

Show HN: AvatarPicker – User-friendly, in-page gravatar alternative - bgdam
https://www.avatarpicker.com/

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funkyy
I think you could adjust your pricing. Usual for new products a year long
subscription is priced at 10 times the monthly plan. For few dollars savings I
am not going to risk signing up with new service if I am not sure if it will
run or not for a year. 2 months worth of subscription is good enough incentive
though.

btw - "up to" not "upto". "upto" is not correct afaik

Looks nice, I will hopefully see it around the web soon!

~~~
bgdam
Glad you liked it. The pricing is only tentative. I thought it would be better
to set expectations higher rather than set expectations lower and then irk
people by raising prices (if required).

I do agree that making it two months free would be a better incentive than one
month free.

Thanks for the language correction too. English is not my first language and
at times I mess it up. Will fix ASAP.

~~~
keerthiko
Since you're not on an app store that restricts your pricing flexibility, I
think it's totally okay to raise your price later when you've gained
stability. You won't really be irking anyone. I think making a more convincing
sale value to early adopters is worth it, and later you can raise the price to
justify the increased stability you will be offering to the risk-averse later-
adopters.

At worst you'll cause on-the-edge customers to suffer "loss by missing out" on
the "deal" when it was cheaper, but that's not a bad thing. It's how airline
ticket sales pages use cookies to tell if you're looking at the same flight 2
days in a row and raise the price by a couple tens of dollars to make you fear
the price will keep going up if you wait too long to buy :)

~~~
bgdam
Thanks for your advice. I think I will be giving the pricing page some serious
thought in the next few days.

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m4tthumphrey
This is cool. I've thought about this sort of the service before. It surprises
me that Gravatar has never bothered creating a widget.

~~~
bgdam
Thanks. This idea only occurred to me when another dev friend of mine was
whining about all the support calls he got from non-tech people who did not
know what Gravatar was, and how he had to spend so much time walking people
through the Gravatar process.

Also the fact that setting up a gravatar the way you like requires you to get
a Wordpress.com account is insane. Anyway, glad you liked it.

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aakilfernandes
Well done. How come you decided to go with an iframe instead of a generic
popup? Also what do you use for image hosting? s3?

~~~
bgdam
Thanks. I'm not sure what exactly you mean by 'generic popup'. I'm assuming
you are referring to overlaid div. I went with the iframe mainly to avoid
having to provide CORS access to all the implementing sites. This way, it's
always a same origin ajax/form post.

Since this is just an MVP (I repurposed the site from an older project, the
only thing new is the actual widget), the images are currently on a Linode
VPN. When/If it gets popular, i'll be re-engineering this.

~~~
aakilfernandes
I think you misunderstand CORS. You have to enable CORS on your server, not
the sites that use your widget.

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/298745/how-do-i-send-a-
cr...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/298745/how-do-i-send-a-cross-domain-
post-request-via-javascript/7605119#7605119)

~~~
bgdam
Yeah, I know that. What I meant was that I did not want to set wildcards for
the access-control-allow-origin header. If you use hostname reflection like in
the linked stackoverflow example, issues arise when the widget is cached
browser side by site A and then invoked by site B.

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toothbrush
Does this mean that if sites i like (and i) use your service, my machine hits
your server very frequently, thus giving you relatively thorough insight into
my browsing habits? This question comes from someone who tries to be strict
with the number of RequestPolicy rules allowed. Forgive me if this is a stupid
question, but humour the paranoid ;).

~~~
bgdam
Well, if you are going to upload your own image, then only a salted hash of
the username you use on that site will be available AvatarPicker.

However, if you use Twitter, Facebook or Gravatar, then yeah AvatarPicker will
have your Twitter/Facebook username or hashed gravatar email. Without this, it
would be impossible retrieve your avatar from those services.

I guess the best I can do is codify in the privacy policy, that we will not
track any kind of correlation between your service usernames and the websites
that they are used on

------
developer1
I don't mean to overly offend, but something like this is not worth more than
$5/month. Maybe $20/month for 1 million+ users. Your $19/month ($11/month if
paid annually) is more than a lot of individuals and small businesses spend on
VPS hosting. Your only target with this pricing would be medium-to-large
companies, and yet your published pricing ends at an extremely meagre 100,000
users which would not begin to cover them.

By the way, your method of popping up the div overlay removes the scrollbar if
present (at least in your demo), which makes centred layouts jump around.
Raises a yellow flag regarding implementation quality.

~~~
developer1
Whoa. You don't even have actual facebook or twitter integration requiring
authentication. You just pull the photo by username, which means no identity
validation. Facebook/twitter should show the username along with the photo to
indicate a verified connection. Plus after picking someone else's account, I
can't delete the photo due to an error. Oh, and then refreshing the page gives
an nginx error. This service is far from ideal, sorry. And at this price?
Another get-rich-quick personal project deployed by someone who hasn't managed
to write a scaleable or truly useful service. Now that probably offends :/

~~~
bgdam
Considering that this is an MVP, I am quite happy with the way the site
managed the HN crowd.

And yes, it doesn't have actual validation for Facebook/Twitter. This was done
mainly for ease of use and preventing user confusion seeing as it is aimed at
non-tech end users. If actual paying customers require this, then I'll
implement it.

As for the errors, it would be helpful if you could copy paste whatever is
listed on the console.

While I have been hearing that the pricing is a bit on the higher side, I
don't think I will ever be lowering it to levels you have suggested. I guess
the companies who believe it's not worth paying the extra few dollars to have
a dedicated service can always implement things in-house.

Finally, this is an MVP, and of-course it is not going to scale. I don't even
know if there is demand to actually develop this into a real product.

As such no project is 100% bug free on the day it is launched. Projects with
such requirements are still stuck in a room full of programmers despairing at
the latest bug found.

Going so far as to call it a get rich quick scheme just because it does not
meet your idealized notions of what a service is worth, or how it should be
implemented is unwarranted.

The entire tone of your comment appears to be more into trashing me/the
project. As such, it would have been more helpful if you had simply stuck to
the constructive criticism.

------
skeoh
The pricing table shocked me until I realised the plans were ordered most to
least expensive, whereas I had subconsciously expected it to be ordered the
other way. Looking at [http://ui-
patterns.com/patterns/PricingTable](http://ui-
patterns.com/patterns/PricingTable) it seems there's no real standard approach
to ordering pricing tiers. Does anybody have any insight into the psychology
of pricing tables from a UX perspective?

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donatj
Gravatar is free though, its hard to compete with free.

~~~
bgdam
Hard, but not impossible. I believe for a lot of companies, the reduced
customer support pertaining to changing user avatars (esp. for a non-tech
based user base) and the better UX, will more than make up for what they pay.

~~~
voidz
Gravatar is too ubiquitous for me now that Wordpress owns it. Plus the
Wordpress account requirement is really annoying. So I hope your project will
become an alternative on many sites, OP!

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fiatjaf
For the indieweb enthusiasts, [http://webvatar.com/](http://webvatar.com/) is
Gravatar for websites, and you don't need to set up anything, just put the
link there and it will fetch and cache the image from the referrer website.

There are not much people marking their websites with microformats, but this
can be a minor problem.

------
programminggeek
What pain does this solve? Is that pain worth the money?

