
Ask HN: I would pay X for Y - westonplatter0
I would pay $10 every 3 months for a highlevel review&#x2F;changelog of the top Javascript frameworks.<p>I would pay $1&#x2F;month for book suggestions related to technical leadership.<p>I would pay $2&#x2F;month for 10 suggestions of breweries I haven&#x27;t tried yet.
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jacek
I would pay $10/month for a weekly digest of the most important world news
without editorializing, clickbait, celebrity news. Just important stuff. Also
I would not like it to be only US-centered (that could be optional though).

EDIT: Some people asked what I mean by "important". For me, important event is
the event that has potential to have a high impact on the society or any large
group of people in long term. Some very recent news that I found important:
results of elections in Austria, terrorist attack in Somalia, grand jury
indictment against Manafort, hundreds of sexual harassment allegations in USA
as a whole (I don't think reporting each individual case and celebrity
implicated is important).

~~~
nikisweeting
I think the Foreign Policy morning brief is awesome. It's not US-centric, it's
fairly unbiased, and the reporting is high-quality.
[https://imgur.com/a/ssfBU](https://imgur.com/a/ssfBU)

I also subscribe to
[https://whatthefuckjusthappenedtoday.com/](https://whatthefuckjusthappenedtoday.com/)
for US politics news.

~~~
soperj
none of the links on the morning brief site work, and when i actually go to
the morning brief site it looks like most of the articles are from 2009. I
thought for a second Swine flu had re-emerged.

~~~
nikisweeting
Yeah sorry the particular page I linked to is from 2008 and is super broken.
The actual morning brief these days looks like this:
[https://imgur.com/a/ssfBU](https://imgur.com/a/ssfBU)

~~~
soperj
k. what's the link to that page?

~~~
nikisweeting
It's an email, to signup go to their homepage.

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andrei_says_
I would pay $50 for 30 minutes of the time of a webpack configuration expert.
Or a similar amount for SAAS allowing me to select modules from a UI and chain
them as desired.

I gave up on my desired configuration after spending 3-5+h in frustrated
powerlessness.

~~~
lukeqsee
Having just gone through the setup process a few times, I concur. It is an
excruciatingly bad entry to a powerful solution to front-end web development.

~~~
zackify
The config is pretty straight forward once you understand how it all works.
The docs have example configs for anything you need. Specify an entry point,
add some loaders, and maybe a plugin or two, what are you stuck on?

~~~
andrei_says_
I agree, it is a straight forward design (you chain things one after the
other).

I just couldn't make these specific items work together, at all.

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mpolichette
I would pay $5 a month to have all physical junk mail filtered out of
delivery.

Why can't I opt out of "or current resident"?

~~~
jmnicolas
In France you just put a sticker on your letter box with something like "no
ads, thank you".

Since I did it my letter box is desperately empty except the occasional paper
bill.

Won't work with junk mail that is directly addressed to you of course, but in
my case it's not frequent, I'm probably not in many databases.

~~~
bluewalt
I'm in Paris, I did it and it had absolutely no effect. I guess the spammers
don't care about these stickers or not bothering you. They just want to finish
their spam job as soon as possible.

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acconrad
I would pay $50 a 30-60 min call with an industry vet programmer/EM to look at
my career and give next steps to grow my career. I have no idea if I'm doing
well or not or how to become a great programmer cause I don't know what's
"next", as it's not as linear as I wish it was.

~~~
vernon99
Unfortunately a good eng/em makes much more than $50/h. More like 150-300
(pretax) and that’s just for a normal fulltime hour, they would def charge
more for consultancy work due to the overheads. That leaves you with not-that-
vet people.

Edit: I assumed major tech companies and western world, the situation is
obviously different in other regions.

~~~
acconrad
> _Unfortunately a good eng /em makes much more than $50/h. More like 150-300
> (pretax) and that’s just for a normal fulltime hour_

That's to hire them for their work. I'm just trying to talk with them about
their experience, not asking them to code/manage.

