He says he had hundreds of users and hosting costs were a problem. This made me curious how this could be. Testing SSL for a few hundred users should pretty much free these days.
He said Patreon pledges paid for 25% of hosting. So I looked up his Patreon. Turns out he has 3 (!) patreons, together paying $9 per month.
The web is a strange place.
Here comes a fun fact I can add: He is doing better than me. I have a website with about 500000 monthly users and 5 (!) patreons. So while he only had 1% paying users, I only have 0.001% :)
Did I say the web is a strange place? Will this ever change?
Actually, we're talking "small" amounts. I had 3 dedicated servers hosted in France, which is cheap compared to the USA for dedicated servers. I was paying 65€ per month, for 5 years.
How could testing SSL use that much? well, I wanted an HA mongodb setup, and I wanted to support millions of servers. SSLPing was super fast, around 5 seconds to check your SSL versions, cyphers, check some vulnerabilities, etc... when SSLLabs takes 2 minutes.
And yes, despite 1100 total signups in my database, I had only 3 patreons... The maximum I had was 5.
The web is a strange place. I'm looking into sslping very differently today. Yesterday I killed it, and received tens of emails from users to thank me, and today I'm on the first page of HN... because I killed my project.
Do I have to say that I didn't dare ask people to pay for sslping because I thought is wasn't worth it?
I think this is natural, not strange. Not saying to criticize, I mean as a friendly heads up...
You're acting like a tree in the forest offering fruits for free. People pass by, take a couple fruits and move on. You put a shy sign "if you drop a dollar on the floor it won't hurt".
0.001% dollars is what you get out of this behavior.
It's strange to expect something different. You need to tell people you expect a LOT of them to pay. Otherwise they don't know. You tell them that by restricting access and saying: pay or go away. Offer a limited time free trial. Then charge.
I'm surprised about that too. If I were to build such a service, I'd use cloud and keep it in a free tier. If there's not enough resources to serve all the servers, throttle it (check it not every 24 hours, but every 25 hours and so on). If there's enough demand, implement paid tier without throttling and some extra features.
I don't think it's strange that to many people, some service are useful but not always seen as useful enough to commit to X dollars per month, especially if their own use is for free stuff as well.
Also, many businesses are not setup to make multiple small(ish) payments to library maintainers even though imho, this should become a normal pattern. Imagine if all the people who used OpenSSL, PHP, Linux, etc. x 1000 were paid even $1 per month per business use.
I think there is a whole PhD around this since there are psychological factors to people charging up-front vs freemium with upgrades etc. Sometimes if I am trying to find a service to do X and find that one charges, I might immediately reject even if it is really amazing and would save me that much in time.
I guess if it was easy, there wouldn't be a problem!
Signing up for any level of subscription is a pretty high bar for me and, as you say, can be logistically challenging for businesses. It's just way too easy to build up money leaks that you aren't getting any real value from.
The web is a strange place indeed, and maybe I misunderstood your reply, but my take after reading it was like: You are freely and independently offering a service to others for free and are complaining to us that you don't get enough donations to keep it? Kill it, it's not that anyone is entitled to your service for free, or charge for it, so yeah I think it will change when people stop putting free stuff online?
It will change as we all "become the change we want to see". How many web apps that have a free (and likely ad-supported) alternative you are supporting/paying for? If this number starts being 5-10 then we can hope for a network effect and the main currency of exchange on the web becoming simply money instead of (private) data as it is now.
Maybe making your hosting costs visible to your users vs burn rate will make the point more salient. Something like "At current burn rate XYZ service will become untenable in 145 days"
He said Patreon pledges paid for 25% of hosting. So I looked up his Patreon. Turns out he has 3 (!) patreons, together paying $9 per month.
The web is a strange place.
Here comes a fun fact I can add: He is doing better than me. I have a website with about 500000 monthly users and 5 (!) patreons. So while he only had 1% paying users, I only have 0.001% :)
Did I say the web is a strange place? Will this ever change?