

What sites would you pay to use? - pchristensen

I've been thinking about supply, demand, and pricing for software and websites lately.  The question in my mind is:<p>If your favorite site switched from free to pay, would you pay to continue using it?  If so, how much?<p>Here are a couple of my answers:<p>-Google: I'd probably switch to another search engine.  Search results are fairly comparable now so I'd be comfortable with an alternative.  In the 90s I would have paid a lot for Google because the others sucked so bad.<p>-Hacker News: I think I'd pay to stay on here.  The discussion and submissions are miles above any other site I've been to.  I'd pay $10/mo? $20?  If I didn't want to pay I'd just substitute other entertainment - there's no site I'd switch to, free or not.<p>-Gmail: not sure about this.  I haven't seen the other web based email clients in a while but I imagine they're better than they were 4 years ago.  I use it so much that I'd probably pony up $5 or so/mo.<p>-Google Reader: hard to imagine there's not another free web based feed reader out there.  I'd probably drop it.  (I haven't seen the competition)<p>-WordPress: I think I'd pay (now that I've used it for 6 months and am very comfortable with it).  But I don't think I would have chosen it in the first place if I had to pay.<p>-DropBox: I'd totally pay.  It seamlessly solves a problem I've been fighting with for 5 years (multiple computers I'm on all the time).  In fact, I've written about some beta products I've tested but I can't even write about DropBox because there's nothing to say besides THANK YOU!<p>What are some others?  I'm thinking sites you use as opposed to blogs and essays you read (that's a whole different animal).
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andr
I would actually be thankful if most sites charged me, as I'd waste less time
on them.

~~~
dcurtis
You mean, you'd either pay and spend as much (or more) time on them, or you'd
never visit them again and not subscribe.

Sadly, there's no middle ground.

~~~
andr
I'd be interested in paying per use or per minute. Something 8aweek could do
and give proceeds to charity?

~~~
derefr
Or just invest it in some sort of fund for you that only pays out when your
usage goes down.

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baddox
The problem with this question is, when you think about it, one big reason all
the popular free web services ARE popular is because they're free. So pretty
much my answer to any of the sites I use would be, I might be willing to pay
if I couldn't find an alternative, yet at the same time, I'd probably never be
using any of them in the first place if they weren't originally free. However,
I would NEVER pay for social news/discussion sites like this one (or digg,
reddit, etc.). Regardless of the quality of the stories and discussion, social
news sites are services I only use in my leisure time, I would probably not
visit them if I didn't have tons of spare time anyway. No offense to social
news sites, it's just that I wouldn't pay for them.

~~~
pchristensen
That's a great answer. The question was an attempt to see what's entertaining
but not valuable, and what's so unique that there's no good substitute for.
For instance, there are other web based email clients (not as good as gmail)
but there's no other community I've found as great as HN. Since I'm sort of
technologically isolated, the community here is a godsend that's the most
stimulating entertainment I get outside of my wife and kids.

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markwweaver
\- Consumer Reports: When it comes to buying a big ticket item, like a car,
the reviews and the user comments are very useful. Plus canceling my
subscription after I bought my car was quick and painless

~~~
Prrometheus
In a similar vein, Amazon. Not for the shopping experience (though it is nice)
but for the reviews.

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jfornear
I have been thinking about this a lot in the past hour or two, too. Though
slightly off-topic:

I've been thinking that a hassle-free solution for micro-transactions needs to
hit mainstream before the average internet user will be willing to pay for
more things online.

Most people (including myself) would pay for more things online if it didn't
involve finding your wallet and typing in your billing address and credit card
information. Paypal is the closest thing I can think of, but I still get
overwhelmed thinking about logging in and all that. A simple one click button
that could somehow be synced with your RFID chip would be great..

On my current project, I am thinking about ways to monetize a small feature
similar to the old Facebook gifts, which as stupid as those are, could
potentially bring in $15 million this year for FB? (Source:
[http://lsvp.wordpress.com/2008/01/23/facebook-digital-
gifts-...](http://lsvp.wordpress.com/2008/01/23/facebook-digital-gifts-worth-
around-15myear/)) I bet FB could just charge users who upload more than 500 or
so pictures $5/mo, and those sorority girls with 2500 party pics wouldn't
think twice about pulling out daddies credit card.

It feels like it has become almost too trendy to give software services away
for free lately. If you never charge you will never know how much people might
have valued your service. If you start losing users drop the price? If you are
trying to grow a user base, start out free and charge for additional features?

