Show HN: Create a paid link to anything
paidlink.to
paidlink.to
For most things being sold you'll want an account attached. If this is a song or a book then you probably want to at least have functionality like reviews, ratings and recommendations.
Whatever it is that you're selling probably forms part of some sort of established relationship -- I don't recall ever getting out my credit card and paying $5 for something from a random link on Twitter.
It also seems abuse prone. If we're supposed to share these paid links, that creates an incentive for scammers and trolls to create their own links and get people's money while delivering nothing. That means customers will lose confidence in the system, vendors will get screwed, and the company will be hit with chargebacks. This seems like a dangerous business model.
For the vendor side, this seems to be a redirector, so once the first person pays, they can share the URL they got redirected to. This doesn't seem like a good business plan.
EDIT: I just got one to load. This is all I get:
"This link costs $15.00 to access. You are trying to accessed a link through PaidLink.to, which requires payment to proceed. Fill out your payment details below."
What the heck am I even paying $15 for? I haven't a clue. Not only there's no preview, there's not even a description!
Screenshot for anyone having issues: https://imgur.com/YIsypEN
This explanation strikes me as being closest. There is a well known problem, which is that using the non-crypto payment systems for things is difficult, by disintermediating the payment provider from the product the paidlink guys can say they have clean hands.
VISA: "What are you selling?"
PL: "Links"
VISA: "Links to what? Prohibited items?"
PL: "Oh no, our TOS doesn't allow that, we tell our customers not do do that."
VISA: "Can you verify that they don't?"
PL: "Uh, well as far as our platform is concerned their just links, you know like groceries are just groceries, we don't get into the nitty gritty of what exactly they are."
The weird thing is, even if the PL guys are 100% aligned with not letting their customers use this for "bad things" their customers are going to try to find ways around any systems they put in place to check or regulate.
Watching the shenanigans people pulled to get around our efforts to prevent the misuse of Blekko (a search engine) was really educational in that regard.
The locker displays the qr code and polls for payment status
The ability to create a link that you click on, and it only gives you access to the results after you pay some money, has been implemented by many frameworks and commerce "stacks". Given that if you implement something that way with an off the shelf front end, you probably already have the capability to gateway the link with a payment ask. So that sets up the situation that we have a thing that just does one part of this kind of the thing, the pay when you click. Sort of "instant paywall for URIs" kind of thing. I think the question "Why would I use that?" or "What problem is this trying to solve?" implies that there is something about the well known solutions that prevents you from using them.
My guess was that you wouldn't use one of the existing solutions if you wanted to obfuscate the connection between the payment and the product. And it is just a guess, I have no investment in it being "the actual reason" or being right about my guess, just speculating here.
From your comment it suggests that you know of "desirable purposes" for just such a service. (which sounds like a problem solution right?) I would love to hear them. I am sure I'll learn something new and that will be awesome.
Bar with a cover charge puts a QR code on the front door. QR code leads you to a paid link, you pay for access, it shows a thumbs up, you show the bouncer, they let you in.
Let's the venue track how many people showed up, doesn't require a whole account situation, and also reduces the need for people to deal with card processing or cash at the door. Also let's you come and go without a wristband or stamp or something else to verify you already paid. Trivial to change the URL each day so you can't use a previous day. Or let it ride for weekend access, etc
Not sure if better solutions already exist though
I think you're on to something here. Much like cryptocurrencies, I'm thinking that the most important uses here are at best questionably legitimate. Very few honest and above-board businesses have an interest in obfuscating what's being sold like this, but quite a few less legitimate ones do. Hit a URL to send money? Sounds great for money laundering, fraud, or extortion when you can move money around using convenient services and the veneer of legitimacy.
But on the other hand, this might be a plausible deniability sort of thing. This way paidlink.to doesn't host anything, they don't even say what it is that they're going to direct the user to. This might be an attempt to keep payment processors off their back as long as possible.
It may not work forever but since next to nothing is being provided, this site is extremely cheap to setup and run, which means it won't take long to pay off.
This significantly lowers the bar for what is required to have a "webshop" like page. For example: a Reddit post can have a product description, with payment links directly in the description, and reviews in the comments. How convenient is that?
2.
> What the heck am I paying for?
I assume you accessed their example link. In practice you would have clicked the link from a page describing what you are paying for.
