8 ms·

Top of HN and people are loving it, but there's got to be a better way of getting some $$ rewards for fun viral ideas like this than "Buy me a coffee". I'm bett

Top of HN and people are loving it, but there's got to be a better way of getting some $$ rewards for fun viral ideas like this than "Buy me a coffee". I'm betting he's got tens of thousands of sessions currently and nobody is tipping. https://ko-fi.com/magnushambleton https://ko-fi.com/magnushambleton Is there a better way? Asking for myself, also.

xnx 8mo ago
Insert product placement/ads into the generated images.
falloutx 9mo ago
Guy who posted this is actually a VC (not sure how big).
glaucon 9mo ago
My view may be as realistic as these architectural drawings but I've long thought that some sort of micro payment system would address a lot of problems, many more significant than tipping software developers.
AceJohnny2 9mo ago
Thanks for the highlight. Doesn't seem like there's much activity on his Ko-Fi for being on the front page of HN. I sent him a tip, although privately.
Levitating 9mo ago
Ideally the model would be run locally in the browser, so the author isn't paying whatever they're paying. But the web standards to do complicated stuff locally aren't there yet and probably will never be. That's not a practical answer but it's my two cents.
- IshKebab 9mo ago
  All you need is WASM surely? I expect this model is too big to download & run on local CPUs though.
  - Levitating 9mo ago
    Maybe, but WASM still has its limitations and pains. If you compile with emscripten you're still using thousands lines of generated javascript to glue the wasm and javaecript together.
- wateralien 9mo ago
  I wish I could give him two cents without having to try. HTTP status 402 with micropayments or something needs to become a thing. The platforms do it... (subs, tips, donations, rewards etc etc.) Why can't the web.
  - Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 9mo ago
    I had an idea for a library used to collect how much you owe who: https://github.com/thiswillbeyourgithub/FUTOmeter https://github.com/thiswillbeyourgithub/FUTOmeter
  - mlrtime 9mo ago
    Yup, the technology exists to do this, but saying such words on HN will lead to critics.
pibaker 9mo ago
This will be an unpopular answer but one way that could have worked is just good ol' advertising, because it directly converts "virality" into income. Any solution that requires the user to bust out a credit card and put down his billing address has way too much friction for the median user to get through.
- Cyphase 9mo ago
  I don't know the terms, but there's what looks like a tasteful ad at the bottom. > Looking for an architect who builds things that still look great even in November rain? Reach out to classical architect Jorian Egge.
- wateralien 9mo ago
  Unfortunately true.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- cyode 9mo ago
  I see 16 coffees received. Assuming no private donations for simplicity, that’s $48. As an ads noob, how many sessions would a banner ad need to beat that?
  - jokethrowaway 9mo ago
    My CPM is not great (not Google) and that's 25-30k impressions
- addandsubtract 9mo ago
  Doesn't an ad require the user to bust out their credit card eventually?
  - verdverm 9mo ago
    Yes, nothing happens until you trade a dollar for something, but it does not have to be this site they spend money at. Advertising isn't even about getting people to open their wallet, it's more about influencing their decision when they do go to spend money or make a purchase.
Fuzzwah 9mo ago
It should be tasteful ads for the AI companies that are making money... Oh wait, I instantly see the problem with that idea.
Lerc 9mo ago
There have been alternatives suggested. While better is a subjective term, most alternatives have either not been successful or have not yet meaningfully achieved a level of success to matter. Flattr took one approach without much success. They represented the problem well though. When someone does something that is of a small but not insignificant benefit for a large number of people, how should they be rewarded? When the reward due, divided by the number of people paying for it, gets low enough it seems to not reach a threshold that it makes sense for any individual to pay. You could charge a fee above the threshold, and many people do take this path. It is essentially requiring a small number of people to massively overpay to cover those who don't pay at all. A Universal Income takes the approach that if everyone gets what they need there is no particular requirement to be monetarily rewarded. You essentially have been rewarded for whatever it is you do. Advertising plays the small threshold thing both ways, They offer you a chance to sell a little corruption below your threshold for thinking it is damaging, and in return they accumulate the corruption and the money and send you the money and deliver the requested corruption to their customers. Part of the fundamental difficulty is in determining the size of the reward due. How is that determined? There are plenty of people who will offer services to do that if it means they can take a cut. I don't see that path going well unless it is a mechanism governed by strict non-profit rules, and even then I would have doubts. A purely rule based system would be intrinsically unfair and subject to gaming, but often times this turns out to be the least worst solution. By agreeing to a set of rules people can accept that while flawed, adhering to them by agreement can make a system that cannot be taken over by a malicious individual. In short, right now, No I don't think there is a better way. There may be people with a financial interest that it remains that way.
huehehue 9mo ago
I built a browser extension for a hackathon that enabled crypto payments direct to site owners. "registration" was just sticking a formatted payment address in a DNS TXT record, and if you were at a supported website, the extension would light up, and facilitated payment. I still think it's a neat idea but I can't be bothered to build a real version
- smoovb 9mo ago
  You'd love Brave browser then.
- Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 9mo ago
  I had a similar idea for a library used to collect how much you owe who: https://github.com/thiswillbeyourgithub/FUTOmeter https://github.com/thiswillbeyourgithub/FUTOmeter
Timwi 9mo ago
> Is there a better way? Yes, UBI. Then you can create what you want and your livelihood doesn't depend on it going viral.
- brainwad 9mo ago
  People already freak out about the sustainability of the welfare state supporting just the elderly with worker-dependent ratios of 3:1 or 2:1. Imagine if also all the working age population got welfare, it'd be completely unworkable.
- wavemode 9mo ago
  Most people want a lot more out of life than basic necessities.
  - djeastm 9mo ago
    Indeed. Some of us want basic necessities provided to everyone.
  - Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 9mo ago
