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Comment by insane_dreamer | Hacker News Reader

Congratulations on a very successful platform! (Success should be measured in usage/reach, not $).

You've probably thought of this, but it might be easier to charge a very small amount -- say $1/month, which most people even students, could afford, rather than rely on donations. If you get 1% of users paying that, it's still $20K month which is more than you're getting now. (Of course managing the payments themselves costs money).

It can still be non-profit (which is a great thing), so no one is getting rich off of it, and it doesn't poison the mission. But it could pay the bills.

Update: Processing fees are a problem as posters have pointed out, so you'd probably want to make it $10/year, or $5/six months. It's still an easily decision for a very large number of people.

Patreon has $1/month options, not sure how they do it though.

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Would $1/month even be worth it? It seems payment processors would take a big chunk out of that $1, which is why I very rarely see monthly subs of that amount.

Yeah, if you want that little, do Bitwardens $10 a year. $1 transactions are ripe for abuse, checking if cards are active.

You'd probably want to charge $10/year (once) rather than $1/month. It's still an easy choice for many people (of course still inaccessible for students in some countries).

Another option is to make deals with universities or schools for access for their students where they pay a certain amount per year and the students can all have access

Uni sales cycles are horrendous. take forever and fickle

Yeah, that would be a __lot__ of overhead. Not worth it. I'd instead focus on trying to find sponsors ("$100 / month allows us to give a free account to 100 students in X countries!")

I've always wanted to experiment with a $5 a month or $10 a year model for low-cost subscriptions.

Some payment processors have "micropayment" fee structures, where they take a higher % (5% in PayPal's case) for a lower fixed fee per transaction.

PayPal's traditional fee (for USD)[1] = 3.49% + $.3, for $1 = $0.3349

PayPal's micropayment fee (for USD)[2] = 4.99% + $.09, for $1 = $0.1349

Using that model would make sense in OP's case.

[1]: https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/merchant-fees#statemen...

[2]: https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/merchant-fees#micropay...

I did not know if Paypal had micropayments fee, thanks fir sharing!

Well, it's $12 a year. I always pay a sub for a year or two if it's that low.

You could use crypto for micro-transactions (it's one of the main problems that crypto was meant to solve). LiteCoin, for example, apparently has quite low fees[0] ($0.03-0.04) Monero much less than that. But enabling this in a frictionless manner for users is probably difficult (I don't own crypto myself).

[0] https://coinwire.com/cheapest-crypto-to-transfer/

Hasn't LiteCoin mining largely subsided and therefore is subject to 51% attacks?

> Congratulations on a very successful platform! (Success should be measured in usage/reach, not $).

Most organizations aim to survive as long as possible, so financial sustainability ($) is crucial.

How does it not "poison the mission" if it means 99% of users drop the platform?

Does that even matter if the mission is dead?

It matters for integrity. They promised 100% free forever. But anyway, death and betrayal aren't necessarily the only options. As others have suggested, they can try soliciting donations more forcefully.

If that doesn't work, they could introduce premium features. Stuff that obviously has to cost money would make the pill easier to swallow, for example, features that depends on third party services (only LLMs come to mind right now), or human assistance (real-life instructors). Admittedly, this would be a compromise. One could argue it fails on the 100% part, but another could argue that 100% of existing features remain free.

that's one percent more success at the mission than you have if you're forced to turn the servers off because you can't pay the bills. Money's to an organization what's oxygen is to a body, before you go and plan any missions you need to be able to sustain yourself.

Fair point. I used 1% at the very low end -- if the amount is small enough (in the $1/month range) I think the opt-in rate would be much higher.

I would then give a free account to anyone who asks. ("We know that even $1/month is a big ask for some folks in certain countries or they may even have a method by which to pay it. If that's you, let us know and apply for a free account here.") Then basically auto-approve (with some bot-screening mechanism) accounts that apply. Sure you'll get some abuse and people lying, but not that many people are going to lie just to save $1/month.

Another alternative is charging $10/month, but allowing students or anyone to request a waiving of fees. They just need to take a minimal speed-bump action to request it, e.g., sending an email once per year. Anyone who isn't willing to do this probably isn't getting much value anyway, and a non-trivial fraction of people (more than 1%) would plausibly pay $10/year just to avoid the speed bump or to support the mission.

>(Success should be measured in usage/reach, not $)

measuring success by how much people are willing to shift scarce resources in your direction is a perfectly good way to measure success. It's "weighted usage+reach". the remarkable effectiveness of markets in allocating resources this way is a huge achievement for civilization. I really had to scratch my head at their surprise that a non-profit oxymoron model, i mean, business model wasn't viable.