I'm not affiliated with the product. Just found this a really cool and innovative idea.
Sure, at the exact moment you're entering your card details, it doesn't say what the product is.
However, it seems this could be changed quite trivially. Just add an optional `description` field to the form used to generate the url, and let the description be displayed on the payment page.
And I've used such services, yes. But this looks way too minimalistic to me to be useful.
On Patreon I subscribe to a specific artist. I know who they are and they can know me if we talk to each other. I can favorite posts, provide feedback, get perks, etc. When an artist says that for $10 I'll get access to their latest sketches that's a public announcement on Patreon, and if they don't hold up their promise, fans will get upset.
Here there's an obscure link. I don't know what I'm paying for, or who made it. I don't know whether it belongs to the actual person who's supposed to benefit. Somebody could pay for the first access, make their own link and then leech off the actual artist by spreading their link around.
Even if I followed a link and expect to be paying, a scammer could also send me a link to the same content. I expected to pay through this site so I go ahead and pay for the content. Since I followed the scammer's link they get paid instead of the content owner.
This is a system just rife with abuse potential.
Sure, but that was a problem that already existed. People already sell other people's artworks / pictures / etc.. Having to copy a file rather than a link is not a significant barrier.
> Even if I followed a link and expect to be paying, a scammer could also send me a link to the same content. I expected to pay through this site so I go ahead and pay for the content. Since I followed the scammer's link they get paid instead of the content owner.
Presumably you're getting the link from somewhere reputable - the creator's own site, or their patreon/twitter/etc.. Sure, a scammer can create a fake profile to impersonate them - but again, that's something that already happens.
It's not helped that there's no preview of the content or creator's site branding to give some indication of an intentional connection between the creator and paid link.
How does anything like that help though? The scammer can download the file and host it themselves and you're right back where you started, and that's always going to be the case.
If it's a link, it's available to anyone if they have it
Of course you wouldn't just pay money for some random link you found on Google search.
First you claim this is useless, then, in this reply you claim that you've used similar services before. Make up your mind.
Yes, it's simplistic and ugly af. But don't attack the idea.
And, I guess, you got that link from somewhere, or rather from someone.
One of the reasons that Bitcoin never took off for their stated purpose, payment, is that they had a similarly too-simple model of irreversible one-shot transfers. Anybody who has worked on an actual payment system can tell you that commerce is more complex than that.
The bigger issues with BTC is the onboarding problem, limited capacity and rapidly fluctuating exchange rate.
But I think you're missing my point. The anonymous, one-shot nature of things made it most appealing to only one set of merchants and one set of customers: people doing crime, and who were therefore most tolerant of the risks.
The onboarding problem is also partly a consequence of this. Because a bitcoin transaction is irreversible, and exchange can't just take a credit card payment and give you bitcoin.
I would use Bitcoin to play poker online because the alternative was using Western Union - which is much more of a hassle.
Because of this issue, online poker sites now use Litecoin, BSV, BCH, etc.
See: bovada.lv and other poker sites who still offer their services to US players
I don't think you can claim it as deflationary overall, but yeah, volatile for sure, riskier as well. But it's not like that's the only currency you take a risk with. When I had a plane ticket refunded to me that was settled in Euros I ate a $50 difference due to conversion fees (which were not refunded to me by Paypal). So currency conversion is a risk anyway.
Slow is also relative, a wire would take several days to come in. If I write you a check it takes a few months to clear, even though the bank will lend you that money before it clears.
And I would claim using those methods of payment is more inconvenient. Credit cards are not exactly equivalents because those funds are lent to you by a bank and you pay them back later.
The equivalent for Bitcoin would be Lightning Network, but it's not really usable right now, if it will ever be. Your channel might be closed after 45 days of not using it and other surprises you will experience if you actually use it.
For smaller payments it's actually better to accept 0 conf BCH payments. It has a feature called double spend proofs where after 3 seconds (the time it takes to enter the mempool of all of the nodes) it can detect whether this transaction is being double-spent
You can still double-spend it, but you need a pool with a decent chunk of mining power of the whole network to help you. So for a $1,000,000 payment it would be worth hacking the network (since you are a big pool operator you need it to be worth your while), but not for a $3 coffee
This is pretty much what solution in search of a problem is. "Here, we made this thing that solves this problem someone could theoretically have." crickets
(Edit) In terms of transparency, there isn't really much to find out about of who is behind this service. From the terms of service (hosted by another domain) we learn:
Neptune Technologies, United States (no further address details)
But there's an email address, and this is the site behind that domain: http://www.neptune.is (???)
