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What sites would you pay to use?
32 points by pchristensen on April 16, 2008 | hide | past | favorite | 68 comments
I've been thinking about supply, demand, and pricing for software and websites lately. The question in my mind is:

If your favorite site switched from free to pay, would you pay to continue using it? If so, how much?

Here are a couple of my answers:

-Google: I'd probably switch to another search engine. Search results are fairly comparable now so I'd be comfortable with an alternative. In the 90s I would have paid a lot for Google because the others sucked so bad.

-Hacker News: I think I'd pay to stay on here. The discussion and submissions are miles above any other site I've been to. I'd pay $10/mo? $20? If I didn't want to pay I'd just substitute other entertainment - there's no site I'd switch to, free or not.

-Gmail: not sure about this. I haven't seen the other web based email clients in a while but I imagine they're better than they were 4 years ago. I use it so much that I'd probably pony up $5 or so/mo.

-Google Reader: hard to imagine there's not another free web based feed reader out there. I'd probably drop it. (I haven't seen the competition)

-WordPress: I think I'd pay (now that I've used it for 6 months and am very comfortable with it). But I don't think I would have chosen it in the first place if I had to pay.

-DropBox: I'd totally pay. It seamlessly solves a problem I've been fighting with for 5 years (multiple computers I'm on all the time). In fact, I've written about some beta products I've tested but I can't even write about DropBox because there's nothing to say besides THANK YOU!

What are some others? I'm thinking sites you use as opposed to blogs and essays you read (that's a whole different animal).




I would actually be thankful if most sites charged me, as I'd waste less time on them.


You mean, you'd either pay and spend as much (or more) time on them, or you'd never visit them again and not subscribe.

Sadly, there's no middle ground.


I'd be interested in paying per use or per minute. Something 8aweek could do and give proceeds to charity?


Or just invest it in some sort of fund for you that only pays out when your usage goes down.


The problem with this question is, when you think about it, one big reason all the popular free web services ARE popular is because they're free. So pretty much my answer to any of the sites I use would be, I might be willing to pay if I couldn't find an alternative, yet at the same time, I'd probably never be using any of them in the first place if they weren't originally free. However, I would NEVER pay for social news/discussion sites like this one (or digg, reddit, etc.). Regardless of the quality of the stories and discussion, social news sites are services I only use in my leisure time, I would probably not visit them if I didn't have tons of spare time anyway. No offense to social news sites, it's just that I wouldn't pay for them.


That's a great answer. The question was an attempt to see what's entertaining but not valuable, and what's so unique that there's no good substitute for. For instance, there are other web based email clients (not as good as gmail) but there's no other community I've found as great as HN. Since I'm sort of technologically isolated, the community here is a godsend that's the most stimulating entertainment I get outside of my wife and kids.


- Consumer Reports: When it comes to buying a big ticket item, like a car, the reviews and the user comments are very useful. Plus canceling my subscription after I bought my car was quick and painless


In a similar vein, Amazon. Not for the shopping experience (though it is nice) but for the reviews.


I have been thinking about this a lot in the past hour or two, too. Though slightly off-topic:

I've been thinking that a hassle-free solution for micro-transactions needs to hit mainstream before the average internet user will be willing to pay for more things online.

Most people (including myself) would pay for more things online if it didn't involve finding your wallet and typing in your billing address and credit card information. Paypal is the closest thing I can think of, but I still get overwhelmed thinking about logging in and all that. A simple one click button that could somehow be synced with your RFID chip would be great..

On my current project, I am thinking about ways to monetize a small feature similar to the old Facebook gifts, which as stupid as those are, could potentially bring in $15 million this year for FB? (Source: http://lsvp.wordpress.com/2008/01/23/facebook-digital-gifts-...) I bet FB could just charge users who upload more than 500 or so pictures $5/mo, and those sorority girls with 2500 party pics wouldn't think twice about pulling out daddies credit card.

It feels like it has become almost too trendy to give software services away for free lately. If you never charge you will never know how much people might have valued your service. If you start losing users drop the price? If you are trying to grow a user base, start out free and charge for additional features?


Actually, just today I went to cancel my $6/mo subscription to www.mofuse.com, which I use to format the iPhone app for my music blog that I run for fun (http://rawberryjams.com). After I logged in, the mofuse team announced that they were dropping their rates to $3/mo, so I accepted the new terms and logged out, keeping my subscription. Perfect example.


