3 ms·

prepay is a good tactic for small customers -- getting the entire lifetime value up front in most cases. but why are you bothering with customers spending <$1/

• cperciva 17y ago
  I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "why are you bothering", so I'll answer both versions of the question I can imagine you meaning. If you mean "why bother charging them instead of making it free" -- as I explain in the post, I don't want to get into a situation where I might have enough small non-paying users that I end up losing money. If you mean "why accept them as customers at all" -- well, thinking as a user of my own service, I'd be really irked if I got told that I couldn't use a great service simply because I didn't want to use it enough! But from a purely business perspective: In my experience, small-scale users are some of the most important ones to have, since they tend to be the ones who go around telling everybody they know about tarsnap.
  • eru 17y ago
    And they might turn into larger scale customers later.
    • staunch 17y ago
      This is the very important part. I probably had my S3 account for a year until one day I dumped hundreds of gigabytes into it. I used S3 because I already had it setup and it was convenient.