    UBI does not mean you don't work, nor you can't earn a lot of money. It just means we don't let you starve if you don't work and we stop making you work out of fear of leaving you starve if you don't. I'm a psychiatry resident and developper. I have never been paid for my dev work but have produced quite a lot on my free time (site: w.olicorne.org ). I would do psychiatry pretty much no matter how much I'm paid for it. In my view the most productive people of every field are not incentivized by money and would do it anyway. UBI would free up time and cognitive load of the most productive people I believe. Following a 80/20 kinda rule. Hence UBI here would mean that the dev would not *have to* monetize.
    - jonahx 9mo ago
      > In my view the most productive people of every field are not incentivized by money and would do it anyway. The idea that money is not an effective incentive to drive behavior is wishful thinking. Even just among devs, even just among devs who truly love programming, most would be doing very different work, and working for different organizations (or none at all) if money weren't the driver. > Hence UBI here would mean that the dev would not have to monetize. Ok, but the dev might still want to monetize, and we're back to the original question.
smoovb 9mo ago
Youtube has this model with Preimum. If Chrome rolled out Chrome Premium, (and copied the Brave BAT model of paying sites you give attention to), I'd be happy to pay.
Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 9mo ago
I had an idea for a library used to collect how much you owe who: https://github.com/thiswillbeyourgithub/FUTOmeter https://github.com/thiswillbeyourgithub/FUTOmeter
mncharity 9mo ago
> Is there a better way? If one's visitors are gamers, perhaps one might use gaming payment providers to sell an "supporter badge"? But that's perhaps be pushing their envelope. If one's visitors are from the "rapidly-developing world", with well-adopted candybar-scale micropayment systems - China, India, Indonesia, Brasil, Kenya, SK, Sweden... hmm. Direct access from elsewhere seems still very limited, but perhaps one might use a global payment gateway like Adyen? My impression is transaction cost is more than $0.10 but less than $1. In the "less-rapidly-developing world", X.com has been working towards a similar superapp with Visa for the US. The Visa/MC duopoly seems to have shifted from its years of preventing US micropayments, to something like "maybe 2030-ish".
arendtio 9mo ago
Especially in the age of AI tools, I also thought about this a few times. The current idea I have is something like a parking meter. Every expensive transaction (like calling a model) would subtract from the money pool, and every visitor could see how much is still left in the pool. In addition, a list of the top 5 donors with their amounts might improve the group dynamic (like on pay-what-you-want pages like humblebundle.com). It would be more about covering the cost than about making someone rich, but I think that is what most of the people who build stuff care about. Sadly, I don't know a service yet that offers this model.
- 20260126032624 9mo ago
  This won't work when the meter is at zero due to human psychology. New visitors will say: "no one subsidized my experience (indeed I don't even know what $thing does) but <creator> wants me to subsidize $thing for others". The whole "subsidize for other visitors" concept is weaker than "pay <creator>".
  - mlrtime 9mo ago
    Wouldn't a floor fix that? Maybe a bad example, but tipping in a restaurant is an example?
- HPsquared 9mo ago
  Nobody likes parking meters.
coffeebeqn 9mo ago
Not everything needs to be a business!
- xboxnolifes 9mo ago
  Sometimes it would be nice if you could just break even though. Particularly for these AI projects.
- throwaway132448 9mo ago
  If there’s one thing I learnt from HN it’s how many people can’t comprehend this. Is it a byproduct of growing up in a very transactional or selfish environment?
  - AlexeyBelov 8mo ago
    I'm almost sure it is. I don't understand it personally, and it feels like grifting to me.
  - addandsubtract 9mo ago
    Yes. First being a YouTube creator became a business, then twitch, tiktok, twitter. GenZ basically grew up with everything being/becoming a business "opportunity". Making money is the goal for "creators", to the point where ads have become normalized and not having a sponsor is leaving money on the table.
eastbound 9mo ago
Monetization: People can now use ChatGPT for this if they have the idea, so it’s a tight goal. Would people in urban planning pay to see this? If not, then this was just the “15 minutes of fame” experience”, and people who are not career influencers have difficulty monetizing that. Of course, thank you for your concept.
Steve0 9mo ago
You could let users import their own Google api key...
tpoacher 9mo ago
I don't think donation approaches are necessarily bad, but yes it should not be as simple as putting a kofi link at the top of a page. This person doesn't just do that though. Right after the part where you've uploaded your own examples, there's a reminder: if you had fun buy me a coffee. Though this is slightly offset by the fact that they state you have 2 free trials and then you pay. It's a complete incentives mismatch if you ask for coffee for something you explicitly presented to them as a marketing offer. Though, I suppose leaving the donation option on doesn't hurt in this case either. In my experience, donationware works best when the donation request is polite, personal, uncoercive, unintrusive, and comes at a moment of surprise right after you would have seen actual value from a product, and from a product that has not otherwise asked you for any money so far (including showing you ads). KeepassXC Android is a good example: the guy asks for a beer during octoberfest :)
IAmGraydon 9mo ago
Yeah - fine tune it a bit more (it’s a little too worst-case-scenario-in-the-dead-of-winter) and sell it to architectural firms and developers for a fee. This is simple to monetize and not up to us to figure out how to turn processor cycles into dollar bills.
MagnusHambleton 9mo ago
I saw it going viral before going to bed last night and spent 15min trying to enable payments but failed so made it block you after 2 gens using cookies and try guilt you into donating instead. Made me $160 in donations compared to the $500 in AI credits burned so not a huge success but at least slightly offset the loss. If the demand continues after this blip I’ll try add ads or make real payments work.
- wateralien 8mo ago
  I feel like you'll probably (mostly) have two types of users: 1. Those who just want to see more examples. 2. Those who actually want to use this as a tool. (Even though it may have started as a bit of a gag.) By having a gallery you'd save a lot of needless tokens so that you can satisfy user 1. By having a paid actual SAAS option you can get $$ from user 2. By showing a few tasteful ads as well as buy me a coffee you can get income from user 1.

