Charging for things on the web

A somewhat off-topic rant, because the site is down, but hear me out:<p>What I wouldn't give for a decent micropayments platform. One that would allow me to pay $0.50 a month for an ad-free social network. Facebook currently averages around $0.25 a month in ad revenue per user, so it'd double that income. Let me pay $0.25 a month to subscribe to a blog. Let me pay $1.50 a month to subscribe to the New York Times. Let me tip $0.10 for an article I like, or pay $0.75 for lifetime access to a forum.<p>We've heard a lot about how "if you're not paying, then you are the product." Well, give me the option to pay, and never have to see an ad, or have my data mined and sold to advertisers. I would pay gladly.<p>I looked into different ways to do this, and the tech would not be hard. It's really more of a business and legal issue than anything.<p>But I really think it would change the web, and for the better. Sometimes, really cheap is better than free. As in beer, anyways.

Charging for things forces you to be better. That's the right kind of pressure.

I often struggle with this as well. It is just so much easier to give something away than charge for it, and if you want your products to be used, you try to limit the pay barrier.<p>Dustin is absolutely right that people will pay, but you have to make it easy for them.<p>I always look at the success of iTunes as the prime example. There is no shortage of free music (even if you don't include stealing), and yet people have happily paid to buy their music because it doesn't ask very much of them at all.

This is a topic I'm quite interested in. I've had many product/project ideas that I think have merit, and a few that I think could be a viable business, but I simply cannot get behind the idea of giving something away for free for the ad revenue. To me, when I build a product, my personal ethos (and this is personal to me, not a moral judgment by any means) is that I want to build something for my customers that they will love and pay for. If that means I have fewer customers, then so be it, but dammit I want my customers to be my customers, not <i>my product</i>.

My Chrome Web Store app has 4000 users, in a couple of months. The previous pay version has about 15. Charging for stuff on the web works if you have a massive reach that comes with things like being on TechCrunch.<p>This project also benefited from being a vanity purchase.

Stripe is cool. There are other quick ways without much programming. Slap up a PayPal button, and connect it with E-Junkie, and you can be selling a download product today.

Design is really well done. Over what period of time did it take you to develop the site? I know you said 400-500 hours but was that over 3 months, 6 months, a year?

That's really great. Over how many months, did you make that money?

Mirror?