
Show HN: FastComments - winrid
https://fastcomments.com
======
inapis
Okay, here's some feedback -

What I Like - The feature set and the clean look

What I cannot find - A demo on the home page itself. Not be required to click
a "live demo" button

What turned me away - The pricing strategy. As a dev, I love the pricing. As a
user, I dislike the pricing. Just give me a flat price and call it a day.
Especially applicable for small blogs, newbies and people who don't yet have
traffic. That breakdown just indicates to me that I will have no idea what my
end bill would be like, especially if my blog starts gaining any traction.

That pricing page also probably limits your audience to a small subset. I
showed your pricing page to someone non-technical and they pretty much lost
any interest.

~~~
OJFord
Suggestion regarding pricing: two or three flat-fee tiers, each with a cap on
traffic (after which you can just drop requests, or do whatever you want) and
then a tier with a minimum + variable charge by traffic for higher usages.

~~~
winrid
done

~~~
setr
Your pricing is currently out of order -- $5 for 1 million, then $350 for
unlimited, then $75 for 5 million

~~~
winrid
Yep! Here's an example that describes that strategy:

"Different Levels of Pricing" [https://www.helpscout.com/blog/pricing-
strategies/](https://www.helpscout.com/blog/pricing-strategies/)

------
winrid
Pretty much everyone says the pricing model sucks. I agree. Will rework.

Edit - Don't want to devalue it but wondering if it's worth having a tier for
the really small players? So like $4.99 up to 5m page loads a month or
something. Then $99 for unlimited and you know enterprise is its own game.

Edit#2 - If you sign up now I will migrate your subscription to the new
pricing model which I will implement tomorrow, no worries (unless you really
really like the current pricing....)

~~~
rewq4321
Seeing the current $70/month for 250,000 page views definitely turned me away
(did I read that right? weird decimal place in your copy: 250000.00), but I
might not be your target audience. If you do lower the price, just make sure
it's long-term sustainable. $5 for 5 million page loads (if that's what you
mean in your comment above) would be great, and something I'd consider (since
the alternative for me is setting up a $5 DO droplet with schnack[0] or
commento[1]) but that might be a bit too cheap depending on the costs on your
side (e.g. fighting spam). Might be worth looking at competitors' pricing for
inspiration. A lot of developer types would most likely choose your service
over disqus even if you're a bit more expensive, simply because of all the
bloat and tracking and shady behavior of disqus. That would be too expensive
for me, but like I said, I might not be your target audience.

I love the simple setup and that you're focused on performance and not spying
on users! If the pricing gets adjusted, I would seriously consider adding it
to some of my sites. Oh, if you're not going to make it open source, then an
"export" feature is crucial for me, because I despise lock-in.

[0]: [https://schnack.cool/](https://schnack.cool/)

[1]: [https://github.com/adtac/commento](https://github.com/adtac/commento)

~~~
winrid
Yes I will definitely do load tests to determine what won't break me. I really
like the $4.99 number. Now have to pick a traffic number.

You can export all of your data. Made sure I had that from the get-go. When
writing the importer from the other providers it's amazing how much they hide
from you. Disqus doesn't even export avatar urls.

Decimal place - yeah I tend to automate things and all that is generated from
some configuration. I trusted Number.toLocaleString too much :)

Schnack - thanks. One cool thing that has that I don't is localization. I have
to work on that.

Edit - a fun story that should have shown me how bad the pricing model is. I
was using Mapbox for a project and accidentally made 1m api calls. I still owe
them a few thousand dollars.... So yeah, I am morally obligated to fix it. :D

~~~
winrid
Localization's been added.

------
codegeek
Looks good but need to rethink pricing. For a small blog, it says you won't
pay more than $71 a month. That means I COULD end up paying $71 for a small
blog. That's very expensive for a commenting system. Yes I understand that it
is ads free and all but this pricing overestimates how much people really
dislike ads.

~~~
winrid
Yep, going to redo that. Would you pay $4.99 for a small blog, vs free Disqus
and deal with ads?

~~~
codegeek
I am not looking for a solution right now but if I did, Yes I think a small
charge of few bucks a month may work. The problem is that most small blogs
don't really need heavy commenting and when they do, they can get away with
free comments from WordPress or even disqus.

You need to think about the value proposition of why someone wants to PAY for
a commenting system. It may not always be "I hate ads". I would say find
people who run blogs with comments and start talking to them.