That would be a heck of an A/B test - some users see free, some see $4.99, some see $9.99. I wonder how those splits would break out for different sites.


Wikipedia. I'd pay a pretty penny for that.


They do accept donations.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate


Who said I don't regularly donate?


No one, it's just a fairly safe assumption.


You're right. I should have phrased my original comment differently.


That's one that didn't immediately come to mind for me. I gotta admit, I almost certainly would pay for that (although it's almost completely hypothetical since paying for it goes completely against the entire philosophy of the service, and if it had always been a pay service, it wouldn't be as extensive).


If you did have to pay (I realize this is hypothetical), what if they charged per article you read and you got a free read when you contributed? Or part of a free article when you edited. Would that help to keep it extensive?


It would increase the noise. People would make nonsense edits just to be able to read articles.


I'd pay for any site that helps me make money, directly or indirectly.

Gmail, Google, Adwords, and Hacker news fall in to that category.


I currently pay for Flickr and Remember the Milk. I also pay for my web host.

Would pay for nymag.com (restaurant reviews & db is worth a few bucks a month).

... other than that, everything else I use has enough free comparable alternatives.


As to paying for Hacker News, there are several community sites that have a low one-time (non-reimbursable) fee for joining. MetaFilter (http://www.metafilter.com/) costs $5 to join, for example. I feel like it makes the community a little more invested in the content, and is worth it overall.

I think that paying for community membership will become more popular in the very near future.


With all the free stuff, it's sort of anathema to suggest that you should pay to just talk to people on the internet, but as everyday internet users keep getting confronted with their own Eternal September, I agree that paying will become more common.


I hope reddit starts charging people to post. The "joke accounts" are ruining the site. $5 would kill those in 20 seconds.

Then we would just have to delete the non-programming parts of reddit. :)


Science, Gadgets & Cogsci are not bad either.


i'm a member at the MeFi too, and agree that even that little fee helps keep the morons out (the odd misguided marketing twit notwithstanding).

Want proof? Check this out: http://www.thatsaspicymeatball.com/comments/

Compares the latest MeFi comments with the latest Youtube comments :)


Do I get anything out of this payment, or would it be exactly the same as now but with cash exchanging hands? I might pay for GMail if it meant actual support (can't get IMAP to work) and no ads, for example.

In general, no, I'd just switch. Everybody has competition.

I only spend money online when buying a physical product or human-generated service. Amazon already knows my CC#, and if one of my regular webcomics went pay-only I'd pay to keep reading.


Gmail definitely, but I would consider it bait and switch.

Wikipedia absolutely.

wordreference.com (online dictionaries for english/french/italian/spanish). Love to have better options though.

The Economist (used to have a web subscription, but cancelled it when they made all content free).

Rescuetime. Keeps me productive.

Fogbugz definitely (it's free for 1-2 persons). I entered 3000 bugs in 5 months.


I pay for the Economist. But I have a dead tree subscription and get the web one as a bonus.


I pay for a Safari subscription. The quality of content there is so much better for some things than just randomly searching Google for programming problems. Right now, I have the $15 a month, but I'll go back to the $40 a month unlimited account after school's done and I'm in startup mode.

I also pay for a Rhapsody subscription. It's just so much nicer to have most any song available to me whenever I want it. Besides, I have a primordial dislike for I-Tunes. I did have a Yahoo Unlimited music subscription, but their customer service was awful.

I'd pay a bit for Gmail. I'd also pay a bit for Hacker News if it meant keeping Hacker News small and focused.


Google obviously.

Pandora.com - ($15/mo ... i already pay this to Napster for unltd dls (but I would have to be able to press a back button to play the previous song,etc),

Hacker News ($20/mo ... keep the trolls off)

Wikipedia? Well if it came down to it, i'd donate to it; if it started charging, i would use other alternatives. the beauty of wikipedia being free is that it is free from the undue influence of paying subscribers- which is pretty essential to a site that wants to supply unbiased information.)

Facebook.

I don't really know of anything else that truly provides a unique value proposition for me that other sites can't duplicate rather easily.


I might pay for Facebook, but if they started making EVERYONE pay, it would cease being the site which I began this sentence by saying I would for it pay.


Another vote for Pandora.

I'd be willing to pay for Hacker News, but deeply suspicious that it would start dying as a paid site.

Yahoo Mail charges me for POP access, and I'd probably pay gmail similarly.

I happily subscribe to Emusic.com.

That's about it for me.

