Comment by lxgr
2 years ago
If you pay Signal $1/year, they'll realistically see about 60-70 cents of that – and that's only considering payment processor fees.
Now add the cost of providing support (it's a paid product now!), payment handling on their end (in a privacy-preserving way, which excludes most common payment methods), and top it off with the immense damage to the network effect by excluding all the users that can't or simply don't want to pay $1/year...
Donations seem like the much better option here.
You can also charge for a 10 year minimum and get to a higher retained %
You don't need to provide support, even much more expensive consumer services live without a proper one, so being explicit about the fact that you only pay for infrastructure could suffice
Not sure why payment privacy has to be so strict for everyone
The network effect damage is real, but maybe it could be limited with donations :)
Selling a service automatically opts you in to all kinds of consumer protections, either legally or de facto through the dispute mechanism of the payment methods your customers use.
Just ignoring customer complaints and selling the service "as-is" is usually not an option.
Why is it not an option when it already exists in many places (all these protections fail all the time)? Your first sentence doesn't imply high/expensive level of customer service
Besides, even now they're not ignoring all the complaints, the do fix bugs?
Maybe to be more specific, how much did it cost WhatsApp when they had $1 price and a tiny team? How does it compare to the cost of SMS?
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Thanks for over-analyzing my comment. $1/year, $2/year, $5/year, is all insignificant in the wide array of things I pay for. Sure, I'd pay $10/year for Signal as it is today if they really needed me to. And I never said to make payment mandatory. You're just way over analyzing a simple comment.