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Comment by blep_ | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I'd prefer to just pay tiny constant monthly fees for things, than to have the mental overhead of knowing there is a nonzero cost for every search I do.

I am prone to microoptimizing things, and I would absolutely spend an objectively excessive amount of time and mental energy trying to avoid doing another search to save three cents.

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I have the same issue. If I'm paying 0.005$ for every search, I would stop searching because of the mental effort to optimize everything.

One alternative that could work, is to make a subscription service, and then reimburse the unused amount.

Like make people pay 20$/month, then do your micropayment system in the background, by the end of the month, refund them to difference if they didn't exceed that monthly value.

It creates a positive feeling instead of a constant background stress with every interaction.

Interesting to hear about how micro-payments would make you two feel.

This is indeed the theoretical expectation I had regarding micro-payments, but I was positively surprised to find out that I didn't care at all and in the end, I'm always positively surprised by the GPT-3 bill (I got much more value out of it than they charged me).

This does seem very likely to vary by person. I'm very much saying this from the perspective of "for my own sake, I hope this doesn't become the standard", rather than "this will never happen because everyone's brain is like my brain". I've made my share of blatantly wrong predictions based on the latter :)

If the level of a bill surprises you, you are financially irresponsible. That just doesn't gel with an adult beyond a certain age (barring some outliers), which is probably what you are seeing above.

I mentioned the same for me during the kagi search engine pricing discussions. Slight overpaying is fine, but paying per search would instantly create an illogical chilling effect for me.

I hope they don't listen to you, because paying per use is the best option and you can just get over it.

If they have a monthly fee I'll hesitate since if I reduce my usage for a unspecified while I'll never know if I should cancel it or not. It requires being able to predict the future, which is a cognitive cost I can't overcome.

Don’t worry, there are both camps in the discord. So there’ll probably be pre-paid credits as well as subscriptions.

Totally agree - I think the main issue with Kagi is that although they have clearly built out the service and are offering it for free at the moment, their premise that people will actually micropay for a search hasn't been tested yet.

It's easy to get users if you offer a paid service for free, but much more difficult to get people to pay for it.

(They have done surveys where people have said they would pay, but this is different to actually putting their credit card in and putting their money where their mouths are!)

To be fair, me and a bunch of other people are wondering why we still can’t pay ;) I’m perfectly happy with it and what I’d get for my $10-$20.

Hehe, I don't doubt that you will pay :)

I just also think there will be a non-zero proportion of people who absolutely promise and intend to pay, then won't put their credit card details in.

I also think there is a non-zero proportion of people who will search differently/less when every search costs them money!

I'm getting tired of all these monthly subscriptions that cost me $7-20 no matter of usage. Premium podcasts feet's, video streaming, Spotify. It's becoming a very real cost and mentally I'm bucketing it all together. Are others not getting subscription fatigue?

Edit: similarity, when I'm building a side project now O avoid everything with a fixed cost as much as possible. $5/month for a relational DB? nope, let's see how I can store data and only pay for storage and access.

Your other option for Kagi will be to pay-per-use (with pre-paid credits).

I don’t have that many subscriptions, so I’m not getting any fatigue ;)

Or you could just stop thinking about it. Especially because your subscription + refund would cost you exactly the same. You may want to set a cap on searches to 20$ per month.

I used to optimise things excessively (eg. when grocery shopping, phone spending pay as you go) - then I stopped when I realised it's not worth the effort compared to what I make in a day.

This is Proof of Stake.

Yes, this is the main argument in Clay Shirky's "The Case Against Micropayments" (2000) [1]. It holds up pretty well 20 years later.

Micropayments are not "pay $2 or $3 per month" (either flat-fee or average), there are plenty of successful examples of that. Micropayments are "pay $0.004 or $0.02 for reading this article or using this service now". As Shirky noted, the problem with micropayments are not the technology or transactions costs. The problem is that they require a huge amount of user time and attention, relative to the value of the item being bought. This has not changed in the past 20 years.

[1] http://mx.thirdvisit.co.uk/2002/10/04/theacaseaagainstamicro...

I always thought of micropayments as the equivalent of buying a bag of quarter-inch mini-Oreos. It can be advertised as a way to diet, and some people eat just one and do fine, but the business model only works because brains are bad at summing up a lot of very small things, and most people will end up eating more mass of cookie than they would with full-size Oreos.

I'm the opposite. I'm sick of subscription service fees, and would much rather pay per view/listen/read.

I'm also annoyed I can't get a cell plan in my country that just charges me a flat rate per GB of data I use. Instead I pay a flat monthly fee that includes "free" call minutes and messages that I never use.

In both cases I'm sure I'm overpaying and cross-subsidising people who consume a lot.

I'm even more opposite than you on internet data usage. It is wonderful to never have to think about how much I'm using. It's just not a thing that ever crosses my mind. If I click on a link to a 10MB monstrosity of a page and most of it gets through my adblocker, all I've lost is time.

I also use my unlimited minutes to answer all spam calls and immediately turn my microphone off, just in case they pay by usage, but that is somewhat less critical :)

I can totally see the other side of it, though. My brain is just structured such that the money-to-mental-effort tradeoffs don't work out for me.

I'd like to support news sites behind paywalls by reading a single article for $0.25 but I'm not willing to pay $10 a month for a subscription if I just want to read a random article every once in a while.

There are two different use cases and we need support for both.

Personally I prefer flat rate for unlimited everything if we're talking cell phone. It's not like I'll cancel it from month to month.

But for $random_site that is linked to from HN... no way I'll pay for a subscription. But I wouldn't pay 0.25 either for one article. Give up on the whale pricing and charge 1 cent.

This use case also needs a frictionless way of paying. No way I'm making an account for each site.

I imagine the line in the sand is the same as whether you enjoy all-inclusive resorts or pay as you go?

Why does it need to be?

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