Ask YC: Who is building a startup/product and making money by charging customers? - <AUTHOR> Per the link I just submitted (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=83536), I would have to agree that there are waaay too many free web apps chasing a highly competitive ad market.
More importantly, some of these web apps just don't lend itself well with an ad model (e.g. are you going to want ads on an online word processor?  Are you ever going to click on the ad?)
With that in mind, why, oh why are we all chasing the same ad biz model?  Does the ad model even scale for some of these apps?
I for one would like to see more web apps that charge users because they provide value. <comment><USER2> My target market is small business.

3 Reasons They Prefer Pay Over Free:

1\. They don't want their employees looking at ads.

2\. They need leverage when they have complaints. (Why would they listen to me if I'm not paying anything?)

3\. They want you to stick around.

Provide them with something they want and charging them will not be an issue.

<comment><AUTHOR> What are you offering?

<comment><USER2> A web-based small business system (order processing, inventory, accounting).

<comment><USER3> What makes you think a web-based system is best for this? Here are some problems that have prevented me from pursuing this market: 1\. Perceived security ("My information is out there in cyberspace? Won't it be hacked?") 2\. Offline usage ("What happens when the internet/power is out?") 3\. Speed and technologies (Is web-based better than local application, i.e. MYOB/Peachtree?)

Most of the problems are probably in customer perception, but because you're dealing with small businesses, perception is really hard to overcome. They presumably don't have IT people to talk sense into them.

<comment><USER2> "What makes you think a web-based system is best for this?"

Doesn't matter what I think. Only matters what they think. I am building a business in response to a tremendous demand.

There seems to be a low level theme running here that the <enterprise><IE using><anyone over x years of age><you name it> crowd is missing the <Web2.0><social networking><everything cool> boat. Don't you believe it! They're not all PHBs. (Most of the smartest people I know run small businesses.) They see what's happening. And they don't understand why there's so much going on these days and they're still stuck with garbage business software that costs a fortune, is hard to use, and doesn't serve their needs.

So who to they complain to? Me! "Give me something that does business the way we do, make it simple, price it right, and put it on the web so I can stop paying XYZ Systems a small forture to never be available!" Every demo I give ends the same way, "Finish that and I'll buy it in a minute!" (Needless to say, I do know the difference between a promise and a check, so we'll see...)

Hopefully it won't be too long before I post one of those "How Do You Like My App" posts.

<comment><USER4> I think you're on a hot trail, edw519!

An interesting thought is what kinds of standards you can hook into. Perhaps stuff for tax file exporting, calendaring, sales /product channels, etc. The standard formats might be easy to provide and could increase the value of your pitch.

<comment><USER2> Yes. No need to replicate the horizontals. The verticals are what everyone is clamoring for. Hooks into existing horizontals seems to be the way to go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Charging tells you a very important thing: if you're adding value. Probably this would prune a lot of fruitless branches from your development tree.

There is a much larger universe of "wouldn't it be neat..." ideas than there are "this would really ad value and people will be begging to pay us..." ideas. Even things that people will pay for because they add value but that are so small a morsel of functionality don't work either- eg: little tiny utilities where people would gladly pay you $1/month to use, and where you could make big money at $1/month given the size of the audience, but are simply not worth the effort to renew on an annual basis for people because $1 a month isn't significant enough in the customers mind to get them to sign up. (EG: a spam filtering service is borderline here, anything less featurful or significant is not going to get many customers, I expect.)

<comment><USER4> This is an excellent point.

The market needs pay-for-software because without it, there's no way to have the software industry make things the users want. Sure you can count eyeballs, but simply because I'm willing to surf over somewhere doesn't mean that I assign the place value -- I surf all kinds of places. In fact, the places I surf are kind of a herd mentality thing. The software I buy is based on my careful analysis of what I need and what it's worth to me. Free software is worth nothing -- even if it has a lot of users. This is the difference between just looking at a pretty girl from afar and actually getting a date -- both experiences may feel good, but one has a lot more significance than the other.

It's also interesting to note that there is a gap between free, nada, el zilco -- and paying money. Ten bucks a year is probably too close to zero. Something like 20 bucks or more sounds like more of a commitment. That's just a guess, though.

<comment><USER6> _"Free software is worth nothing -- even if it has a lot of users."_

This is the problem with all the people that embrace open source or free software. The developers price themselves out of existence. Sure you have to hand out the source code, but you can still charge for the software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Anything that can be free, will be free.

<comment><USER8> Who cares. Startups ultimately exist to make money. How do we get the most of that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nice topic--I'd really enjoy seeing more discussion of this kind here.

