5 ms·

Laterpay – Buy digital content, pay later

43 points by dewey 13y ago

bachback 13y ago
missed the bitcoin train.
- dewey 13y ago
  I don't really see the connection between Bitcoin and Micro-Payment services at all. Bitcoin is hardly easy and instant unlike Flattr (Although I'd say Flattr isn't really that easy and straightforward as their intro video wants people to believe) and this service.
  - mareofnight 13y ago
    Dogecoin managed to be pretty easy, though. (I've never used bitcoin, so I don't know how much difference there is.)
jere 13y ago
>Why buy 200 coins in a game when you only need ten? Great. Another psychological trick the F2P devs can add to their toolbox.
- Pitarou 13y ago
  That made me stop short, too. When do you ever "only need 10"?
  - saraid216 13y ago
    An extra 5 moves in Farm Heroes Saga requires 9 coin thingies. I don't remember how much that is in USD because I've never actually bought any.
bananas 13y ago
A digital loan shark that will only let you have €5. Sound business model there...
ntaso 13y ago
The concept is interesting. However, I don't think that the concept of "use now, pay later" is really what prevents people from doing micro transactions. The real work is to convince content providers to hide their stuff behind cheap paywalls and use their system. Flattr never gained enough traction and I don't see how laterpay solves this problem.
- PaulHoule 13y ago
  some people do better than minimum wage at http://gittip.com/ http://gittip.com/
- quarterwave 13y ago
  Good point, I was wondering how the link was made to the content provider.
mobiuscog 13y ago
"no upfront registration" is a misnomer, as you will obviously have to sign-up in order to partake of the service. I would assume you will also have to register a payment method, otherwise they will just fill up with throwaway accounts.
- dewey 13y ago
  According to this german blog post (It's an interview with a famous german blogger/tv presenter who is working for Laterpay in a consulting position) [0] you don't have to sign up to use it at the beginning. You basically just say "I want to pay for this later" and once you are hitting the 5 euro mark it'll prompt you to sign up and pay for it. [0] http://meedia.de/2014/03/21/richard-gutjahr-ueber-laterpay-paid-content-nach-dem-bierdeckel-prinzip/ http://meedia.de/2014/03/21/richard-gutjahr-ueber-laterpay-p...
jheriko 13y ago
> otherwise they will just fill up with throwaway accounts. this is exactly the kind of strategy that 'poor' people take to maximise the effectiveness of 'freebies' (which includes credit). i hope they have some strategy in place to mitigate that risk...
patio11 13y ago
This business model was previously tried by Kwedit. I was sort of disappointed when they abandoned it, because it deprived the world of kwedit default swaps. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1099811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1099811
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- jonnathanson 13y ago
  You made a good point about Kwedit back in the day, which I believe applies just as well here. Namely, micropayments on the nickel-and-dime scale are seriously challenging. How does a vendor price them effectively? How do you get a consumer to wrap his/her head around them? Everybody understands the value of a dollar; nobody understands the value of a nickel. Coins, pseudocurrencies, and loyalty points seem much better suited to overcoming that psychological barrier.
KhalPanda 13y ago
I like how the login/sign-up button click boxes conform nicely to the central circular 'or' area. ...but that's about it.
- killercup 13y ago
  I like that as well. Except, I'm seeing the content in German and this button reads "Jetzt registrieren OR Anmelden". Well, I guess "ODER" would have been too wide anyway.
- NoodleIncident 13y ago
  Quite clever. The white border on the circle is pixel-perfectly tuned to match the white margin between the buttons. ...sounds like hell to fix for IE. Glad I don't do css. They also have a .call-to-action class for that green color, which is cute.
carlio 13y ago
As a publisher, I'd question when I'd actualy get money for the content I sold, if I have to wait for every "customer" to accumulate €5 before they forked over cash. Until LaterPay has significant market penetration, the likelyhood is that small publishers will never see any revenue.
mattmaroon 13y ago
Content producers and techies want something like this (microtransactions) to work so badly that they keep trying to make it happen, despite the fact that people quite simply don't want it. They keep thinking "maybe I just need to make it more usable" when PayPal has been quite usable for nearly two decades. People don't want to buy a bunch of small stuff a la carte. They just don't.
- bryanlarsen 13y ago
  counter-example: the billions of apps sold for 99 cents on the Apple app store.
  - mattmaroon 13y ago
    And yet you could buy TV shows there a la carte and nobody does. Suppose maybe I should have specified reading material though.
    - bushido 13y ago
      The reason people don't buy TV shows is due to bad pricing and lackluster value. I know a lot of people who wait to buy a TV series when it comes on DVD because they cannot understand why the sum of all episodes available for digital download costs the same as the DVD, when there are much lower expenses. Also they need to pay extra for any specials. Hollywood and studios assume that people are willing to pay more for instant access than they pay for physical products. And there in lies the problem why very few people but TV shows a la carte. On the people who download from p2p etc. a number of people would pay if the amount was lower, and within this group are a number of people who download from p2p now and buy the DVD when it has released. This is also a big attraction for people waiting a year+ for a season to show up on netflix. You reasoning is unfortunately an ad homeinem.
      - saurik 13y ago
        > I know a lot of people who wait to buy a TV series when it comes on DVD because they cannot understand why the sum of all episodes available for digital download costs the same as the DVD, when there are much lower expenses. This sounds like an education problem: how do we make people understand that the cost of printing DVDs is negligible (in fact, practically nothing) in comparison to the efforts of hundreds if not thousands of trained individuals, tens of millions of dollars of specialized equipment, and the limited availability of their favorite actors?
ycaspirant 13y ago
I'm having a hard time understanding what I can use this service for. Can somebody please provide one or two concrete examples of potential use cases? Thanks very much in advance!
danbruc 13y ago
Assume you want to read an article because it relevant for work. Assume your salary is $25 per hour. If you think for just 5 seconds whether you should pay for the article or not this will costs your employer 3.5¢. So at least in that context a price of 5¢ or 10¢ per article should absolutely be a no-brainer. What I have no idea is if you can sustain a business at that price - content producer and payment provider. And I am also unsure how well that translates to non-working time. It is at least often argued that you should value that time just like your working time. Psychological barriers as mentioned by others are a very different matter, too.
PanMan 13y ago
Sounds similar to tipit.to which friends of mine did. Unfortunately, like a lot of money transferring services, they ran into a lot of fraud. Any money -> something -> money service online makes it really attractive to launder stolen credit cards.