The other issues with this site aside, affiliate programs don't require the user purchase the item that brought them to the site. There's a book I found myself recommending quite often, so I created an affiliate account at a retailer and started using that link when I recommended it online. I make about $100 each quarter off of site referrals, but almost no one buys the book -- instead they follow the link, click on something in a related items carousel and buy one of those items. Sometimes the time between click and purchase is pretty long (weeks or even months), but as long as the affiliate cook persists I get a percentage of the purchase price.
Who is the subject? Because in my mind, for most things sold, as the buyer, you actually just want the product/service.
> I don't recall ever getting out my credit card and paying $5
Even if you never shopped in a retail store or dined in a restaurant and paid with your credit card (which seems somewhat unlikely) you are familiar with the concept of paying for something "random" as a one of. What's the conceptual hurdle?
But oh boy this seems to be an invitation to money laundering. 3 2 1 and people are going to put up links, and buy them themselves with stolen credit cards.
It's quite possible this isn't determined yet. It might exactly be a solution searching for a problem, intentionally so.
The creator can implement the idea and launch it as a proof-of-concept, and see if anyone comes up with any good use cases for it. Maybe it goes nowhere, but maybe it's worth a shot at hitting it big in some unforeseen niche.
Imagine, for example, Musk's twitter requiring payment to see what some user's post linked to somewhere else off of Twitter.
Not saying its a good idea. It's mafia-esque, tbh.
If I create a perfectly reputable storefront with a "We use thirdparty paidlink.to for simple one-time purchases", it's quite easy to understand how you get customers to use this. It's no different than "We use stripe, I promise this popup window that asks for credit information is legit".
2 vendors is infinitely worse than 1, because they can blame each other for whatever goes wrong, creating an unbreakable circle of blame. If I try to chargeback paidlink.to, they can say "the link works, not our fault that the user and InterestingContentForSaleSite.com disagree on the value of the link".
At least PayPal has some reputation for consumer protection.
As an example, I buy sheet music PDFs from online stores. The stores often show the first part of a PDF and then you pay and get access to download the PDF.
It would be easy to imagine then replacing their system with this.
As a customer, I see no real difference. If I paid the store and didn't get the sheet music, of probably be stuck in credit card chargeback hell anyway.
As the store, there are probably some downsides. E.g. their own system can probably give me a unique link. That link may expire after I use it. With this system, there's nothing preventing me from tweeting the link if I wanted to.
If I've paid for a piece of sheet music and my discord group says "hey, can we get a link to it?" I might not even think twice about just posting the link to the url. But if I actually have to upload it to some file sharing website and then post the link to that url, I've really made it clear to myself that I'm sharing something that shouldn't be shared.
Obviously they're the same thing, but I feel like adding barriers to sharing probably does reduce them somewhat.
And stripes pay links are badly advertised.
One is that I don't see PayPal support. Typing credit card info into any site not owned by a billion dollar company is a bit scary.
Secondly, and this is just a personal thing, I'm not sure it would support any of my ideas that might be a use case.
Do you have any plans to add the ability to handle membership or paid unique codes? As a lone dev, I would prefer to never touch anyone's financial info.
It would be cool if there was a service that would handle accounts and user data 100% so an app never had to touch it whatsoever.
It could provide Oauth2 SSO or something, but only if the user paid.
Or it could just act as a paid proxy that adds a secret API key plus the user's per-site anonymized ID and membership level.
It could even have an API fot the app to store files on the proxy, which the user would have full access to in their account portal.
That way an app developer never stores any user data at all, you could make a paid app just by making an open access unpaid app and hiding it behind the proxy.
I get the PayPal support, but why are you so averse to typing in a credit card for a company who maybe makes 1 million a year?
PayPal loses credit card information to hackers and there’s congressional investigations, dodgy website selling “links” gets hacked and it’s all about “buyer beware”.
Do they?
How do you ensure the paid links are safe to visit, and it won't redirect me to a malicious website?
