which has a very interesting history.

[1] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti- psychiatry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-psychiatry)

<comment><USER17> Psychiatry is the only medical specialty to have an active resistance movement. The problem is that their go-to treatments are palliative, and do NOT address any of the causes of their patients' conditions.

Robert Whitaker has found the evidence supporting the use of commonly-used drugs actually shows that psych patients do very poorly when medicated for an extended period of time [1].

[1] [http://www.madinamerica.com/2016/07/the-case-against- antipsy...](http://www.madinamerica.com/2016/07/the-case-against- antipsychotics/)

Before the tranquilizers became available, people had episodes from which they usually recovered. Now their chronic conditions are 'managed', until they die 20 years earlier than would otherwise be expected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I read the article and can't help but wonder where the family is in these situations. Why are doctors forced to commit someone against their will? Isn't that a decision better left to a family member?

More and more we're asking society to take on the role traditionally held by family members. The author is describing a symptom to a greater issue, which itself is probably a symptom to some other issue as well. It's symptoms all the way down.

<comment><USER19> Not to attack you, but that's a little closed minded.

Not everyone has a family structure to depend on. Many times, that's a contributing factor to the predicament that disturbed person is in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Another big problem is that if a hospital admits a patient for mental issues, they'll have to treat their physical ailments as well. Since the patients does not have any money or insurance, that comes out of the hospitals pocket. So they have an incentive to cut as many "harmless" people loose as possible.

</comment><comment><USER21> Every single person who advocates or speaks in a visionary way about a new belief, cause, or theory is a prophet. Silicon Valley is full of prophets trying to profit from making their internal view an _external_ view for all of us.

<comment><USER22> I guess I would call those SV people inventors and/or entrepreneurs? Or visionaries (in the business school sense or the literary sense, not in the mystical sense)? There are multiple definitions of the word "prophet" and you have chosen the one where someone just imagines something that doesn't currently exist, but might or will someday. i.e., a prophet is just someone who is prophetic in the broadest possible sense of the term.

I think of a prophet (in the context of this article and this thread) as someone who is convinced that they literally have supernatural insight gifted to them by some unseen omnipotent being who sits behind the curtain of the universe pulling the levers.

I'm not inherently scared of someone who thinks that if only they could get the right product out there, they could make some money (and maybe even make some people happier in ways that they weren't before). I am inherently scared of someone who has convinced themselves that some unseen omnipotent being has a message for the world about who's good and who's evil and what's going to happen in the future, and everyone who doesn't get on board deserves to have bad stuff happen to them (in this life or the next).

Although, I guess that person is harmless in isolation- what I'm really scared of are the people who hear someone like that and decide, "hey this guy clearly knows what's up, let's just listen to (and do) whatever he has to say, and stop thinking about all these hard questions about ethics and morality and life and justice. Even better, we get to act like we know infinitely more than all those poor bastards who wrestle with that stuff every day!". Anyway, that's what I think of when I think of a prophet. Someone who claims to have the answers to the hard questions via magic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Two much more powerful, deeper, and more interesting articles on the same subject:

[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/05/30/god-knows- where...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/05/30/god-knows-where-i-am)

[http://www.columbia.edu/cu/neuwrite/pubs/avivHarpers.pdf](http://www.columbia.edu/cu/neuwrite/pubs/avivHarpers.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER23> I have said more than once that if Joan of Arc were alive today, she would be in a psych ward having hervmedsxadjusted instead of ending The Hubdred Years War and playing handmaiden to the birth of modern France.

I am glad this article is promoting the idea that forcibly treating someone is not really a means to foster mental health. Good mental health is more than the absence of obvious abnormality.

</comment><comment><USER24> >He was a college graduate from a middle-class family. But on Christmas Eve three decades earlier, the Archangel Michael had come to him in a vision and demanded that he spread God's word.

Suppose it's false.

 _Given_ that it's false, are his _actions_ acceptable conduct for a person? Really what is unacceptable is going without treatment for obvious full-blown AIDS.