43 points by dewey 13y ago

bachback 13y ago

missed the bitcoin train.

dewey 13y ago
I don't really see the connection between Bitcoin and Micro-Payment services at all. Bitcoin is hardly easy and instant unlike Flattr (Although I'd say Flattr isn't really that easy and straightforward as their intro video wants people to believe) and this service.
- mareofnight 13y ago
  Dogecoin managed to be pretty easy, though. (I've never used bitcoin, so I don't know how much difference there is.)

jere 13y ago

>Why buy 200 coins in a game when you only need ten? Great. Another psychological trick the F2P devs can add to their toolbox.

Pitarou 13y ago
That made me stop short, too. When do you ever "only need 10"?
- saraid216 13y ago
  An extra 5 moves in Farm Heroes Saga requires 9 coin thingies. I don't remember how much that is in USD because I've never actually bought any.

bananas 13y ago

A digital loan shark that will only let you have €5. Sound business model there...

ntaso 13y ago

The concept is interesting. However, I don't think that the concept of "use now, pay later" is really what prevents people from doing micro transactions. The real work is to convince content providers to hide their stuff behind cheap paywalls and use their system. Flattr never gained enough traction and I don't see how laterpay solves this problem.

PaulHoule 13y ago
some people do better than minimum wage at http://gittip.com/ http://gittip.com/
quarterwave 13y ago
Good point, I was wondering how the link was made to the content provider.

mobiuscog 13y ago

"no upfront registration" is a misnomer, as you will obviously have to sign-up in order to partake of the service. I would assume you will also have to register a payment method, otherwise they will just fill up with throwaway accounts.

dewey 13y ago
According to this german blog post (It's an interview with a famous german blogger/tv presenter who is working for Laterpay in a consulting position) [0] you don't have to sign up to use it at the beginning. You basically just say "I want to pay for this later" and once you are hitting the 5 euro mark it'll prompt you to sign up and pay for it. [0] http://meedia.de/2014/03/21/richard-gutjahr-ueber-laterpay-paid-content-nach-dem-bierdeckel-prinzip/ http://meedia.de/2014/03/21/richard-gutjahr-ueber-laterpay-p...