~~~
winrid
Exactly. That's why I'm adding lots of features a default WP install won't
have. I should probably also support export/import from WP...

I also plan to write a WP plugin.

Edit - yes the 1:1 reaching out will happen soon. I suck at sales, and it's
super hard not to just focus on writing code. But I will do it!

------
winrid
Well this is a fun load test. Nice to see things aren't falling over while
being on the homepage (Thanks HN!!!!).

It's also a fun load test for my other project, Watch.ly, which doesn't track
you but I can see in realtime the traffic to the site and it's peaking at
around 100 concurrent sessions.

~~~
winrid
I'm seeing lots of requests from fun things like go-http-client and such.

------
cutemonster
I wonder how this compares with Commento?

Differences I've found:

FastComments has a smaller Javascript file.

Commento is open source. Could it be more stable since been around for longer?

What would you say, @winrid? There's this blog post: "Migrating From Commento
To FastComments" \-- what are the main reasons someone would do that?

~~~
winrid
Hey, first of all thanks for asking the right questions! :) I have considered
putting together a big "FastComments vs..." chart to answer these questions.

I'm trying to offer a larger feature set than Commento. This means things
like: 1\. Better ways to fight spam 2\. Migration supports more than just
Disqus. 3\. Inline image support (which will also be able to be toggled in the
future) 4\. Customization on a per domain or url basis:
[https://blog.fastcomments.com/(1-24-2020)-how-to-make-a-
comm...](https://blog.fastcomments.com/\(1-24-2020\)-how-to-make-a-comment-
system-like-hackaday.com.html) 5\. No signup process, no passwords. Everything
is email based, however we allow anonymous comments now (configurable).

Also, solutions for larger customers (integrations, developer support, etc).
At the highest tier for $20/mo Commento gives you 100k monthly page views.
FastComments gives you one million on the lowest tier (closer to what Disqus
gives you on the lowest tier, but cheaper).

I'm not sure Commento has pagination? I'd have to check. But we just added
that today too. Also, a cool blog post is coming on how you can optimize
threaded pagination! :)

But yes Commento has been around longer. I think I'll catch up quickly though.

~~~
cutemonster
Thanks for the reply and your thoughts, best wishes.

------
dvko
I like the goal and the product seems good apart from some subjective styling
nitpicks, but your blog is terrible. Why can’t I click on any of the titles
or/and a “read more” link?

After figuring out how to get to a single post, I noticed your blog uses the
product, perhaps that could serve as a nice low-effort demo? Firing up an
editor and trying out the code snippet is too much work for something you
haven’t even seen yet, imho.

~~~
winrid
Yes that's on the todo list. Thanks for bumping up the priority...

------
todotask
With Firefox night mode enabled, the comments can’t be seen.

When blocked images, the whole comments is hidden, it can pose problem for
some readers.

~~~
winrid
Would be cool if you checked now. On FF mobile I installed "Dark Mode" which
made the page black and the text white. I also disabled images.

------
lindig
Copy-writing on the pricing page: "We'll charge you for your traffic to
FastComments. For example if you have a small blog and you never get more than
250000.00 visitors a month you won't be charged more than $71.43 a month."

Who measures number of visitors down to their 100th part? Remove the ".00" to
make it simpler. The price "$71.43" suggests the underlying pricing model is
somewhat complicated, as others have identified, too.

~~~
winrid
Redid whole page, thanks.

------
darekkay
I've gathered all the commenting systems I could find in my blog post [1]. I'm
glad to see yet another alternative. I will add it soon to my list (maybe I
should wait for your pricing adjustment).

[1] [https://darekkay.com/blog/static-site-
comments/](https://darekkay.com/blog/static-site-comments/)

~~~
winrid
Pricing's been adjusted! [https://fastcomments.com/traffic-
pricing](https://fastcomments.com/traffic-pricing)

------
omarchowdhury
I'd use this if we had complete customizability of the comment system's design
through CSS.

~~~
winrid
You do! I made a page that looks like Hackaday to demonstrate that:

[https://blog.fastcomments.com/(1-24-2020)-how-to-make-a-
comm...](https://blog.fastcomments.com/\(1-24-2020\)-how-to-make-a-comment-
system-like-hackaday.com.html)

~~~
Stratoscope
It's good that the CSS is customizable, but many of your clients won't
customize it, and the default text size is too small. I did a quick test of
increasing comment bodies from 13px to 16px, and comment headers from 12px to
15px, and it made everything much more pleasant.

Consider increasing the default font sizes? If comments are worth writing and
reading, it's worthwhile making them eye-friendly and easy to read.