Any link you click on a page could lead to a malicious site. But again, if you trust the seller, why would you think they would link you to a malicious site?
I wonder how they'll police that?
Do they have a reputation? If a third party mediates the sale (eg eBay) do they have policies in place to handle such issues?
Is it up to this website though? It's like asking URL shorteners to check the malicious activity of original links.
Imagine this catches on. Now I'm not sure why would it, but let's suppose we have a paid link to a book, or song, or download, or something else useful. If this link is ever shared anywhere public, there's an incentive for spammers and trolls to create their own links and try to get paid for nothing.
Probable end result: platforms start banning links to paidlink.to, because a lot of people get cheated out of their money.
More cynically, if it catches on like you mentioned, the OP probably already made a shit ton of money from a simple and IMO elegant idea.
That's the same as for any other sale over the internet. There are lots of fake web stores that scam people.
also we're nerds, we ask questions and shit. it's fine. nobody means anything by it.
Isn't this exactly how Gumroad started too right here on HN?
> Over this past weekend I had the idea to build a sort of link shortener but with a payment system built-in. There have been many times in the past where I wanted to share a link - on Twitter or just through IM with a few friends - but did not want to go through the overhead of setting up a whole store.
All the same comments as here, but I suppose they ultimately pivoted away from the link format. I suppose it's the perfect MVP though!
Lean startups have been rejected in favor of “Do all the big work up front and then we’ll see if we like it”. It’s MVP fatigue.
Yes. But you can absolutely want to and actually do make your own file storage and syncing service with web interface and desktop integration and whatnot. In fact, nobody can stop you!
This site...well, I can't even tell what it does aside from creating a paywall link that requires $X to bypass. And on that payment page there's no hint as to what you're buying.
And after you've gotten a new link...then what? Someone can just post that link everywhere? Or is there some kind of API that unlocks a link? Or...?
The service has very questionable usability. Gumroad has obvious utility. That's the difference.
Although, I haven't tried.
Edit: I assumed wrong.
Some examples off the top of my head:
- I'm selling something to exactly one person - I met someone on discord and I'll sell them a writeup on how to do X in language Y for $5, or I'm selling an art commission or something. I use this service to send them a link.
- I'm selling a somewhat niche infoproduct - the "Expert's guide to using jq to parse stripe data" or something. I expect most people to find it via my blog or newsletter where I talk about jq a lot. I don't think many people will pirate it and I use this paid link to distribute it.
- I'm selling something time-bound, like "Joe's guide to the 2022 world cup tournament for programmers," and I expect that I'll make whatever money I'm going to make on this guide pretty quickly before people get around to sharing the link for free.
- I'm selling something that's paid now, but that I plan to make free next week. "Click this link to buy early access to my yadayadayada!"
If you want to actively prevent sharing of the post-paywall content, Gumroad and plenty of other options already exist for that use-case.
These people obviously don't care much about piracy (and probably don't need to, either) and don't seem interested in setting up another service like Gumroad/Patreon/OnlyFans, so being able to trivially automate their existing manual processes sounds pretty handy.
Don't ask me about CORS, XSS, CSRF...
It seems to do that securely requires proxying the resource but that’s not a great idea for platform content (It would likely break the site: You would need to rewrite all static and dynamic links to resources in order to host the platform under a different domain. You would also be responsible for bandwidth fees for relaying the content.) and redirecting would expose the platform’s open url to the resource.
Very low trust for a service like yours.
FWIW the content on it is great. Very concise and to the point. It's just the look and feel I'm referring to.
However, I think you need to consider the overloading of the term "link" in your product. I know it's your name, but the example shows just how confusing the overloading of the term is to your users. Here's the breakdown of what my mind does as it scans the example link page:
- Ah, I'm at a site, "Paid Link dot To"
- "This link costs $15 to access" - OK, the seller page I just left is selling me something called a "link"
- "You are trying to accessed a link" - Skip over typo...OK, what's the link I tried to access? Like, what's even the thing I was trying to do on the last page?
- "Autofill your card with Link" - Huh? The link already has my card?
- "... or create a Link account" - Is link the name of the site I'm on, the site I came from, or the thing I'm buying? Why do I need/want an account from any of them? If any of them, I'm assuming the account I should want to create is with the seller with whom I've just decided to transact business.