xnx 8mo ago

Insert product placement/ads into the generated images.

falloutx 9mo ago

Guy who posted this is actually a VC (not sure how big).

glaucon 9mo ago

My view may be as realistic as these architectural drawings but I've long thought that some sort of micro payment system would address a lot of problems, many more significant than tipping software developers.

AceJohnny2 9mo ago

Thanks for the highlight. Doesn't seem like there's much activity on his Ko-Fi for being on the front page of HN. I sent him a tip, although privately.

Levitating 9mo ago

Ideally the model would be run locally in the browser, so the author isn't paying whatever they're paying. But the web standards to do complicated stuff locally aren't there yet and probably will never be. That's not a practical answer but it's my two cents.

IshKebab 9mo ago
All you need is WASM surely? I expect this model is too big to download & run on local CPUs though.
- Levitating 9mo ago
  Maybe, but WASM still has its limitations and pains. If you compile with emscripten you're still using thousands lines of generated javascript to glue the wasm and javaecript together.
wateralien 9mo ago
I wish I could give him two cents without having to try. HTTP status 402 with micropayments or something needs to become a thing. The platforms do it... (subs, tips, donations, rewards etc etc.) Why can't the web.
- Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 9mo ago
  I had an idea for a library used to collect how much you owe who: https://github.com/thiswillbeyourgithub/FUTOmeter https://github.com/thiswillbeyourgithub/FUTOmeter
- mlrtime 9mo ago
  Yup, the technology exists to do this, but saying such words on HN will lead to critics.

pibaker 9mo ago

This will be an unpopular answer but one way that could have worked is just good ol' advertising, because it directly converts "virality" into income. Any solution that requires the user to bust out a credit card and put down his billing address has way too much friction for the median user to get through.