>I run a program for young people experiencing psychosis for the first time. Every day I confront my impulse to coerce people into care. This spring, one of our participants, whom I will call Mark, once again went off his medications. He had been on track to finish his first semester of community college and was looking for part-time work when his father showed up after years of absence. Soon he was smoking weed daily with his father, had dropped out of school and was refusing to take his medications. Over the next few months he became increasingly psychotic, stopped sleeping and started rhyming all his sentences. Then the sentences gave way to incoherent word pairings that psychiatrists call "clanging." Soon he was nearly mute and rail-thin. But he still refused medication.

You're lying.

Not to me, and not to Mike, but to yourself and to society. Nobody wants to help Mike be himself or be happy. That's Mike's job. The modern paradigm of psychiatry says "take your medications so that you can be happy", but what we obviously mean is "take your medications so that you can work". Here's the thing: he'll be just as happy smoking weed and babbling as he is at college. Or, to be more honest, we have no _good evidence_ that he _won 't_ be.

Here's the thing: how on Earth is Mark supposed to work if nobody cares that he does? The society around him has stated quite clearly that it isn't worth going to a bunch of effort to get him to work -- he's not being medicated in order for him to work -- his work isn't necessary or a duty, _according to everyone who tells him anything about anything_ \-- yet the actual standard _being applied_ is "does this guy pass his classes?".

The truth is that that sounds awful. But the deeper truth is that the psychiatrist and the family and the legal system as a whole have collectively chosen the non-awful fantasy of "mental health" rather than the awful reality of "crazy people are useless". And then we wonder why the patient wants to make the same kind of choice!

<comment><USER3> > Here's the thing: he'll be just as happy smoking weed and babbling as he is > at college. Or, to be more honest, we have no good evidence that he won't > be.

You stopped reading at the smoking weed part. After that, he stopped eating, sleeping, and talking. What part of that sounds happy or healthy to you?

<comment><USER24> It doesn't really matter.

I mean, sure, it might affect the way this example can be used to make the point, but, in my experience, the thrust of my argument holds in plenty of situations anyway. And I'm not sure I agree anyway: happy is a very subjective judgment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The only difference between a prophet and a madman is the number of followers they have.</comment>


Ask HN: Carbon neutrality for a startup? - <AUTHOR>

I've been seeing more and more companies becoming carbon neutral these days (Dreamhost is a popular example, and Rackspace offers a "green" server configuration as well as of this past January). After watching Al Gore's TED talk covering 15 ways of reducing your personal footprint, I started to look into companies selling carbon offsets.
My question for Hacker News is, how would you assess the footprint of a startup so as to be "green from the get-go"?  What I can think of is:
- Personal carbon use (house, transportation), since we don't have an office yet - Servers (our host isn't green to my knowledge) - Additional services such as Amazon S3 and EC2
How would you go about calculating a carbon footprint for such a scenario?  Also, do you think there is a real promotional advantage to being green? <comment><AUTHOR> Another question I didn't include in the original post but is also important: Are the carbon certificate issuers worth trusting? I'd definitely want to do some research on any company I potentially invested money into for something like this.

I wonder if there's a site where you can rate or talk about these companies, so the bad ones can be outed to the public... :)

<comment><USER2> Outing the bad companies: <http://badbuster.com/>

[http://badbuster.com/index.php?option=com_awaveshow&Item...](http://badbuster.com/index.php?option=com_awaveshow&Itemid=2&task=company&id=280)

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool, thanks for the link!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Carbon Neutrality is something systemic. Take any process that is locally "carbon neutral" and you can trace back to some input or prerequisite that involved an emission of carbon dioxide. Right at this moment it's hopeless. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't try. It's millions of small steps that will eventually shift our economy and our society to sustainability. Just don't expect to get there in a day.

(Poster drives a B100 Biodiesel fueled car, but realizes he's still part of the carbon economy.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comments :) I definitely see what you mean.

