Visitor.js is arguably not very innovative. The only "added value" that I would consider is having it all in one nice library.
The knowledge necessary to create visitor.js is almost at the level of a beginner. How many 'hello world' tutorials aren't there on the web that display how to use cookies in Javascript by showing the last time you visited the page?
The incentive behind creating something like visitor.js should be community, exposure and input from other developers. What was John's incentive behind releasing jQuery for free, a toolkit more useful, and harder, by far? *
I am not arguing against monetizing. I think monetization is most of the times appropriate, but when any Javascript coder worth his salt can copy your idea and implement it in 3 hours and you have no competitive edge, then monetization is not appropriate.
*: Addendum: John's incentive was probably not exposure, although it probably rocketed him towards being know as a Javascript authority.
The added value is running the whole thing as a service. They are responsible for running it, maintaining it and monitoring it. They track dependencies and provide the geolocation backend. This is added value. There's quite a few services that actually just take an open source component, provide a little glue code and a configuration backend and actually make money off that. (cloudant, redis2go,...).
Whether it's worth the price charged certainly depends on your point of view and your needs as well as your technical setup.
Personally I think that the idea of parsing HTTP response headers as a service is one aimed clearly at people who design websites but don't understand how they work on the server side. Otherwise you're paying someone to add extra script load to your site to give you data you already get.
Maybe there's a market for that, but I'd be surprised if HN or any serious tech site would cater to the same demographic.
What's left is the geolocation. At this point I'd think a major USP is relegated to a bullet point in a feature list. I've not seen much in the way of helpful geolocation APIs, and the data needed for this costs money if it's mission critical.
You've got to maintain the database after you've bought it, you've got to run a server for that database, you've got to write a script or an API that exposes it, in JSON format, to a client-side script...
If you're not up for that commitment, or it's not worth the time or money, then surely 'geolocation.js' (as opposed to 'visitor.js') can help you out. And your commitment to it lasts only for as long as you pay.
But for anything else? Well, I'd want a server to save that for analytics, and posting HTTP response data via an XMLHttpRequest is a bit convoluted.
I built similar functionality into sites I built back in 1997 in PHP (and later in ASP). I.e. all of the things that you can get from the request (OS, referrer etc) plus a crude geolocation based on an IP lookup and a few heuristics (which worked pretty well for everyone except AOL users).
Seems like a foolish business plan (or maybe a business plan designed to profit from the foolish).
Then again I had the same reaction when I heard about Groupon's business model.......
This reply is the Slashdot review of the Apple iPod when it was released. It is a great example of how some people (incl. many geeks) look at a product/service, and only look at the raw technical specs, and presume that it's very easy to replicate or not very innovative. Since the iPod was a massive success, it shows how sometimes raw technology doesn't make or break something
I did not presume anything. You only have to look at prior HN posts to see how it is reproducible in 3 hours, one definition of easy.
Note that my comment pertained to innovation, not usefulness. I don't doubt that there is a market for visitor.js. However, I am 100% sure that it is not innovative.
A fairly unique aspect of building software products for software developers is that most of your potential customers could probably build your product if they really wanted to. And as was illustrated yesterday, if the cost is of whack with the value created, software developers will just build their own version of it.
Twillio is a great example of the opposite. I don't think Twillio is actually so deep that people don't understand what's going on under the hood. Open source alternatives exist to using Twillio, like Asterisk. But setting them up and maintaining them is a massive time suck. The value Twillio creates is being able to make phone calls and send text messages immediately and never have to worry about that piece of your infrastructure. Additionally their pricing is set such that using them is over taking the time to setup something yourself is a no-brainer.
A nice side effect of making software for software developers, is that if you do open source something simple, someone else will find it when they're looking to save a few hours, and probably spend a little more time adjusting it to their needs and making it better. Then everyone is in a better position to use that code to build something that creates a lot of unique value and charge for it.
I have a friend that wrote a very uninnovative, very shallow app a few years ago in a couple of months and barely works on it nowadays. He thinks he will make $60K this year and there are at least five or six different open source competitors (read last word as Daniel Plainview please.)
I could write something to replace it in a week or two.