- "Link logo Learn More" - Is this the link I need to click on to get the thing I want? Like a "Download Now" button on a link scam website like softpedia?
- "Access Link" - does this button take me to my Link account? A new website called Link? Ah, it's the content I've been after this whole time.
Certainly none of that is insurmountable for the user, but I just wanted to put it out there to give you my impression as someone who's brand new to your site.
Doesn't work, though, it Server Errors.
Also, out of $1.00 I net only $0.25?
> https://paidlink.to/l/aofBHyHOkU
(Obviously, don't click through, it doesn't go anywhere for your $15.00).
How does this service prevent the actual (free) URL of the content from being visible / shared after a user pays? It seems like this would be difficult for some of the use cases presented (YouTube, Wordpress, etc) without managing the backend.
And how long does the buyer have access? How do they regain access to the link later?
Congratulations!
So far for the onboarding process I have:
- signup by giving email and password; does not appear to be an email confirmation
- Thank you for registering, [insert-signup-email]. Next, we will have you register with our payment processor, Stripe, to collect payments for your link. (Link to “Continue to Stripe”)
- No idea.
__________
Edit: In searching for their pricing found a competitor that’s charging 0.5-1% of the transaction:
Also, that way we would not need to setup a stripe account.
Our team's background is in content so we initially were imagining this as a paywall for one-off content. You could put these monetized links inside a newsletter or twitter stream for instance and get an easy to create payment stream from your exiting users.
Over the product's development we have found support with the web3 community doing token gating (get the premium content if you own an NFT for instance).
This can be used, for instance, by gig workers to deliver documents to their clients, while conditioning the retrieval of such documents to a payment.
1. How much margin does the platform charge? 2. Why can't I see a preview to what I am paying for? 3. How is it better than Gumroad, Stripe and others? Margins, ease of use etc, whatever your arguments are, I would love a detailed explanation.
e.g. I went to somewhere and bought an e-giftcard of $1000, I use $100 of it to buy a licensed software and download it, I pay another $50 for an online subscription,etc.
So I do not need disclose my location and even my name when I do not need to, this is basically a simple bitcoin-style-debit-card-for-online-purchases.
does such thing exist? any online stores accept that? if not why not.
Embedded browsers and iOS safari do sign transactions using WalletConnect. Or you can deeplink into a wallet dapp browser too.
For most things my gut says deeplinking to a dapp is going to kill conversion. Use cases I'm thinking are selling audio samples or a sewing pattern... stuff people use gumroad for.
I wonder how the transaction costs compare at these price points ($1-20). Hoping that's gotten better. Last time I tried sending eth it only made sense for big transactions.
Or pay sum that become public once the sum of payments from everybody reaches given value.
Payment processing is not the hard part there.
The UX is as follows:
> Server Error (500)
This is very common, but still rude.
> Start working with Tailwind CSS that can provide everything you need to generate awareness, drive traffic, connect.
Is it a library/backend/hosted-form? (For just $499 - you save $500!!!)
Is it a payment gateway? Do they spare you the need for pp/stripe/CC account ?!
I cant possibly image what the other 90 plugins do...
This is an alternative to something like woocommerce if you only have digital merchandise, and makes restricting access to files easy
You should definitely work on getting an API together. I could see people building services on top of this if there was a programmatic way to create paid links.
So many problems here. Once I have the link, I can just re-share it and bypass the paywall. For starters.
But also, smaller stuff... the UX on the paywall is bad. It needs a preview... UX on the whole of the site is very bad. If you're going to charge, make sure it's a good experience. Not just something that looks like someone slapped it together in a basement in an hour. Get a real designer, a logo, a brand theme... It'll add trust.
The costs seem to not be great in terms of what the content creator gets to keep.
A FAQ would be nice.
scenario: You share a link with me, earn $0.50, i notice people willing to pay for it.
I then go on to create my own link once I have access to the site. I now earn the money.
I can also share the original link once I paid.
This is also ripe for abuse because it intentionally hides the original url, so it could be taking you to a scam site after a paywall. Or worse, if you always conceal the original url, the perfect way to get people to pay and put in their google passwords into another site.
I cannot see this being anything positive.
Show me an example.
Here you go: https://paidlink.to/l/aofBHyHOkU
(from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34067109#34067410)
(does not look pretty with JS disabled, there's an icon the size of my screen)