

Ask PG & HN: Subscription or Data Licensing, as business model? - kingsidharth

I am not sure if PG answers these kind of questions but it's worth asking.<p>I am working on a simple service to sort reading material. Something, say, like <i>Read it Later</i> or <i>Instapaper</i> which does some sorting based on some social media things. (Of course this is not full idea but that hardly matters).<p>Now there are two ways I can go:<p><i>Subscription based Service</i> There will be a free account but for better experience and features. You pay, say, $5-$15 a month. That's simple charge user for what they use.<p>But then is asking user to pay for what otherwise is free, is that cool? And not even sure if "technically" selling sorted links is cool with Publishers.<p><i>Free Service, Sell Data</i>: Somewhat what Crowdbooster is doing? Service is free but data of, say, reading habits can be useful for advertisers or publishers. That can be licensed.<p><i>What are your thoughts on both business models (if I can call them that).</i>
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bendmorris
Charging isn't about whether or not it's "cool" to do so, it's whether or not
people will actually pay for it. Is your idea significantly better than what
already exists so that people would actually pay to use it, instead of some
existing free product?

For either option you need to figure out whether there's a viable market that
will pay for what you're selling.

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kaisdavis
Do you want your customers to be _people_ who pay a monthly fee or do you want
your customers to be _corporations_ who purchase the data from you?

There's nothing wrong with building a subscription based service and having
people pay for it - I think that's a 'better' business model than free -> data
harvesting, but the real question is _what will people_ [corporations or
individuals] _pay for_?