~~~
winrid
Thanks

------
ardme
Interesting to see, I am curious how this goes especially with the pricing
model. Have you been doing this very long?

I would want to see a docs page and a React, Vue, Angular etc client library
before I would realistically purchase this and spend time trying to consume
it.

~~~
winrid
Could you help me understand why would you need a client in each framework?
It's in vanilla JS and attaches to a Dom element. :)

Edit - one thing to note is 99% of the code is actually just loaded in an
iframe. So the actual code on your site is very small.

[https://blog.winricklabs.com/(1-25-2020)-making-an-
embeddabl...](https://blog.winricklabs.com/\(1-25-2020\)-making-an-embeddable-
widget-safe-from-cross-site-attacks.html)

Edit #2 - no I've only spent a month on this so far.

------
dyeje
This looks really great, congrats on shipping. I think it'd be worth it to
have a designer give the site a facelift, I think it would convey more
trustworthiness. Also the pricing page doesn't work very well on mobile when
selecting plans.

~~~
winrid
All good feedback thanks

------
winrid
Pricing and pricing infrastructure has been redone. Thanks everyone!

[https://fastcomments.com/traffic-pricing](https://fastcomments.com/traffic-
pricing)

~~~
listenallyall
There are a LOT of blogs which get well under 1 million pageviews per year,
let alone per month. I dont know your admin costs, but perhaps there's room
for a Micro plan at a flat $15/year for something like 500k annual pageviews?

~~~
winrid
I could work that out if you're interested.

------
clarry
How long do I have to wait for my cat post to show up in the demo, after
confirming both my email and my post?

EDIT: I think my first comment simply vanished, the second one went through
instantly :(

~~~
winrid
That's weird and simply shouldn't happen. What's your username? I did do a
deployment earlier, and since I don't have a queue in front of the this (and
nginx isn't setup to replay POST requests yet) it is possible that is why.

~~~
clarry
meowmeowmeow. My first comment included a picture (rabbit showing tongue) and
I received a pair of emails for verifying my account & comment at 23:30:33
EET, according to server logs. I promptly verified both, but that comment
never showed up.

~~~
winrid
The spam filter thought it was spam :) It should have shown a message. Right
now verifying your comment doesn't unmark it as spam. I'm still contemplating
that.

Edit - it should show now. Just clicked "not spam" in the dashboard...

~~~
clarry
Oh, I actually saw that message. I thought it just meant all messages from new
users would be flagged as spam until verified.

~~~
winrid
Ah, well after I deploy this next round of changes verified accounts bypass
the spam filter (and verifying a comment marks it as not-spam).

I'll experiment with this. I bet it'll have to be configurable in the future.

------
derision
The pricing model itself is one thing that people have covered here, but why
the hell is it so expensive? Over $1000 / mo just for a comment widget???

~~~
winrid
Yeah that was something I should have thought about more before posting. I am
thinking of having two tiers, up to $99/mo for the biggest sites. Most people
would use the $4.99 package.

------
hamid_ra
Just to mention, when I added the embedding I was getting a 404 error. Not
sure if it is supposed to work or not without a subscription;)

~~~
winrid
Should be fixed now, except commenting won't work for the demo tenant id. I'll
address that too. I was a little overzealus with my request validation.

------
winrid
Well. Took a little downtime there due to an issue I had to fix which is
embarrassing. Back up now. Whoever just broke it - thanks. :)

------
tutfbhuf
I think you should rework your pricing model.

~~~
winrid
I agree! Done: [https://fastcomments.com/traffic-
pricing](https://fastcomments.com/traffic-pricing)

------
forgotmypw
Is there a fallback for no-JS users?

~~~
winrid
On the TODO list. However, I think it'd have to be opt-in.

EDIT: Maybe not. You'd just see a scrollbar since the iframe can't auto
expand:

[https://blog.winricklabs.com/(1-25-2020)-making-an-
embeddabl...](https://blog.winricklabs.com/\(1-25-2020\)-making-an-embeddable-
widget-safe-from-cross-site-attacks.html)