~~~
jfornear
Actually, just today I went to cancel my $6/mo subscription to www.mofuse.com,
which I use to format the iPhone app for my music blog that I run for fun
(<http://rawberryjams.com>). After I logged in, the mofuse team announced that
they were dropping their rates to $3/mo, so I accepted the new terms and
logged out, keeping my subscription. Perfect example.

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nextmoveone
I'd pay for any site that helps me make money, directly or indirectly.

Gmail, Google, Adwords, and Hacker news fall in to that category.

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yan
Wikipedia. I'd pay a pretty penny for that.

~~~
RK
They do accept donations.

<http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate>

~~~
yan
Who said I don't regularly donate?

~~~
pchristensen
No one, it's just a fairly safe assumption.

~~~
yan
You're right. I should have phrased my original comment differently.

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thorax
Google (more so in 2000 than now)

HNYC

Gmail

8aweek

Chatterous (seriously)

Used to feel that way about Reddit.

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fortes
I currently pay for Flickr and Remember the Milk. I also pay for my web host.

Would pay for nymag.com (restaurant reviews & db is worth a few bucks a
month).

... other than that, everything else I use has enough free comparable
alternatives.

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ken
Do I get anything out of this payment, or would it be exactly the same as now
but with cash exchanging hands? I might pay for GMail if it meant actual
support (can't get IMAP to work) and no ads, for example.

In general, no, I'd just switch. Everybody has competition.

I only spend money online when buying a physical product or human-generated
service. Amazon already knows my CC#, and if one of my regular webcomics went
pay-only I'd pay to keep reading.

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blinks
As to paying for Hacker News, there are several community sites that have a
low one-time (non-reimbursable) fee for joining. MetaFilter
(<http://www.metafilter.com/>) costs $5 to join, for example. I feel like it
makes the community a little more invested in the content, and is worth it
overall.

I think that paying for community membership will become more popular in the
very near future.

~~~
jrockway
I hope reddit starts charging people to post. The "joke accounts" are ruining
the site. $5 would kill those in 20 seconds.

Then we would just have to delete the non-programming parts of reddit. :)

~~~
marcus
Science, Gadgets & Cogsci are not bad either.

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mdemare
Gmail definitely, but I would consider it bait and switch.

Wikipedia absolutely.

wordreference.com (online dictionaries for english/french/italian/spanish).
Love to have better options though.

The Economist (used to have a web subscription, but cancelled it when they
made all content free).

Rescuetime. Keeps me productive.

Fogbugz definitely (it's free for 1-2 persons). I entered 3000 bugs in 5
months.

~~~
eru
I pay for the Economist. But I have a dead tree subscription and get the web
one as a bonus.

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cellis
Google obviously.

Pandora.com - ($15/mo ... i already pay this to Napster for unltd dls ( _but I
would have to be able to press a back button to play the previous song,etc_ ),

Hacker News ($20/mo ... keep the trolls off)

Wikipedia? Well if it came down to it, i'd donate to it; if it started
charging, i would use other alternatives. the beauty of wikipedia being free
is that it is free from the undue influence of paying subscribers- which is
pretty essential to a site that wants to supply unbiased information.)

Facebook.

I don't really know of anything else that truly provides a unique value
proposition for me that other sites can't duplicate rather easily.

~~~
mattmaroon
I think Pandora is the only one that could reasonably charge there. The rest
would see massive switchovers to free, similar competitors.

~~~
pchristensen
I'm not recommending they do or that quality would remain if they became paid.
I just wanted to feel out which sites people really valued.

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iamelgringo
I pay for a Safari subscription. The quality of content there is so much
better for some things than just randomly searching Google for programming
problems. Right now, I have the $15 a month, but I'll go back to the $40 a
month unlimited account after school's done and I'm in startup mode.

I also pay for a Rhapsody subscription. It's just so much nicer to have most
any song available to me whenever I want it. Besides, I have a primordial
dislike for I-Tunes. I did have a Yahoo Unlimited music subscription, but
their customer service was awful.

I'd pay a bit for Gmail. I'd also pay a bit for Hacker News if it meant
keeping Hacker News small and focused.

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cstejerean
I would definitely pay for GMail and Google Reader, unless someone can find me
a similar service (web based and with awesome support for keyboard shortcuts).
AFAIK the competition doesn't even come close.

