Ask HN: What services do people pay for online?

[akumpf]

I'm curious to get some concrete numbers about what people are really spending on (as well as an idea of some services _you_ actually pay for online).

Is there anything you pay for that is experimental/simple (something that a team could have made in a few days/weeks?), or are most things massive infrastructure plays (like pro accounts and extra storage for big-name companies)?

We're doing everything we can to stay away from ads (they're both annoying and distracting), but not sure what our best alternatives are.

Thanks!

[akumpf]

To start things off, here are some services I pay for online:

$2.50/month: Google drive storage space (hosting lots of shared photos) $10/month: Netflix (and I'm about to cancel) $50/month: Rackspace cloud servers and CDN storage ~$50/month: Comcast internet hookup to residence (lame, but kind of table-stakes)

I'm sad that all of those are with really big names -- I want to support the little guys, but haven't found much reason to actually use them as a day-to-day service (beyond pitching in a few dollars here or there to donate/support the cause).

[ig1]

Basically only two types of (online-only) consumer subscription businesses are making significant amounts (7-8 figures) of revenue: content businesses (hulu, spotify, ancestry.com, etc.) and network businesses (eharmony, match.com, xbox live).

There are some productivity apps (DropBox, Evernote) which generate subscription revenue from consumer, but these figures are likely to be minuscule compared to revenue from business users.

[akumpf → ig1]

After seeing all of the responses come back with big company names and a somewhat dismal outlook on small/lean companies and finding a path toward sustainable revenue not from ads, I got to thinking about why that is...

The biggest hurdles seem to be around critical mass (many things only get interesting when you have a certain amount of users/content), lock-in (users' inability to easily move between new services), and silos (apps only working with themselves, or at best, other apps on a single domain).

More thoughts here: http://blog.chaoscollective.org/post/32205575097/where-the-i...

[ig1 → akumpf]

My response isn't to say you can't make profitable consumer subscription businesses in other areas, just that if you're looking to make a large VC funded business then consumer subscriptions is a very hard space.

There are definitely small but profitable consumer saas businesses. For example fitness/weight loss apps, 23andme (although no longer), sleep management apps, pinboard, etc.

[dholowiski]

What kind of market are you looking for? I think if you look at the HN crowd, probably the things we want are pretty big (infrastructure & functionality wise) because if it's small we would have already created it.

But if you ask 'normal people', you'll probably get dozens of ideas. The problem with normal people is they often don't know what they want until you tell them.

[junto]

Spotify monthly subscription Hosting monthly Dropbox yearly Google Drive yearly Flickr yearly

The vast majority of my costs are related to cloud storage it would appear.

If I had access to Hulu or Netflix, then I would be happily paying for those too, however, they don't seem to want my money (yet).

[sainttex]

Rdio $10/mo

Netflix $8/mo

Typekit $50/yr

Github $7/mo

Basecamp $20/mo

Sendgrid

Pingdom $10/mo, but am in the middle of replacing it with https://github.com/sainttex/tentacle

Hosting for http://postheat.com $170/mo

[codegeek]

1) Freshbooks for invoicing 2) Small business accounting software (using Wave which is free but will gladly pay for a good one. still looking. Dont ask me to use Quickbooks btw. Not useful in my case)

[damian2000]

$10/month usenet

$29/month online developer training courses (Pluralsight)

$20/month web hosting (old school apache shared hosting with unlimited domains)

[lucaspiller]

Personally:

* £10/month Spotify

* £6/month Netflix

* $20/month Linode

* $1/month S3 (backups)

* ~£30/month Steam (not a subscription, but I spend a lot on it)

My company:

* Hipchat

* Basecamp

* Adobe Creative Cloud

* Typekit

* Nexmo

* Dropbox

* S3

* Linode

(OT - Is there a way to make multiple lists nicer?)

[robertha]

Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon Prime, some of Google services.

[rabidonrails]

Papertrail $7/month

[ggalan]

netflix easynews