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toyg

Show me a (useful) website that costs less than $5 for lifetime access.

Many SAAS companies charge the same as an app, but per month, so you can't really compare it with a one-off payment.

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http://www.google.com/

I don't understand whether you're trolling or not. Google doesn't make you pay for access, last I checked.

>>> Show me a (useful) website that costs less than $5 for lifetime access.

The business model is often completely different for the web. We pay with our eyeballs (ads) and our thoughts (click data).

Nice. So that pretty much guarantees that only those SAAS apps that are operated by the largest corporations, and that harvest your personal data most efficiently, are the ones that dominate. Everything else is only that much more likely to disappear in an instant, taking with it not only all your documents, but the app's functionality itself as well. I really don't know what people like you are smoking.

I only smoke weed. But yes, outside of fairly niche markets, the largest corporations are dominating (Amazon AWS, Google Docs). It IS a lot more likely that any of these alternatives (http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-great-alternatives-to-google-...) will disappear with all your data than that Google Docs will. I'm not saying it's some awesome thing that big businesses can out price the little guys and I'm not saying that the profitable SAAS does not exist (Harvest, Github (most of Github's users don't pay a dime)). The simple reality is that most people get a fair amount of utility from free web services.

Exactly. It's a website that costs less than $5 to use, and its an immensely useful website.

Hard mode: one that costs more than zero dollars.

> per month

You're right in general (I was surprised at the jump from free to lowest paid tier for Dropbox), but fastmail.fm is <$5 per year.

http://www.pinboard.in/ The price has now risen above that level because it is successful, but it started lower. I think it qualifies for your request because the higher price in this case just demonstrates that the model has worked in this case.

(Pinboard's sign up price rises with the number of users)

My opinion is that the whole discussion on this topic is totally worthless and it's even starting to get annoying: all we see is articles saying “apps are dead, we should build on the web” and nobody doing it.

Even Google's – which should be on the front line championing the web – mobile web apps are crap. The best mobile web app, the only one that actually made me want to use that instead of an app because it worked very well and not out of principle was Twitter, until last week, then they broke scrolling like everyone else and now I hate it. Runner up is Facebook.

Why don't we see more people actually making mobile web apps instead of just writing articles about how other people should make them?

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