Cyphase 9mo ago
I don't know the terms, but there's what looks like a tasteful ad at the bottom. > Looking for an architect who builds things that still look great even in November rain? Reach out to classical architect Jorian Egge.
wateralien 9mo ago
Unfortunately true.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
cyode 9mo ago
I see 16 coffees received. Assuming no private donations for simplicity, that’s $48. As an ads noob, how many sessions would a banner ad need to beat that?
- jokethrowaway 9mo ago
  My CPM is not great (not Google) and that's 25-30k impressions
addandsubtract 9mo ago
Doesn't an ad require the user to bust out their credit card eventually?
- verdverm 9mo ago
  Yes, nothing happens until you trade a dollar for something, but it does not have to be this site they spend money at. Advertising isn't even about getting people to open their wallet, it's more about influencing their decision when they do go to spend money or make a purchase.

Fuzzwah 9mo ago

It should be tasteful ads for the AI companies that are making money... Oh wait, I instantly see the problem with that idea.

Lerc 9mo ago

There have been alternatives suggested. While better is a subjective term, most alternatives have either not been successful or have not yet meaningfully achieved a level of success to matter. Flattr took one approach without much success. They represented the problem well though. When someone does something that is of a small but not insignificant benefit for a large number of people, how should they be rewarded? When the reward due, divided by the number of people paying for it, gets low enough it seems to not reach a threshold that it makes sense for any individual to pay. You could charge a fee above the threshold, and many people do take this path. It is essentially requiring a small number of people to massively overpay to cover those who don't pay at all. A Universal Income takes the approach that if everyone gets what they need there is no particular requirement to be monetarily rewarded. You essentially have been rewarded for whatever it is you do. Advertising plays the small threshold thing both ways, They offer you a chance to sell a little corruption below your threshold for thinking it is damaging, and in return they accumulate the corruption and the money and send you the money and deliver the requested corruption to their customers. Part of the fundamental difficulty is in determining the size of the reward due. How is that determined? There are plenty of people who will offer services to do that if it means they can take a cut. I don't see that path going well unless it is a mechanism governed by strict non-profit rules, and even then I would have doubts. A purely rule based system would be intrinsically unfair and subject to gaming, but often times this turns out to be the least worst solution. By agreeing to a set of rules people can accept that while flawed, adhering to them by agreement can make a system that cannot be taken over by a malicious individual. In short, right now, No I don't think there is a better way. There may be people with a financial interest that it remains that way.

huehehue 9mo ago

I built a browser extension for a hackathon that enabled crypto payments direct to site owners. "registration" was just sticking a formatted payment address in a DNS TXT record, and if you were at a supported website, the extension would light up, and facilitated payment. I still think it's a neat idea but I can't be bothered to build a real version

smoovb 9mo ago
You'd love Brave browser then.
Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 9mo ago
I had a similar idea for a library used to collect how much you owe who: https://github.com/thiswillbeyourgithub/FUTOmeter https://github.com/thiswillbeyourgithub/FUTOmeter

Timwi 9mo ago

> Is there a better way? Yes, UBI. Then you can create what you want and your livelihood doesn't depend on it going viral.

brainwad 9mo ago
People already freak out about the sustainability of the welfare state supporting just the elderly with worker-dependent ratios of 3:1 or 2:1. Imagine if also all the working age population got welfare, it'd be completely unworkable.
wavemode 9mo ago
Most people want a lot more out of life than basic necessities.
- djeastm 9mo ago
  Indeed. Some of us want basic necessities provided to everyone.
- Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 9mo ago
  UBI does not mean you don't work, nor you can't earn a lot of money. It just means we don't let you starve if you don't work and we stop making you work out of fear of leaving you starve if you don't. I'm a psychiatry resident and developper. I have never been paid for my dev work but have produced quite a lot on my free time (site: w.olicorne.org ). I would do psychiatry pretty much no matter how much I'm paid for it. In my view the most productive people of every field are not incentivized by money and would do it anyway. UBI would free up time and cognitive load of the most productive people I believe. Following a 80/20 kinda rule. Hence UBI here would mean that the dev would not *have to* monetize.
  - jonahx 9mo ago
    > In my view the most productive people of every field are not incentivized by money and would do it anyway. The idea that money is not an effective incentive to drive behavior is wishful thinking. Even just among devs, even just among devs who truly love programming, most would be doing very different work, and working for different organizations (or none at all) if money weren't the driver. > Hence UBI here would mean that the dev would not have to monetize. Ok, but the dev might still want to monetize, and we're back to the original question.

smoovb 9mo ago

Youtube has this model with Preimum. If Chrome rolled out Chrome Premium, (and copied the Brave BAT model of paying sites you give attention to), I'd be happy to pay.

Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 9mo ago

I had an idea for a library used to collect how much you owe who: https://github.com/thiswillbeyourgithub/FUTOmeter https://github.com/thiswillbeyourgithub/FUTOmeter

mncharity 9mo ago

> Is there a better way? If one's visitors are gamers, perhaps one might use gaming payment providers to sell an "supporter badge"? But that's perhaps be pushing their envelope. If one's visitors are from the "rapidly-developing world", with well-adopted candybar-scale micropayment systems - China, India, Indonesia, Brasil, Kenya, SK, Sweden... hmm. Direct access from elsewhere seems still very limited, but perhaps one might use a global payment gateway like Adyen? My impression is transaction cost is more than $0.10 but less than $1. In the "less-rapidly-developing world", X.com has been working towards a similar superapp with Visa for the US. The Visa/MC duopoly seems to have shifted from its years of preventing US micropayments, to something like "maybe 2030-ish".

arendtio 9mo ago

Especially in the age of AI tools, I also thought about this a few times. The current idea I have is something like a parking meter. Every expensive transaction (like calling a model) would subtract from the money pool, and every visitor could see how much is still left in the pool. In addition, a list of the top 5 donors with their amounts might improve the group dynamic (like on pay-what-you-want pages like humblebundle.com). It would be more about covering the cost than about making someone rich, but I think that is what most of the people who build stuff care about. Sadly, I don't know a service yet that offers this model.

20260126032624 9mo ago
This won't work when the meter is at zero due to human psychology. New visitors will say: "no one subsidized my experience (indeed I don't even know what $thing does) but <creator> wants me to subsidize $thing for others". The whole "subsidize for other visitors" concept is weaker than "pay <creator>".
- mlrtime 9mo ago
  Wouldn't a floor fix that? Maybe a bad example, but tipping in a restaurant is an example?
HPsquared 9mo ago
Nobody likes parking meters.

coffeebeqn 9mo ago

Not everything needs to be a business!

xboxnolifes 9mo ago
Sometimes it would be nice if you could just break even though. Particularly for these AI projects.
throwaway132448 9mo ago
If there’s one thing I learnt from HN it’s how many people can’t comprehend this. Is it a byproduct of growing up in a very transactional or selfish environment?
- AlexeyBelov 8mo ago
  I'm almost sure it is. I don't understand it personally, and it feels like grifting to me.
- addandsubtract 9mo ago
  Yes. First being a YouTube creator became a business, then twitch, tiktok, twitter. GenZ basically grew up with everything being/becoming a business "opportunity". Making money is the goal for "creators", to the point where ads have become normalized and not having a sponsor is leaving money on the table.

eastbound 9mo ago

Monetization: People can now use ChatGPT for this if they have the idea, so it’s a tight goal. Would people in urban planning pay to see this? If not, then this was just the “15 minutes of fame” experience”, and people who are not career influencers have difficulty monetizing that. Of course, thank you for your concept.

Steve0 9mo ago

You could let users import their own Google api key...

tpoacher 9mo ago

I don't think donation approaches are necessarily bad, but yes it should not be as simple as putting a kofi link at the top of a page. This person doesn't just do that though. Right after the part where you've uploaded your own examples, there's a reminder: if you had fun buy me a coffee. Though this is slightly offset by the fact that they state you have 2 free trials and then you pay. It's a complete incentives mismatch if you ask for coffee for something you explicitly presented to them as a marketing offer. Though, I suppose leaving the donation option on doesn't hurt in this case either. In my experience, donationware works best when the donation request is polite, personal, uncoercive, unintrusive, and comes at a moment of surprise right after you would have seen actual value from a product, and from a product that has not otherwise asked you for any money so far (including showing you ads). KeepassXC Android is a good example: the guy asks for a beer during octoberfest :)

IAmGraydon 9mo ago

Yeah - fine tune it a bit more (it’s a little too worst-case-scenario-in-the-dead-of-winter) and sell it to architectural firms and developers for a fee. This is simple to monetize and not up to us to figure out how to turn processor cycles into dollar bills.

MagnusHambleton 9mo ago

I saw it going viral before going to bed last night and spent 15min trying to enable payments but failed so made it block you after 2 gens using cookies and try guilt you into donating instead. Made me $160 in donations compared to the $500 in AI credits burned so not a huge success but at least slightly offset the loss. If the demand continues after this blip I’ll try add ads or make real payments work.

wateralien 8mo ago
I feel like you'll probably (mostly) have two types of users: 1. Those who just want to see more examples. 2. Those who actually want to use this as a tool. (Even though it may have started as a bit of a gag.) By having a gallery you'd save a lot of needless tokens so that you can satisfy user 1. By having a paid actual SAAS option you can get $$ from user 2. By showing a few tasteful ads as well as buy me a coffee you can get income from user 1.