>>why, oh why are we all chasing the same ad biz model?

I think this may be--at least partially--a case of "get rich quick" versus "get (sort of) rich slow."

I believe if you follow the pay model you go your own way and forget about VC and GYM money, at least until you're successful enough for others to notice. This may never happen, however. I used to work for a guy who was probably one of the first ASPs in existence, only it likely never even crossed his mind because he's a businessman and not a techie. I'll bet he's barely even known in his niche, but he owns a successful business with about five employees and just keeps on adding customers.

</comment><comment><USER10> Charging for your application is a big step -- you are making a statement that what you are offering is of value.

I think that if you can offer some premium lever of your software for a price, do it.

My company created billQ (<http://www.mybillq.com>). Now this is a VERY specific and simple app, but it is very well done (biased?). At first we offered it completely free. This came partly from fear. Is this simple app really worth charging for? After a few months, and a bunch of feedback, people were actually offering to pay us even though we weren't charging. We learned from this, and the latest version now has a premium level that has more features and costs a small amount. And people pay for it.

Most people aren't not going to use your product because of the price, they are not going to use it because it a) isn't useful to them, or b) it sucks. The onus is on you to make the value match the price.

If at all possible, charge for your product. It will not only bring you better customers, but it will provide you with the resources to invest back into those customers. And this is something they are more than willing to pay for.

I would hope more companies put a value on their products. Web apps shouldn't be just commodities in the same way desktop software is not. If everyone relies solely on ad revenue, there will be a lot of cash-flow starved companies out there.

</comment><comment><USER11> I HATE the "CPM and a prayer" mindset that masquerades as a business model. I don't understand why anyone starting a business these days would rely exclusively on ad monetization for their business. I personally would never invest time or money in any startup that had ad sales as the only source of revenue (and I've invested in magazines, fergoodnessakes!)

I believe in MULTIPLE revenue streams. Most of my startups have charged directly for the product or service, but the most successful have all had multiple revenue streams. A startup I'm working on now, for example, has six distinct revenue streams...and there are probably others we haven't figured out yet. One of the revenue streams is advertising, but we deal directly with the advertisers (no ad network or agency taking a cut), there is a minimum $50K ad buy (reducing time/communications overhead), we have no dedicated ad sales staff (just 'order takers' and ad screeners) and it is our smallest source of revenue by a significant margin.

There are too many opportunities out there to rely on the whims of the ad market.

</comment><comment><USER12> the ad model might not scale for apps like word processors or spreadsheets, but it will scale for other information work.

we are creating an event network, and there are more than enough event marketers out there that need help when it comes to getting the word out, and there are even more users that don't use the calendars they have because they are hard to keep in sync with what everyone else is doing.

i would suspect that there are plenty of information worker apps that have yet to be revealed, just look at where money changes hands based on a known process, or product shipments.

an architect might actually find it usefully to have all of the worlds building materials organized, and material suppliers would be more that willing to pay to organize that info, if it meant that an architect might select that material for a new office building or subdivision.

There are plenty of Pro2Pro or Pro2Consumer application touch points that have yet to be explored.

You should read about MITs Fab Lab project and vision.

</comment><comment><USER13> A few thoughts on ad supported SW:

-It's interesting how TV is moving towards a pay-per episode model (HBO orignals, ITMS and netflix) and SW is going towards advertising. I haven't owned a TV in 10 years b/c ads became so intolerable. But I now rent / buy TV episodes commercial free (I missed the TIVO revolution.) I'm the type of consumer who would rather pay for something and not deal with ads / potential privacy violations.

-People can only spend so much time on the interweb in a day. And a site has to go nuclear to make real money off ads. So if you're going to make money off ads you have to steal traffic from google, yahoo and FB etc or you have to grab traffic from emerging net markets.

</comment><comment><USER14> with our app, we have been lucky enough to both charge our customers, as well as we have leased out our software to a bigger company and set them up with their own site. Similar to what reddit did with lipstick.com

<comment><USER12> does anyone know what the licensing arrangement was?

I am trying to figure out how to price our services to a few websites.

Right now I am trying to think about flat rate licensing with maybe 3-5 tiered packages, that vary based on volume, features and included consulting time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm charging a monthly per user fee. Most businesses won't use free products simply out of principle. I'm not sure why.

<comment><USER16> If something goes wrong, the guy who picked you is going to look like an idiot for choosing a free service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Users can choose pay or free:

<http://ourdoings.com/hostingplans.html>

<comment><USER18> That's nice and all, but what do you offer at 52 bucks a month that is more than what picasa and picasaweb offers for free? it's not space, if it's the "sort-by-date" feature, I would reconsider your model.

