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Frugly vs. Freemium
- markx2 3y agoReader view solves the ugly ..
- DamonHD 3y ago'Solves'?
- TranquilMarmot 3y agoAnd? It sounds like the point of it is to try and get people to pay, if they can and if they want to, without compromising the product experience. They _want_ to give this away for free, but also want to be able to cover the costs. Getting rid of the "ugly" doesn't really take money away from them if you were never going to pay in the first place.
- bee_rider 3y ago> Anyway, here’s the moral of my story: there needn’t be so much conflict between ethics and profits. Carefully consider your constraints, and use design thinking to make the world a better (and possibly uglier) place. I really hope the author the best, they seem to be working on trying to figure out some way to monetize their project without doing anything evil. Which is a rare and admirable attempt. But the moral of the story here seems very contingent on whether or not their plan works out, right? And I think it is not a very sure thing.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- atoav 3y agoThis is btw. a phenomenon I often see in creative people: Just because you thought long and hard about topic X while doing your work doesn't mean topic X is well preseved in the final result of your work (outside of your own memories). The harsh truth is that only if the final result says what you wanted to say in terms of that topic, your considerations and reflection on that topic "count". I am not saying that it is all about the result, because how many corpses you produced on your way there still makes a difference — but yeah in the end you will be judged by the final result.
- skybrian 3y agoWhen paying is optional, the question is how do you get people to want to pay you? If they dislike you or they're cheap, they'll use a workaround. If they want to show their support, then they might pay you even though there's a workaround. So the question is, how good are you at selling your website as something that people might have warm feelings about? Seems like a high bar.
- chii 3y ago> So the question is, how good are you at selling your website as something that people might have warm feelings about? streamers and online content creators have already solved this problem - parasocialism is the answer. Not sure if it works in the tech world, but in the onlyfans/GFE world, it works amazingly well.
- LtWorf 3y agoOne thing I've learnt from busking is that people who have more give less. So seems normal that rich companies give nothing.
- friend_and_foe 3y agoI really like the author's philosophy. I too am allergic to maintenance and do everything I can to avoid it.
- gnicholas 3y agoOne thing I noticed about having different tiers and free options: government institutions will be required to acquire whatever the cheapest version, even if they have tons of money and your product directly supports their mission/goals. So if you want to have government customers, realize that their duty to taxpayers may prevent them from purchasing if you have a free version.
- leetrout 3y agoDo you have further information on this?
- gnicholas 3y agoI make a tool that is widely used to help people with reading issues, including those that are caused by traumatic brain injuries/strokes. We have been contacted by government-run hospitals and other government-run entities that want to avail themselves of our self-serve pricing ($1.99/mo), which we keep very low in order to ensure that most people who can afford a computer can afford our software. However, these entities wish to have us comb through dozens of pages of legal agreements and review even more laws/regulations that they are subject to. When we tell them that they have to pay institutional pricing if they want require contract review, they balk and say that they cannot pay any more than the price on the website, which is for self-service. I understand that they want to pay the lowest price possible, but they need to respect that different customer types (with different contractual review needs) are fundamentally buying different products/services.
- michaelmrose 3y agoAren't they just lying to you? No law prevents you from setting terms and prices for different sets of features and services nor forbids them from paying market price. They aren't paying above market they are simply being billed for the actual terms and features they are demanding.
- gnicholas 3y ago
- nicbou 3y agoAnother option is affiliate marketing. If you already lead your customers to a reasonable and justified purchase, you can get a cut of the sale. This is how I can afford to spend so much time on free and useful things. A few pages on my website fund everything else.
- webmaven 3y agoCan you provide more information on this (what works, what doesn't)? I'm thinking of adding something like this to a nonprofit's website to help fund their mission.