jheriko 13y ago

> otherwise they will just fill up with throwaway accounts. this is exactly the kind of strategy that 'poor' people take to maximise the effectiveness of 'freebies' (which includes credit). i hope they have some strategy in place to mitigate that risk...

patio11 13y ago

This business model was previously tried by Kwedit. I was sort of disappointed when they abandoned it, because it deprived the world of kwedit default swaps. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1099811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1099811

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
jonnathanson 13y ago
You made a good point about Kwedit back in the day, which I believe applies just as well here. Namely, micropayments on the nickel-and-dime scale are seriously challenging. How does a vendor price them effectively? How do you get a consumer to wrap his/her head around them? Everybody understands the value of a dollar; nobody understands the value of a nickel. Coins, pseudocurrencies, and loyalty points seem much better suited to overcoming that psychological barrier.

KhalPanda 13y ago

I like how the login/sign-up button click boxes conform nicely to the central circular 'or' area. ...but that's about it.

killercup 13y ago
I like that as well. Except, I'm seeing the content in German and this button reads "Jetzt registrieren OR Anmelden". Well, I guess "ODER" would have been too wide anyway.
NoodleIncident 13y ago
Quite clever. The white border on the circle is pixel-perfectly tuned to match the white margin between the buttons. ...sounds like hell to fix for IE. Glad I don't do css. They also have a .call-to-action class for that green color, which is cute.

carlio 13y ago

As a publisher, I'd question when I'd actualy get money for the content I sold, if I have to wait for every "customer" to accumulate €5 before they forked over cash. Until LaterPay has significant market penetration, the likelyhood is that small publishers will never see any revenue.

mattmaroon 13y ago

Content producers and techies want something like this (microtransactions) to work so badly that they keep trying to make it happen, despite the fact that people quite simply don't want it. They keep thinking "maybe I just need to make it more usable" when PayPal has been quite usable for nearly two decades. People don't want to buy a bunch of small stuff a la carte. They just don't.

bryanlarsen 13y ago
counter-example: the billions of apps sold for 99 cents on the Apple app store.
- mattmaroon 13y ago
  And yet you could buy TV shows there a la carte and nobody does. Suppose maybe I should have specified reading material though.
  - bushido 13y ago
    The reason people don't buy TV shows is due to bad pricing and lackluster value. I know a lot of people who wait to buy a TV series when it comes on DVD because they cannot understand why the sum of all episodes available for digital download costs the same as the DVD, when there are much lower expenses. Also they need to pay extra for any specials. Hollywood and studios assume that people are willing to pay more for instant access than they pay for physical products. And there in lies the problem why very few people but TV shows a la carte. On the people who download from p2p etc. a number of people would pay if the amount was lower, and within this group are a number of people who download from p2p now and buy the DVD when it has released. This is also a big attraction for people waiting a year+ for a season to show up on netflix. You reasoning is unfortunately an ad homeinem.
    - saurik 13y ago
      > I know a lot of people who wait to buy a TV series when it comes on DVD because they cannot understand why the sum of all episodes available for digital download costs the same as the DVD, when there are much lower expenses. This sounds like an education problem: how do we make people understand that the cost of printing DVDs is negligible (in fact, practically nothing) in comparison to the efforts of hundreds if not thousands of trained individuals, tens of millions of dollars of specialized equipment, and the limited availability of their favorite actors?

ycaspirant 13y ago

I'm having a hard time understanding what I can use this service for. Can somebody please provide one or two concrete examples of potential use cases? Thanks very much in advance!

danbruc 13y ago

Assume you want to read an article because it relevant for work. Assume your salary is $25 per hour. If you think for just 5 seconds whether you should pay for the article or not this will costs your employer 3.5¢. So at least in that context a price of 5¢ or 10¢ per article should absolutely be a no-brainer. What I have no idea is if you can sustain a business at that price - content producer and payment provider. And I am also unsure how well that translates to non-working time. It is at least often argued that you should value that time just like your working time. Psychological barriers as mentioned by others are a very different matter, too.

PanMan 13y ago

Sounds similar to tipit.to which friends of mine did. Unfortunately, like a lot of money transferring services, they ran into a lot of fraud. Any money -> something -> money service online makes it really attractive to launder stolen credit cards.