<comment><USER17> That's actually 52/year. I'll take this as a lesson that the word "year" should be in bold.

The "sort-by-date" feature is the starting point for what distinguishes ourdoings.com. But I don't want to go into detail here. If you have a few hundred photos that lend themselves to chronological organization, make yourself a free site and give it a try. If you don't like it, use the "Tear down this site..." option on your site info page, and the "Forget I exist..." option on your personal info page.

More relevant to the business model question, it's important to look at the ad vs pay question from your customer's point of view. From my own point of view, pay is better because I don't want ads on the pages where I share my photos. However, I'm catering toward people who have very little time to spare. Freeing them from filling out a form with credit card info is a time saver. They will put up with ads for other convenience.

Initially it was pay-only, but I changed it.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, actually picasa doesn't have ads at second glance either, I've been using it for quite a while now, and as with most ads, I don't even notice that they're there (a note to people who think that ad-based models get user's attention).

I certainly don't want to argue with you, or tell you that your business won't work (I can't say that I know TOO much about that), but picasa auto-arranges albums by date too. It doesn't have the blog feel of your albums, which I sort of like.

I like that you've added a free service, but I guess I just didn't see what made somebody choose your pay service (even per year) over google's, who gives 10Gb for $20 per year.

My bigger question, is how can us little guys compete with Google and Yahoo and Microsoft on anything?

<comment><USER17> Here's a quick answer to your bigger question: Google has attracted a large number of users who like the way picasaweb feels now, and they need to keep _those users_ happy. How can they ever compete with lots of little guys who make things that appeal to others?

A longer answer will appear in a blog post in the not-too-distant future.

<comment><USER18> They do that with the ability to change the defaults, and add new features, like a hosted blog management (blogger) or similar. The same could be done for picasa.

<comment><USER17> Every option/feature has a cost. If they try to be all things to all people they will fail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> My service (not yet launched to public) is a pay model, right now the idea is a pay-for-what-you-use model, but having four general brackets to encourage people to pick what suits them best and save a little money.

People want to know that you're dedicated, and a subscription type service has a contract on both ends.

</comment><comment><USER19> I charge $5/mo for RunFatBoy ( <http://www.runfatboy.net> ).

I would rather service 100 paying customers vs a million freebies. Less customer service emails, less scaling costs, and I can sleep at night.

</comment><comment><USER20> That's a good question, I'm working on project management software that is aimed towards advertising firms and post production companies. And no it's not going to be free :) but I guess the demo will be.

<comment><AUTHOR> Project management software seems to be going niche these days :)

<comment><USER20> Agreed

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> as a matter of principle, we don't show our users ads, since we provide a productivity tool, and we surely don't want our customers to distract. and yes, we charge for premium account types.

<comment><USER22> I went to your website out of curiosity: "We're sorry, but we was not able yet to support Opera 9.23. Please use Firefox or Safari. We'll do out best to support your browser soon."

It's not the place to bitch about the any browser principle; still, I find the line "Please use Firefox or Safari" insulting.

<comment><USER23> Worse still, the message is written with improper (bad) grammer "We was not able to..."

<comment><USER21> thanks!

<comment><USER23> Just for the record, it is still wrong..the correct thing would be: "We are not able ..."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> yes I am planning on charging for my next product. I run a web dev shop at the moment and plan on branching into products from there.</comment>


CLI tool that finds secrets accidentally committed to a Git repo (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/UKHomeOffice/repo-security-scanner <comment><USER2> I read that as "CLI tool ... accidentally committed to a Git repo," as in the CLI tool itself committed to a Git repo by accident, and that the CLI tool finds secrets.

Title as of my reading was "CLI tool that finds secrets accidentally committed to a Git repo (2017)".

<comment><USER3> I read it the same way

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I made a similar tool [https://github.com/zricethezav/gitleaks](https://github.com/zricethezav/gitleaks) Reasons why you might want to use gitleaks over this:

* performance (powered by go-git)

* scan github orgs/users

* ref targeting

</comment><comment><USER5> I'd like to have some way to prevent certain code from being committed in the first place.

E.g. when I have a line saying

        printf("debug: now at: %d\n", i); /* DONTCOMMIT */

then when I type "git commit ...", a script will be invoked that will recognize the "DONTCOMMIT" string, and it will abort the commit.

<comment><USER6> Should be possible if you create a pre-commit hook, like this one [https://gist.github.com/guilherme/9604324](https://gist.github.com/guilherme/9604324)

<comment><USER5> Hmm, it uses "git diff" but in my case, this shows a few lines of context. So if the context contains "console.log" (and not the change itself), the script would still complain.