------
megaman22
I pay $60-$70/month to have my laundry done. They do a better job than I
would, and I value my time highly. Plus the capex of a washer/drier, and the
opex of detergents and dryer sheets, and I think I'm coming out well ahead...

~~~
konpikwastaken
In theory, Handy
([https://www.handy.com/services](https://www.handy.com/services)) does this
for you for significantly higher rates at your own home. I've used the service
before when it first started and rates were 40-60%/hour of what they are now.
Seems like they could not keep up with demand - scheduled appointments would
get cancelled less than an hour before and be incredibly inconvenient - which
I would guess was a factor to them increasing their prices to attract more
talent while keeping margins.

tl;dr; services like this exist, but 60-70$/mo is laughably low (assuming min
2-3 loads of washer + dryer per month)

~~~
megaman22
This is a wash-dry-fold service out of my local laundromat. I just drop off a
big sack of laundry in the morning, they weigh it and charge by the pound
(Wednesdays is a sub-$1 special), and then I pick it up after work, clean,
nicely folded, bagged up, and with all my shirts on hangers. It's pretty close
to the best thing ever.

~~~
konpikwastaken
I see. I was envisioning a "bigger" service - your quoted price makes sense in
that case.

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nathell
I would pay high margins to legal firms whom I'd forward spam and they'd sue
spammers on my behalf (in Poland).

~~~
coding123
90% towards class action to sue spammers on my behalf (in US)

------
jblow
I would pay $100/hr for a competent freelance system administrator who could
parachute in and deal with the various things we need dealt with.

Of course the problem here is "competent". On two different occasions people
have offered to do the job and they were terrible.

~~~
synicalx
I wish there was more demand for stuff like this at a reasonable price. I've
worked from various freelance sites in my spare time asking a similar price,
but invariably I'd only see 10% of the business that the $15/hr crowd would
see.

I got a few ex-$15/hr customers, who wanted a few hours of my time purely to
clean up the mess left by the last guy, and once it was cleaned up they'd take
their business to the next $15/hr guy and hope he was a little better than the
last one.

Bit of a tricky situation I suppose, on one hand the competent Sadmins are
probably more inclined to stick to a normal job with a steady income, but the
incompetent ones seem to be happy to sit around all day spamming freelancing
sites.

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sagitariusrex
I'd pay 20k for an open-hardware Notebook with a formally verified open source
OS

~~~
whamlastxmas
[https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-
kosagi/novena](https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/novena)

------
mitchellshow
I would pay $20/month for a simple, easy to set up affiliate management
service.

Seriously - there are literally hundreds of affiliate management services out
there, I've looked at dozens of them, and none of them quite fit the following
requirements:

\- Simple setup \- Reasonably low cost \- Dashboard for affiliates to track
clicks & signups

Most existing systems also wrap up some sort of customer referral widgety
thing, which I don't need. Or, the websites are broken / look like they're
from 2001.

ReferralCandy is probably the closest thing, but again, it's way more set up
for "customer referrals" vs professional or semi-pro affiliates. The
integration process is also super heavy.

We literally built our own affiliate management since everything that fit our
requirements was so expensive. This seems like an obvious side-project for
someone to knock out.

~~~
holic
This is something I've considered doing for years after dealing with the likes
of Clickbank, etc. I'd love to pick your brain for your requirements. How can
I get in touch?

~~~
mitchellshow
alex@viphawk.com

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jmnicolas
I would pay 1€ once for an Android weather app that has no ads, that don't
take 30s to load and that is instantly readable and not some fancy schmancy
style that makes it hard to know what's the weather for today and where to
look for next days.

Apparently it's too much to ask.

~~~
pplante
The Google weather app is easy to read and loads in <5 seconds on my OnePlus
5. Doesn't that app fit your requirements?

~~~
jmnicolas
Now you're talking about it, it didn't appear in the top 30 apps that I found
on Google Play.

However I sometimes get Google weather predictions on my (desktop) browser and
find them less accurate than our local weather service (Météo France).

------
source99
I would pay $5/night for someone to clean my families dishes after dinner.

I would pay $20/month for someone to keep my clothing fresh.

~~~
schitzapplebits
I’d pay $200 a month for a professional dishwasher, but really I’d probably
have to pay much more.

------
thenomad
I would pay $5 to get a text transcription of any podcast.

My life doesn't support podcast-listening particularly well, and yet I know
there's a lot of good info out there in the audio world.

