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Show HN: JustComments – a comment system for websites

10 points by orkon 8y ago

orkon 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      There used to be a demo, but the site the comments were designed for is now defunct so it was removed.
      - orkon 8y ago
        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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      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.
vladholubiev 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      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.
KajMagnus 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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.
jazoom 8y ago
This looks really good. Thanks for making it.
ullarah 8y ago
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! :)

10 points by orkon 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    There used to be a demo, but the site the comments were designed for is now defunct so it was removed.
    - orkon 8y ago
      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 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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.

vladholubiev 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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.

KajMagnus 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.

jazoom 8y ago

This looks really good. Thanks for making it.

ullarah 8y ago

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! :)