I like Twitter, Friendfeed, and Blogger, but I wouldn't pay to use any of them.


I think Pandora is the only one that could reasonably charge there. The rest would see massive switchovers to free, similar competitors.


I'm not recommending they do or that quality would remain if they became paid. I just wanted to feel out which sites people really valued.


I would definitely pay for GMail and Google Reader, unless someone can find me a similar service (web based and with awesome support for keyboard shortcuts). AFAIK the competition doesn't even come close.


A good alternative to Google Reader is simply visiting the sites you want to :-) I'm being sarcastic, but I honestly don't get the point of using a web-based RSS reader, I've always just bookmarked and visited the sites I desire to check.


Have you tried using Google Reader or other? I used to bookmark and revisit, but there were two problems - too much time visiting sites when there were no updates and it was too much hassle to visit sites with rare updates (like pg essays or Yegge novels). Now I follow ~150 feeds and it takes less time than I spent following 10-15 with bookmarks.


I've solved that problem for me by configuring rawdog RSS reader. Now, it checks for update and generates a static HTML page. (if you are interested, here is the link: http://anton.kovalyov.net/tools/feeds/)

So I don't have to visit a website just to make sure that there are no updates and I also don't have to use some big RSS reader with a lot of unnecessary things (ajax, tags, stars, share with friend, etc.)


That's really nice! I like the fact that you control the output and that it's web accessible. Does it include a way to mark items as read or do they just drop off the bottom?


Just drop off.


There is also Bloglines. I recently switched from Google Reader to Bloglines' beta version, since I felt the latter was slightly faster, and it is supported in my blackberry browser.


Google (more so in 2000 than now)

HNYC

Gmail

8aweek

Chatterous (seriously)

Used to feel that way about Reddit.


Just a specific comment on whether or not I'd pay for GMail: I would pay for any service for which I depend on if it gave me a higher service guarantee and would also include support.


I would pay for Gmail if their IMAP support wasn't awful.


Do you actually have problems with Gmail's IMAP support in practice? I've heard similar comments about issues with Gmail's IMAP support, but it's working fine for me.


The biggest problem I have is the way they map IMAP "folders" to Gmail "tags". I guess my complaint is more with Gmail itself. Tags are nice, but I'd really like real folders too.

Also, you end up with basically two different inboxes: your real inbox, and the "All Mail" folder. You have to delete or mark messages in both places (I think there's supposed to be some sort of synchronization, but it's not obvious)


I'd be happy to pay for Rescue Time and Hacker News, but having said that I'm not sure that I would pay for either if I hadn't used them for free first.


Would you have signed up after a 30 day trial?


I wouldn't pay for any of those sites. I'd pay for google if all search engines started charging. Also, I'd probably end up paying for some e-mail service if gmail would charge (it might not be gmail).

I probably would pay for wikipedia if I had to, as well. Maybe planetmath.org.


Surprised no one's mentioned IMDB.com; it's the first thing that leaps to my mind.

Also occasionally surprised to consider I get people to pay to use http://linkswarm.com/ -- not complaining, though.


Hmm, I can tell you what I do pay for. A hosted exchange server account. That's it.


Ditto. Not really the same though.


I wouldn't pay for gmail. I'd go back to using Thunderbird.

As for the rest... extremely hard to predict because if all the most popular sites charged money the dynamics of the web would be completely different.


I would pay a join fee for a lot of sites I use daily something like http://forums.somethingawful.com/ but not much over that


I have only paid for games, ebooks and hosting lately, or for buying physical stuff. I would pay for movies and music, if it was available in acceptable formats where I live.


Mint.com

It needs more features, but so far it's the only tool I have that is able to synch with all 12 of my financial accounts without having to manually download/import OFX or MNY files.


Ameritrade...

oh, wait.


Hacker news is probably the only site I would pay for.

It seems to me there are pretty good free alternatives to just about everything else.


You, or someone else, could very easily create a free alternative to it. Hacker news is good because it's still relatively obscure. ANY social news site that is full-featured and doesn't censor its users will almost invariably start out great then begin it fail as more people find out about it.


I think you're underestimating the difficulty of attracting enough of the right kind of users.


http://news.ycombinator.com


Google. GMail. Wikipedia. DropBox. Anywhere.FM.


I would pay for twitter. Definitely.


wikipedia, gmail, and thesixtyone.


Digg


waffles.fm


Google Maps

Hacker News

TripIt

Zillow




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