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Comment by MattyMc | Hacker News Reader

Tool looks great! Out of curiosity, are you planning to monetize? If so, do you mind me asking how?

Thanks for asking. Yes we are, but we want to always have a super generous free-tier. We were looking into charging educators for using Barbra in the classroom with more features (like tracking, permissions, etc), and also charging power-users (people with a lot of flashcards and notes) a small subscription fee of around 5-8$ a month.

What do you think? :) is it fair?

Maybe you could allow creators to make their decks purchasable? Maybe take a cut from that purchase

Hmm yes. Could be good. We are trying to build this "study group template" library. So we are putting the notes and flashcards from our university lectures up for free in the platform. Maybe asking students to do so too for their lectures and then giving them money based on how many people use it would be nice.

It could look like this (mockup) https://imgur.com/JVdhnco

What do you think? :)

> charging power-users (people with a lot of flashcards and notes) a small subscription fee of around 5-8$ a month

Don’t charge that little monthly. Maybe $30 a quarter for more than 5,000 text flash cards or $50 for that plus photos and videos. No one has yet made a success of flash cards with a real big company. Anki is one guy. Remembr.it focuses on Chinese vocabulary. Memrise needs to figure out a way to make real money because they took VC.

Good luck. Counting to $40,000 a year in $8 increments is really hard. Don’t handicap yourself by charging so little.

That is true. Thank you. We want to empower ourselves enough to invest back into product and make it awesome.

Specially during Covid we need to figure out how to stay alive without necessarily fundraising.

Personally I strongly favour building a sustainable business - but surely you can raise funds despite (because of! Given your market) the crisis?

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