~~~
baddox
A good alternative to Google Reader is simply visiting the sites you want to
:-) I'm being sarcastic, but I honestly don't get the point of using a web-
based RSS reader, I've always just bookmarked and visited the sites I desire
to check.

~~~
pchristensen
Have you tried using Google Reader or other? I used to bookmark and revisit,
but there were two problems - too much time visiting sites when there were no
updates and it was too much hassle to visit sites with rare updates (like pg
essays or Yegge novels). Now I follow ~150 feeds and it takes less time than I
spent following 10-15 with bookmarks.

~~~
simanyay
I've solved that problem for me by configuring rawdog RSS reader. Now, it
checks for update and generates a static HTML page. (if you are interested,
here is the link: <http://anton.kovalyov.net/tools/feeds/>)

So I don't have to visit a website just to make sure that there are no updates
and I also don't have to use some big RSS reader with a lot of unnecessary
things (ajax, tags, stars, share with friend, etc.)

~~~
pchristensen
That's really nice! I like the fact that you control the output and that it's
web accessible. Does it include a way to mark items as read or do they just
drop off the bottom?

~~~
simanyay
Just drop off.

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itay
Just a specific comment on whether or not I'd pay for GMail: I would pay for
any service for which I depend on if it gave me a higher service guarantee and
would also include support.

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tlrobinson
I would pay for Gmail if their IMAP support wasn't awful.

~~~
neilc
Do you actually have problems with Gmail's IMAP support in practice? I've
heard similar comments about issues with Gmail's IMAP support, but it's
working fine for me.

~~~
tlrobinson
The biggest problem I have is the way they map IMAP "folders" to Gmail "tags".
I guess my complaint is more with Gmail itself. Tags are nice, but I'd really
like real folders too.

Also, you end up with basically two different inboxes: your real inbox, and
the "All Mail" folder. You have to delete or mark messages in both places (I
think there's supposed to be some sort of synchronization, but it's not
obvious)

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tristian
I'd be happy to pay for Rescue Time and Hacker News, but having said that I'm
not sure that I would pay for either if I hadn't used them for free first.

~~~
pchristensen
Would you have signed up after a 30 day trial?

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mynameishere
Ameritrade...

oh, wait.

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aflag
I wouldn't pay for any of those sites. I'd pay for google if all search
engines started charging. Also, I'd probably end up paying for some e-mail
service if gmail would charge (it might not be gmail).

I probably would pay for wikipedia if I had to, as well. Maybe planetmath.org.

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vasudeva
Surprised no one's mentioned IMDB.com; it's the first thing that leaps to my
mind.

Also occasionally surprised to consider I get people to pay to use
<http://linkswarm.com/> \-- not complaining, though.

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mattmaroon
Hmm, I can tell you what I do pay for. A hosted exchange server account.
That's it.

~~~
pchristensen
Ditto. Not really the same though.

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Goladus
I wouldn't pay for gmail. I'd go back to using Thunderbird.

As for the rest... extremely hard to predict because if all the most popular
sites charged money the dynamics of the web would be completely different.

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angstrom
Mint.com

It needs more features, but so far it's the only tool I have that is able to
synch with all 12 of my financial accounts without having to manually
download/import OFX or MNY files.

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stevengg
I would pay a join fee for a lot of sites I use daily something like
<http://forums.somethingawful.com/> but not much over that

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Tichy
I have only paid for games, ebooks and hosting lately, or for buying physical
stuff. I would pay for movies and music, if it was available in acceptable
formats where I live.

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mixmax
Hacker news is probably the only site I would pay for.

It seems to me there are pretty good free alternatives to just about
everything else.

~~~
baddox
You, or someone else, could very easily create a free alternative to it.
Hacker news is good because it's still relatively obscure. ANY social news
site that is full-featured and doesn't censor its users will almost invariably
start out great then begin it fail as more people find out about it.

~~~
pchristensen
I think you're underestimating the difficulty of attracting enough of the
right kind of users.

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systems
<http://news.ycombinator.com>

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ashu
Google. GMail. Wikipedia. DropBox. Anywhere.FM.

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kirubakaran
Google Maps

Hacker News

TripIt

Zillow

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atog
I would pay for twitter. Definitely.

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renault
wikipedia, gmail, and thesixtyone.

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rms
waffles.fm

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chandan619
Digg