<comment><USER7> You could use 'git diff -U0' which shows no lines of context. Or you could just search for "DONTCOMMIT" (which is what your example used).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> TIL the UK Home Office has over 700 projects on GitHub.

</comment><comment><USER9> Is there a similar tool that can run as a pre-commit hook and prevent it from happening in the first place / after this scan?

<comment><USER10> I wrote one using the same difference library a few months ago: [https://github.com/burdzwastaken/git-rid-of- keys](https://github.com/burdzwastaken/git-rid-of-keys).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Looks nifty, but I'd ask: why use this over Trufflehog?

[https://github.com/dxa4481/truffleHog](https://github.com/dxa4481/truffleHog)

<comment><USER12> As well as the CLI tool the repository contains code for a server to listen for pushes to repositories in github via webhooks and write any violations found into elasticsearch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Maybe I'm missing something, but doesn't a whitelist (the `.secignore` mentioned in the README) defeat much of the point of a secret-scanning tool? If I whitelist a file now for containing the (benign) string "password," I'm likely to miss a future problem in that file.

</comment><comment><USER14> There are backdoor for SMTP credentials in django projects: [https://searchcode.com/?q=EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD%3D&p=1&loc=0&l...](https://searchcode.com/?q=EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD%3D&p=1&loc=0&loc2=10000&lan=19)

</comment><comment><USER15> Now if only there was a CLI tool to convince my coworkers that storing secrets in git is a bad idea.

<comment><USER16> I'm guessing such people have little interest in new CLI tools, since CLI is for old tools, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> And how to really remove a file from your git history....

[https://help.github.com/articles/removing-sensitive-data- fro...](https://help.github.com/articles/removing-sensitive-data-from-a- repository/)

<comment><USER18> > And how to really remove a file from your git history....

That's misleading. Once you commit and push it to a remote, you should consider it compromised. You could remove it from the repo and force-push to re-write history, but anyone could have pulled from the same remote since your original push and have the file locally on their system.

A better option is to push a new commit to remove the file from the repo (add to .gitignore), then set a new, strong passphrase/whatever and don't ever use the one you pushed again.

<comment><USER17> How is the article misleading? It said the same thing you did in bold....

 _Warning: Once you have pushed a commit to GitHub, you should consider any data it contains to be compromised. If you committed a password, change it! If you committed a key, generate a new one._

<comment><USER18> Your comment was misleading, not the article, which is why I quoted you comment and not the article...

<comment><USER17> Fair Enough....

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This reminds me of gitguardian.</comment>


Elon Musk Says Tesla's Self-Driving Tech Already as Good as a Human Driver - <AUTHOR> https://www.inverse.com/article/38049-elon-musk-self-driving-autopilot-tesla <comment><USER2> The worst driver? An average driver? The best driver? There's a pretty big difference between all of those.

Also, just like with machines being "just as accurate" at translation from one language to another, doesn't mean the machine will be as good as the humans at exactly the same things. A robot that translates from one language to another with equal level of accuracy as a human would probably sound "off" to a human, because it would make different types of mistakes.

Similarly, a self-driving car that achieves as few/many accidents per million miles as an average human driver may also seem like it's driving pretty weird compared to a human.

> _"Regulators may require some significant margin above human capability in > order for a full autonomy to be engaged," said Musk. "They may say it needs > to be 50 percent safer, 100 percent safer, 1000 percent safer, I don't know. > I'm not sure they know either."_

I would say it needs to be 1,000 percent safer. Better safe than sorry, and at the rate machine learning chips are improving these days, that would only take like a car model generation to achieve. So why not wait a few years?

And if human safety is not the primary concern of car makers, because they'd rather be bragging with their "self-driving feature" for their cars, then they should consider that if they "screw-up" this self-driving thing initially, it could ruin it for themselves as well as everyone else for a decade or more. So again, better safe than sorry?

Also, the next time someone mentions their cars are autonomous, I want to hear them say in the next sentence how secure software digital systems are against hackers.</comment>


Ask HN: B2C Startups what % of revenues do you spend on marketing? - <AUTHOR>

We are trying to figure out our marketing budget. It would be helpful if you can share your marketing budget as percentage of your revenues both online and offline. <comment><USER2> Hey, drop me a note and I'll be happy to send you some figures.</comment>


JavaScript cloth physics simulation using verlet integration - <AUTHOR> http://lonely-pixel.com/lab/cloth/

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure why but this version is considerably more resource intensive (i.e. laggier) on my modest work PC than this version I saw on Twitter today: <http://codepen.io/stuffit/pen/KrAwx></comment>