Comment by aflag

I'm not sure if the number of queries is easy to measure. My experience is as follows:

I found out about it and decided to make some queries. I was trying to understand what it's good at and what it is not. I think I tried the same query a few times and small variations of it. I was trying to figure out when citations would start at 1 and when it wouldn't when it stopped working. I had already made a more generic query and I was trying to think some queries that would be probably answered by hackernews stuff. I would probably play around with a little more today, so even for that exploration the number of queries were too little. It even surprises me the limit is 20, I thought I made less than that.

Anyway, after I knew what it was good at and what it was not. I was planning on just keeping it in the back of my mind throughout the next days, specially when I go back to work (I'm on holidays now) and I thought I'd try it out whenever I had a natural query that I wanted to search for. That would be the true test in my mind.

In my mind, an unlimited 30-day free trial would probably be what makes most sense for that sort of thing. I do realise you'll probably want the user to sign in to offer that. Which, I might, reluctantly, do if the site actually offered me that option, but I didn't get the impression that I'd get anything like that. Signing up is a bit annoying because then I'll have to sign in from work as well, which I never really like to do, but I don't have a better way to offer a 30-day trial anyway. Alternatively, if you limited to 5 queries a day instead of a month it would already be a better proposition, because at least I'd be able to try it again tomorrow or when I get back to work. As it currently stands, I can only try it again in a month. I'll surely have forgotten about this by then.

Edit: actually just realised that not even $15/month gives you unlimited queries. 26 per day seems a bit on the short side of things. For the same reasons above, I think refreshing the queries daily or at least weekly makes more sense. I'd hate to run out of queries at the end of the month. Or maybe just have a price per query and charge based on that while allowing the user to set a limit. I suppose at the moment the price is $0.01875 per query. But you are required to bulk buy 800