- nicbou 3y agoIt works if you help people pick the best bank for their needs with a lot of useful information. It doesn't work when you promote a VPN at the start of a YouTube video about cats. In other words, genuinely helpful recommendations, not half-assed ads. In general, services with recurring payments pay much higher commissions than single purchases. Most affiliate deals are brokered through affiliate platforms. If you know your industry well enough and your own website is popular enough, you can broker your own deals with people that otherwise don't have a program.
- nyanpasu64 3y agoIs there some dynamic equivalent of document.querySelectorAll("section") JS-based DOM filtering, that listens to websites building new UI elements through dynamic loading and applies the filter on newly added (or modified?) DOM elements (much like how CSS rules automatically cascade when HTML elements are added and removed)?
- ajayyy 3y agouBlock Origin filter type called has-text
- kevindamm 3y agoProbably you want MutationObserver: https://dom.spec.whatwg.org/#interface-mutationobserver https://dom.spec.whatwg.org/#interface-mutationobserver
- n_plus_1_acc 3y agoLook up MutationObserver
- phartenfeller 3y agoInteresting idea but I think one huge factor for cosmetics in games is status. Other people see, what cosmetics you have and this encourages people to show off expensive stuff. This does not apply to a personal UI. And what about people judging the app on the first look? Good design can interest people in checking out what the site is actually about in the first place.
- bjord 3y agoI respect the effort either way, but is anyone actually paying to remove the frugliness?
- joshxyz 3y agodiscord is good example of this. nitro got good themes.
- andruby 3y agoAnd if I recall correctly, Trello was similar
- torginus 3y agoThe problem with this approach is that you will sour your customers on your app with your intentionally bad UX - they won't want to upgrade from the 'bad' version to the good one.
- codetrotter 3y ago> Not to toot my own horn, but I am very good at making things uglier. > To work with my natural skillset, I focused on aesthetic downgrades over aesthetic upgrades. I call this “frugly pricing”, AKA “cosmetic crippleware“. > It’s simple: I plaster the word “free” everywhere until consumers pay for a license. I’m not the first to do this, and I certainly won’t be the last. From the title and other comments I was imagining that the UI itself was made uglier in the frugly version. But it sounds like the only difference is that it has these messages. Which reminds me more of being nagware than being cosmetically crippled.
- kreddor 3y agoOr like the unlimited trialware license of WinRAR, without a deadline.
- seaparter 3y agoThe term Crippleware is ablest and we should probably stop using it. That said, I like the frugly approach. The cosmetic upgrade approach in Fortnite the author mentioned is also implemented in a new game I've been playing called The Finals. It is nice not to have winning behind a paywall.
- dns_snek 3y agoThere's nothing wrong with the term, it succinctly conveys the limited functionality of this software. Words aren't sentient and as such they cannot be ableist, only people can. It's perfectly clear that the author didn't intend to offend, demean, or discriminate against any disabled person with their choice of words, they were merely writing about their own software.
- emmet 3y agoWe have fortnited the apps. May god have mercy on us.
- amelius 3y agoIf you make your free version ugly, then doesn't that drive potential customers away?
- carlosjobim 3y agoWhat is wrong with just making the product paid? How can there be any kind of ethical dilemma for the author? Charge a fair price for the app and that's it. Freeloaders do not have to be considered. Paying people for their work is a matter of respect.
- two_handfuls 3y agoThe article answers this very question.
- carlosjobim 3y agoI read the article, but see no answer to this question.
- CuriouslyC 3y agoI think the growth before profits mentality of SV startups has been cargo culted way too far. Free to play games demonstrate an alternative model (pushing customers to spend via service rate limits, cosmetics and limited time deals) that is more honest in my opinion, since the value proposition is right there for the user to see, and it lets you monetize without degrading the experience for the average user (as long as you know how to manage your whales).
- pavlov 3y agoShowing online ads is the quintessential frugly because you don't control what the ads look like, and thus you lose control over the overall design.
- ysofunny 3y agoso it's a variation of the overall idea of nagware I believe the real problem is larger than computers and technology. capitalism just doesn't play well with digital assets which have effectively 0 distribution costs
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]