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Twitter seems to be another case of giving away free services online when people value it enough to pay for it. It would make things easier for all startups if
by jonnytran 18y ago
Twitter seems to be another case of giving away free services online when people value it enough to pay for it.
It would make things easier for all startups if users didn't expect things for free. In the real world, when someone at a store gives you something for free, you look at them, say "Are you serious?!", and walk away dumbfounded. But online, it's become the default.
Maybe startups can change the expectation by charging by default instead of the other way around.
- apgwoz 18y agoThe post on SvN yesterday regarding this sort of idea got me thinking. Why don't people use the model some museums use? "What do you want to pay today to see our exhibit?" You default to the amount you'd ideally like to get, but have a few radio buttons that have other amounts (one is the free amount). If your service is based around a subscription model, then you add the option of, "only charge me once, I can always pay later." I wonder how well it'd actually work. My guess is that the same people that buy eBooks instead of downloading them for free will at least throw you a couple bucks.
- jonnytran 18y agoThis got me thinking... Why isn't there a "credit card payment system" gem in RoR? Because if we want this sort of thing to be ubiquitous in startups, our tools must support them out of the box. Put another way, startups are too busy prototyping and running up hill to bother re-implementing a credit-card payment system -- a simple, yet difficult-to-get-right chunk of software. Unless it's already done, no startup wants to waste their time doing it. Again, I ask the question, why isn't it dead-simple to include credit-card payment into my website? (Please, someone make this!)