~~~
RepressedEmu
Don't most mainstream podcasts come with a text transcription?

------
bluewalt
I would pay $100/year for a photo organizer SaaS, that has a read-only access
on a folder in my Dropbox, and let me organize my photos by time, by people on
the photo, by places, or by events that I would have created. It would let me
make some requests like "Show me all photos with John on it, taken on Europe,
between 2008 and 2012".

Google Photos is shitty and Google already got too much information about me.

~~~
lzy
[https://www.smugmug.com/plans/basic](https://www.smugmug.com/plans/basic)

I don't use them and it's not from your Dropbox but heard great things about
them in general.

------
tmaly
I would pay $50 for 30 minutes of time in person from an expert on gardens.

I would pay $10 a month for scraping 100 data entries for my side project.

~~~
icey
Most nurseries have expert gardeners on-hand who will happily talk to you for
free.

~~~
tmaly
I speak with them frequently, but it would be awesome if some could be paid to
come to your house and help with various issues.

~~~
ktta
I bet you can say "Hey, would you mind coming to my house this weekend? I'll
buy dinner after" to someone you've spoken to before (so that they know you're
not a murderer)

You might make a wise old friend out of it too :)

------
YouKnowBetter
I would pay up to 50% (EU level) of my monthly income to live in a place with
direct democracy. Fortunatly I live in the one country on earth with direct
democracy so I pay less then 24%.

~~~
earenndil
Which country is that?

------
softwareqrafter
I would pay $xxx for a good UX/UI designer!

~~~
fairpx
Are we ([http://fairpixels.pro](http://fairpixels.pro)) within your budget? :)

~~~
rmdoss
That's an interesting concept. Do you do only the design/mockups or you build
the frontend (HTML/CSS) as well?

I will forward the link to a friend that was looking for something similar.

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antisthenes
I would pay $100 for a secure, open source version of Skype that is compatible
with Skype chat history and contacts.

~~~
acconrad
Signal has video and voice chat

~~~
antisthenes
Can it seamlessly import all the Skype chat history and groups correctly?
That's mostly what I'm paying for, not just "video and voice chat"

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piecu
I would pay up to $300 for a NAS with at least two hard drives bays working in
RAID and an open linux-based operating system (with root access). Hard disks
are no included in that price.

~~~
SirAiedail
How about GnuBee [1]? They're currently running a campaign [2] for version 2.

1: [http://gnubee.org/](http://gnubee.org/) 2:
[https://www.crowdsupply.com/gnubee/personal-
cloud-2](https://www.crowdsupply.com/gnubee/personal-cloud-2)

------
kahlonel
I would pay $200 for a dumb phone that only makes/receives call/texts, and has
whatsapp and google maps.

~~~
almostarockstar
The technical requirements of running google maps would immediately turn your
dumb phone into a smart phone.

Why don't you just uninstall everything from your phone but whatsapp and
google maps?

~~~
kahlonel
Try to switch your SIM card on your iPhone without having access to WiFi or
any other assisting device, in a remote terrain where you need the new SIM
immediately.

------
logfromblammo
X = you Tuesday, Y = a hamburger today

If you don't like that Wimpy suggestion, I would pay $2000/year in union dues
(or professional association of equivalently sized teeth).

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bootsz
$20/month for a bundled subscription to various popular news sites (WSJ, NYT)
& other online media (The Atlantic, New Yorker, etc.). So many of these sites
are behind paywalls and everyone wants you to subscribe to them. It's
unsustainable to subscribe to all of them and the days of being a dedicated
reader of just 1 paper are long gone

~~~
goatherders
I don't do this exactly, but have 3 newsletters that: \- publish two times a
week \- include between 8 and 12 key industry stories in the specific B2B
vertical of that newsletter \- Include a ~100 word summary of the linked story
\- Cost $10/month each

The cool part to me is that the subscribers I do have almost never click the
links; they tell me the summaries are all the info they need. So that feels
like creating some value. Now, if I could just find more subscribers. :)

~~~
laci27
shameless plug missing:)

~~~
goatherders
yeah, I don't care for it much when people plug their wares unless it really
is applicable. In this case, no one brought up the niches I publish to so I
avoided adding them in. LOL