There will still be plenty of students (mainly from outside of the West) who will immediately lose access if anything gets paywalled by even a cent because of various reasons.

Yes, for sure. You could make it free for users in X countries, based on IP. Yes, people elsewhere could use a VPN to get around it and use it for free but you're charging so little that anyone who can afford or has a mechanism to pay won't go through the trouble.

> Success should be measured in usage/reach, not $

What? No.

If a business isn't able to sustain itself with its revenue, it has failed and will need to shut down. That's the definition of failure.

Lots of things can be "successful" by your metric by using unsustainable pricing.

This entirely. You can't eat using "good feelings" / "impact" alone.

Also the whole non-profit angle is immature in my opinion.

Non-profits denote nothing about their financial good-standing or moral good-standing. You can be an amoral non-profit, a moral for-profit or vice-versa. Your profit structure has nothing to do with the morals of the people inside of it.

Additionally, there a lot of non-profit executives that are profiting very healthily off of their work.

Non-profit simply tells people what the incentives/motivations are or are not.

The average for-profit company can't be trusted/expected to do what's best for anyone outside the profit structure (e.g. users or the public at large). Of course you can have exceptions in either direction, but on average for-profit orgs will likely be willing to fuck over anyone else to increase profits - intentionally or not - because profit growth is literally their purpose.

'Non-profit' advertises that you don't have to worry about that specific, powerful motivation of the org contending with your best interests.

Unfortunately, in practice, this isn't really true.

It's a less powerful motivation, in that there are not shareholders who will benefit from growth.

But in practice, executives and managers end up making more, which provides an incentive for growth.

Completely agree. In the end, it's all about the motivation and ethics of the owners. For an extereme example: OpenAI is "non-profit".

Not everything beneficial to the world has a viable business model.

In the best case, you get to change the world and make a bunch of money. Sometimes, you just have a viable business selling sugar water. And other times, you're doing something really good that's just not going to get you paid.

There's nothing wrong with the last thing, other than its potential lack of sustainability.

I'm now a teacher; I could easily make 10x my comp elsewhere; possibly 100x. Measured on your scale, the only value is what I'm getting paid. But it turns out that those good feelings are worth something to me.

I don't think anyone is arguing that the good feelings aren't worth anything but rather that we are all humans with mouths to feed at the end of the day. If your comp went down 90% or even started costing you substantial money, at some point you too would probably reconsider being a teacher.

> And other times, you're doing something really good that's just not going to get you paid.

This. I feel that this has been missed in the thread a little.

Yeah, you can’t deposit vibes at the bank, and employees can’t pay their mortgages with them either.

A sustainable business demands some kind of ongoing income.

From TFA, they’re not a business, they’re non-profit.

Nonprofits are businesses.

They aren't. Look it up in the dictionary.

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/business

Someone's profession (their "business") can certainly be working at a nonprofit, but that's because they are getting paid. The nonprofit organization itself is not a business. You might be looking for the word "corporation", which can include nonprofits.

I don't need to look it up because I've started two nonprofits and more than a dozen corporations.

Nonprofits in the US literally are corporations, just with a different tax status. They need revenue that exceeds their costs. Many of them sell things. They can even turn a profit. Ikea operates as a nonprofit in the US.

I know nonprofits are corporations. That’s what I already said above. You claimed they were businesses, which is incorrect and which I disputed.

Requiring more revenue than costs does not a business make. You starting a nonprofit does not give you special insight into the meaning of words. I am the treasurer on the board of a nonprofit. I have had to go through the books quarterly, confirm we’ve got enough cash for a year of runway, etc. The understanding of what nonprofits do is not the issue. This is a boring dispute over words (semantics).

Remember, you initiated this dispute over words when you made an argument “by definition” and you criticized KolmogorovCamp’s correct use of the distinction between nonprofits and businesses.

It may not be successful long-term with this model, but it's been very successful so far.

You do know Twitter never made a profit, right? And Lyft is 14 years old and is not profitable...And GitLab does not make money...And Zillow is not profitable...And Snap is not profitable.

And that does make it the correct approach somehow? How will this business continue to exist in 1, 2, 5 years?

Someone has to pay (paid) for this business a.k.a. is actively loosing money.

Don't most payment platforms have a constant minimum fee per transaction? That would hurt you at a $1 price.

I think this makes a lot of sense. Same model as TryHackMe.

Yeah their minimum is $10, which for me, I can only justify if I daily your project, or use it frequently. I love the site, but I don't use it nearly enough to justify this cost. $5 I might forget about. There's a site I rarely use that I pay $3.99 for, because its <= $5.

I'm guessing fees make it not worthwhile, maybe they should negotiate lowered fees from their payment service, or figure out someone else who would give them drastically lower fee rates.

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