

Ask HN: A payment model similar to Google's App Engine? - sentinel

I'm building an application that will be able to register events from companies/bars/theaters etc. that are interested in exposing their events to a larger audience.<p>If a user finds an event interesting, he/she can favourite it or save it in their calendar. Once the user does this, it's a +1 count on the number of people/potential visitors for that event.<p>On the business side of things, I'm wondering if something like the GAE payment method would be a good idea.<p>That is: allowing the company that posts the event 20 'potential visitors' for free (a free quota), and for every other visitor above these 20, they would have to pay something like 5 cents/visitor. That virtual money would be coming from a balance in which they deposit money via paypal or something. When that deposit runs out, the event goes offline (is not shown to the users anymore).<p>Has anyone (well...except Google) tried this with any success in their business? Is it a good/bad idea? Any shortcomings? Do you have any suggestions or recommendations with regards to this plan of payment?<p>The reason I want to offer this quota is for small, independent events to be noticed for free...at least for the first 20 people.<p>Thanks!
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DeusExMachina
One shortcoming I see is that some dishonest person could target a
competitor/company he dislikes by creating fake accounts and subscribing to
events just to make these spend money.

I cannot asses if this is a model that could work, but you need to find a way
to prevent abuses which could drive away customers.

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sentinel
That's a good observation. And come to think of it, I did think of a way to
disallow this type of activity, but not entirely.

Since the client app will run on a smartphone, the person using the phone will
have to reinstall the application many times so that he could intentionally
subscribe again and again to an event. So I guess one thing to do would be to
register the mobile user with his mobile phone's unique identifier and not
allow him to subscribe again to a previously subscribed-to event.

Otherwise he would just have to buy more phones, but I don't think that's a
practical solution.

