
Show HN: JustComments – a comment system for websites - orkon
https://just-comments.com/
======
KajMagnus
1\. Can I ask, what are your goals & vision? What motivated you to build an
embedded comments system?

2\. You wrote elsewhere: _" My example now costs $0.014 instead"_. — I'm
wondering if people think it doesn't matter if they pay $1 or $0.014 per
month. Or rather ... they'll feel worried that when you charge "too little",
you risk running out of money and disappear. Any thoughts about that? if it's
OK that I ask. ... I've been thinking, me too, about pricing the embedded
comments service I provide in the way you do now ... and mostly didn't do
that.

3\. If someone is to pay say $0.1 for a month ... Or $1 for a year ... Then,
I'm thinking there's a minimum transaction fee, and that maybe the credit card
company (or something), will get most of the money the customer pays. Any
thoughts about that, and how to deal with that?

4\. Would be interesting with screenshots that shows the moderation interface.

5\. And yes the tech stack wold be interesting :-) (& if you have any
questions to me (I'm doing a bit the same as you) feel free to ask)

~~~
orkon
Thanks for the questions!

1\. I wanted to build an embedded comment system which is not monetized by
selling user data or serving ads and which has a fair pricing model. By "fair"
I mean that you pay what you consume without non-transparent pricing plans
where some features are only available for certain plans. I have found no such
system myself, so I started building it.

2\. It's unlikely that I will run out of the money and the service will cease
to exist because it's a side project for me and it is self-funding. You buy
credits upfront, and this pays the bills for the service. It's hosted by AWS
and has no fixed recurring costs for me.

3\. The minimal amount of credits you can purchase is 500k or $7.5. The
transaction fees are already included in the price.

4\. There is no moderation interface at the moment. As an administrator, you
get email notifications for every comment you receive. The email contains a
link where you can hide the comment if you don't like it.

5\. Regarding the stack, I have answered below. If you have specific
questions, feel free to ask.

Could you share the project you are working on? And what's your vision?

~~~
KajMagnus
Ok interesting to hear :- ) And I understand better how it's different from
the others. Ok, $7.5.

Have you found any payment handler that deals with Value Added Taxes
"everywhere in the world"? I feel I don't want anyone to pay anything right
now ... because I'd just mess up things with the tax agency :-P

My project: [https://www.talkyard.io/blog-
comments](https://www.talkyard.io/blog-comments) (it's in my HN profile).
Vision: Building a discussion tool, that [people who change the world or their
neighborood] can use to find ideas and solutions, and pick the right things to
do. There are HackerNews like discussions, ... I think they work well for
finding the important things and making decisions.

------
ullarah
Just a small fix required in the Attribution section of the Terms of Service
page. The GitHub link is
[https://github.com/Just%20Comments/legalmattic](https://github.com/Just%20Comments/legalmattic)
I assume it should be 'JustComments' instead? Once the URL is fixed, the link
leads to a non-existing project.

Another thing is the 'Contact' link has HTML inside the HREF tag.

Not being nit-picky, just something I picked up! :)

------
vladholubiev
Since we are on Hacker News, it would be interesting to read something about
the tech stack behind the product. After visiting your blog, I suppose you can
tell, for example, how just-comments.com provides high availability with the
help of AWS Kinesis, DynamoDB, Athena, etc.

By the way, this page is 404: [https://just-
comments.com/about.html](https://just-comments.com/about.html) (and some
others from ToS)

Otherwise, congrats on the launch and good luck!

~~~
orkon
Thanks, I will fix the broken links :-)

The tech is completely hosted on AWS, and it is entirely "serverless". So the
core is using the API Gateway + Lambda + DynamoDB. Additionally, I use Kinesis
Firehose + S3 to process internally generated data such as billing events.
Athena helps me to query the data if needed.

Basically, the scalability & high availability is entirely provided by AWS and
the pricing model matches almost 1-to-1 the pricing by AWS.

If you have any specific questions about the tech, I can answer them.

~~~
EmilBruckner
If you match the pricing almost 1:1 / don't really make a profit, why don't
you open-source it? Or do you actually make quite some profit by people who
pay but don't really use their credits?

Just being curious about your plans

~~~
orkon
I match the model, not the price. I don't think you can make a profit from
people who pay and don't use. Such people typically don't subscribe.

Generally, the project is none-free and low-margin and that is what makes it
interesting. There are plenty of dead and alive open source projects offering
comments which you can use.

------
orkon
Hi, a direct link to the demo page [https://just-
comments.com/demo.html](https://just-comments.com/demo.html)

I am looking for the feedback and users because I think the project is quite
ready for real usage. Thanks!

~~~
stevekemp
Had to read the documentation to see that serving the comments-widget one time
consumes 1 credit, but sending a single email-notification consumes 15.

It seems very "expensive" to send emails.

Looks like a cute product, and the pricing mechanism is interesting. Good
luck.

(I wrote some a simple self-hosted system, far less featureful, but it seems
popular enough -
[http://github.com/skx/e-comments/](http://github.com/skx/e-comments/) )

~~~
orkon
Thanks for the link to your system. Is there a demo instance somewhere?

Yeah, emails are quite expensive. AWS itself charges $100 per 1 million plus
additional infrastructure to manage subscriptions + email validation & dealing
with bounces.

Therefore, email notifications are an optional feature. I hope in the future
push notifications will be supported much better by the browsers so that it
won't make sense to use emails.

~~~
stevekemp
There used to be a demo, but the site the comments were designed for is now
defunct so it was removed.

~~~
orkon
It would be cool if you could add a "Deploy to Heroku" button or similar. Or
at least screenshots. I think it would be nice to see how the UI looks like.

------
fiatjaf
7 cents for one comment view? So if you have 1000 pageviews on your blog post
that had 5 comments -- basically a small personal blog -- you have to pay
$350.

~~~
detaro
You are off by factor 25000. 7 cents for 5000 credits, and 1 credit for one
load of the comment section for an article, not per comment.

~~~
fiatjaf
Oops. Sorry about that. It's a fair price now, I guess. Much cheaper than the
alternatives (except Disqus, which is free but rips your soul).

My example now costs $0.014 instead.

~~~
orkon
The computations can get a bit complicated. Basically, one pageview costs
$0.000015. So if you have a thousand pageviews, it's $0.015.

On the pricing page ([https://just-comments.com/pricing.html](https://just-
comments.com/pricing.html)) I have an example of 20000 pageviews per month and
it costs $0.3 per month.

------
jazoom
This looks really good. Thanks for making it.