My partner and I were talking today about how if you really want to trace it down to the nth degree, your ISP comes into play, all the way down to the visitors' computers, etc. It's impossible to hit 100%, but definitely worth trying for improvements :)

I don't have a car since I work from home, but on my personal consumption there's also public transit to consider even still, and then water consumption that had to be purified somehow, plastics in products we use, recycling, energy and emissions in producing the meat on my plate, transportation of said items, ad infinitum. I'm aiming at a reasonable guestimate for myself personally for now anyway, definitely with the understanding that I have to draw the line somewhere!

Hopefully we can do the same to a reasonable degree on the startup side, and maybe if enough startups pave the way it could influence others to join in too...

<comment><USER4> Right! CO2Stats Pro already incorporates client, network, and server contributions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well, Fast Company magazine just had an article about American Apparel's failed attempt at ethical marketing. That isn't quite the same as "green" marketing, but I think it's parallel. They chose to market a sexy young image with ethics as a subtitle:

<http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/126/sex-vs-ethics.html>

</comment><comment><USER6> There's a big difference between buying carbon credits and actually reducing carbon emissions over time. You need to investigate your carbon credits to see if they actually are reasonable. The best thing for offsetting carbon is running an environmentally friendly tree farm. It's good to cut down the trees because then they never catch on fire and release all of their carbon again.

</comment><comment><USER4> A number of venture-backed startups I know use CO2Stats Pro. Take a look:

          http://www.co2stats.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the link. The info on the site wasn't quite clear on exactly how calculations are made or how the process works. Can you explain a bit better for us? For example, is the $9.95/month a flat-rate regardless of traffic or do you give an assessment and determine the amount based on monthly traffic? Also, is this just for the server or do you provide offsets for the rest of the business as well? Thanks!</comment></comment>


Building Miniature Dream Houses for the Homeless - <AUTHOR> http://america.aljazeera.com/multimedia/2015/4/building-miniature-dream-houses-for-the-homeless.html?utm_content=manual&utm_campaign=ajam&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=SocialFlow <comment><USER2> Live about a quarter mile from here and see these small homes growing in number and intricacy every few weeks. Though I'm just riding by on my bike it feels like there's a community amongst the camps inhabitants. We'll see if the police break up the place like they did in Albany and San Jose.</comment>


Ask HN: What if a technological advance makes all existing cryptocoins obsolete? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> You can't just say "What if" and then describe something plausible that has mostly predictable consequences, as if the question's profound just for being asked. This will probably happen! What specifically do you want to know about the consequences?

No-one's satisfied with the protocol of any cryptocurrency right now. Transaction rates are very low, proof of work algorithms are ridiculous, the decentralized protocols are still incurring emergent centralization.

So there'll be new protocols, and the price of coins running on the old protocols will presumably decrease eventually.

However, something like Bitcoin could be adapted on the fly to gain newer protocols, which has already been happening somewhat. You just have to persuade the majority of miners to adopt the change. In that case, the coin could retain value rather than become obsolete.</comment>


The FTC is more responsive than NASA - <AUTHOR> http://www.appneta.com/blog/ftc-more-responsive-nasa/

<comment><USER2> I actually think the author is misunderstanding the quote from the OPM. A shutdown does _not_ mean that each agency has to save as much money as possible. It means they cannot spend any money or create any debts at all (with some exceptions).

Even if it would be cheaper and better for everyone to pay all the staff to keep it running, that's not necessarily allowed.

This sounds crazy, but the federal government really isn't designed to operate without a budget.

<comment><USER3> Hi, I'm the author! Yep, you're correct - I ended up cutting some explanation at the beginning, and that means it makes less sense if you don't already know how appropriations work. (I have a poli sci degree, so I'm not that lucky.)

This is part of the reason why 'what to shut down' is a complicated question. For example, some sites remained up even though the main portal linking to them went down, so you could only access them if you knew about it already. Other sites were able to stay up in entirety, but froze support/updates for everything but a few critical portions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> But the FTC doesn't have a couple of rovers on Mars.</comment>