Hey everyone,<p>I am really keen to build a for sale web app, having developed a couple of successful free products. Instead of going for the build it and they will come approach, I have decided to get some early validation of my idea. Yesterday I asked HN about Silo (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2556658) a SSL certificate management web app. A HN user pointed out that there may be major trust hurdles to overcome with this product, but he expressed interest in the expiry notification concept. This got me thinking.<p>A little while ago two major, yet easily avoidable problems occurred, resulting in downtime, lost revenue, stress, and unhappy clients:<p>1. I get a phone call from a client who tells me their websites and email is down. I run some checks and find out that the domain name had expired. My client registered and manages the domain name so this downtime is his fault. However my client is not particularly happy when I tell him this. He was of the opinion that I looked after his domain and hosting so should of spotted and warned him about this. Clearly doing this manually for all my clients is impractical. The domain went into 'holding' and an extortionate release fee had to be paid, which I bore the cost of as a gesture of good will. With lots of clients and domains registered by myself and clients this is likely to happen again.<p>2. I get a phone call from a client who tells me that some of his visitors have reported that their e-commerce website is coming up as insecure in their browsers. I check the website and see that the SSL certificate has expired. I spend the next few hours getting a new certificate re-issued using my clients Enom account. My client is annoyed as his customers have complained and he suspects he has lost revenue as a result.<p>Step in Flaregun. Flaregun (http://getflaregun.com) is targeted at people who look after domains on behalf of their clients. You enter all your domains and it looks up the whois information. A notification email is sent out a week before the domain expires to ensure you have time to warn your client and renew the domain. Similarly SSL certificates are added and expiry notifications are sent out a week before to ensure you have enough time to renew your certificate.<p>I have put up a holding page (http://getflaregun.com) with price plans. I am reaching out to the HN community to see how the idea is received and whether you would be willing to pay for this product. Thanks for your time.
I like it (caveat: I'm not the target market)<p>It's simple and doesn't require much interaction from the user. Ideally, I would set the notifications at 1month and 1week as some clients may have purchase orders to be written etc (or for small businesses, on holiday for example over Christmas)<p>Only other thought: this doesn't have to be a webapp. It could function just as well as a cross-platform desktop app or browser extension. Sure, that's a one-off payment model but I would worry that a user wouldn't be signing into Flaregun that often so the likelihood of maintaining a monthly subscription would be low. I would just worry that if that aren't logging in often, the perceived value goes down.<p>Best of luck!
i do web/email hosting and am in a similar situation with my customer domains. however, i'm an opensrs reseller, so i usually do the actual domain registration and renewal for my customers as their registrar. if customers don't want to transfer their domains to me, i tell them they're responsible for renewing them (which i use as a selling point for why they should transfer them to me).<p>for any domains/certs that require manual renewal on my part, my billing system (plug: <a href="http://corduroysite.com/" rel="nofollow">http://corduroysite.com/</a>) is set to invoice the customers for these a month or two in advance because it's entered as a yearly recurring service. if they pay the invoice, i see it and do the renewal manually (or at least verify that the domain is set to auto-renew with opensrs). if they don't pay the invoice, the domain doesn't get renewed. this is actually beneficial because sometimes customers want to let some domains go, so they will contact me and tell me to let them expire before the auto-renew date comes up.<p>anyway, as for your product, your free package seems like it would be useful for your target market (web developers managing a few domains). however, anyone with more than 15 domains would probably have a billing system or domain reseller account that manages all of this for them. for a large company with hundreds of domains needing your more expensive packages, i can't really see them manually importing and deleting lists of domains as customers come and go, especially since there is no integration with their billing system.<p>my point being, the product may get a lot of free accounts but not many paid accounts. perhaps you should look into integration with established billing/invoicing systems?
I'd definitely pay for this, but the pricing feels off. I have about 70 domains right now, and I just can't see spending $12/month for an automatic renewal reminder.