Just make sure you know your audience: if you are selling to developers, you are probably SOL. If you are selling to managers, they really don't care whether they pay or not but it solves their problem.
Sure let's try this again with some different language:
It is possible to compete with free if your customer base has an incentive to use your tools. That incentive can either be that they don't want to figure out how to do it themselves (e.g. non-technical managers), or if you provide some sort of value added service on top of the freedom, e.g. your tools are nice to use/easier to integrate/enables someone to do something that wouldn't take more than a few hours.
visitors.js clearly isn't this sort of thing, unless if you need/want accurate geolocation.
Value and technical difficulty have no interdependence. The fact that this thing could be cloned in half a day doesn't in any way indicate that the original business won't go on to be successful.
I know this because I make a comfortable living on the proceeds of a SaaS product that anybody here could reproduce in half a day. The fact that several dozen of my customers are HN readers (and thus capable of the aforementioned feat) goes to show that even if it's possible to do something, the smart business decision is sometimes to pay somebody else to do it for you.
I actually give a full set of instructions to build your own version of the service on the site, and link to several open source packages that you can install on your server. But still there are plenty of people out there capable of multiplying [hourly bill rate] * 4 to come up with how much doing that would cost. Since that'll buy most shops a couple years of my service, the smart money goes toward the "buy" end of that build vs. buy decision.
I don't know what's all this about. Yes, someone open sourced a service that is providing an all-around solution for data that's easily trackable-- but the user's location.
If you've used free services to convert an IP to location, you know it's not so reliable. And that's the issue with the open-source version, which tracks me to the US, while I'm actually in Mexico City and it's quite accurate (12.8 kilometers off).
Yes, there's a geolocation API, but it needs user authorization and when you're building a service that requires knowing the user's location without them doing anything, visitor.js appears to be both reliable and at a fair-enough price.
When you write software for programmers, you typically are writing it for "ego" or "cred" rather than for money. The money will come when you write software for normal people, either in the form of actual payment, or in the form of recommendations for jobs (contracting or full-time). Therefore, as an author, you are compensated. Just not with money. (What's better compensation for your weekend project: $10 now, or a $10,000 raise tomorrow? That's why programmers advertise themselves instead of monetize their "products".)
I think Pusher is an excellent example of something which can be quite simple to setup and use (socket.io) but people are willing to pay if someone maks it really really easy and just plug and play.
I think if visitor.js came with some nice extra things to do with the data rather than just displaying it (country list with yours preselected, only showing social media buttons from the referring website).
I also believe the pricing for visitor.js was a little off-putting to people but not sure how you would price / rate limit a SaaS like that..
Consider switching to a statically generated blog using something like Jekyll. From my experience, an unoptimized wordpress install doesn't take much traffic to take it down assuming every request is hitting mysql.
People who want the paid version, which probably comes with support as part of the package, will pay for that service. People who don't can just take advantage of the 'free' version. Even though the complexity of the code was low, there is value in offering a paid version, which usually comes in the form of support. Happens all the time.
If it'd been priced at $18 once off instead of $x/month, would the HN reaction have been very different?
A few people have talked about it being trivial to create, but it's obviously not so trivial that people haven't found a free option useful to save them time.
One of the things we hope http://TipTheWeb.org/ will be good for is offering a way for creators of open source tools and useful web services to get money from the people who use what they've created, especially for things that would be hard to build a full business around, but which still have significant value.
Much of what's great about the Web is exactly that: valuable, published for free access, not the basis of a full-time business, yet definitely worth supporting.
The knowledge necessary to create visitor.js is almost at the level of a beginner. How many 'hello world' tutorials aren't there on the web that display how to use cookies in Javascript by showing the last time you visited the page?
The incentive behind creating something like visitor.js should be community, exposure and input from other developers. What was John's incentive behind releasing jQuery for free, a toolkit more useful, and harder, by far? *
I am not arguing against monetizing. I think monetization is most of the times appropriate, but when any Javascript coder worth his salt can copy your idea and implement it in 3 hours and you have no competitive edge, then monetization is not appropriate.
*: Addendum: John's incentive was probably not exposure, although it probably rocketed him towards being know as a Javascript authority.