jhartist

Two answers:

• The operating costs are very low, since all Easyful does is email your customers your content when they buy it.

• Our team at nicer.io is primarily a product agency, so when we make our own apps like Easyful, SimplePerks and Smallchat, they don't have the pressure to be highly-profitable. We often end up getting good connections, agency customers and referrals from these apps, and keeping them running and supported is pretty low-cost for us.

We started building Easyful while looking for a platform to fulfill orders for Standerd, a Figma UI kit our team uses that we sell:

https://www.standerd.co/

We’ve run Smallchat, a default-free saas app, for a few years now, supporting millions of users. Our experience: with low-operating-cost saas apps like this, you can add a paid tier with pro features if you get a lot of traction while keeping the base app free.

With Smallchat, for example, a small percentage of paid users more than covers the operating costs of our mostly-free user base.

Good question: because we’re not handling payment processing or anything, just emailing users your content, we think Easyful can be default-free forever. If we get a bunch of usage, we might build some more advanced pro features and sell those features as a paid tier. We’ve had success with that model before.

Stripe actually does collect VAT and helps you file and remit. Check out their docs page for doing this with Payment Links, which is what Easyful uses:

https://stripe.com/docs/tax/paymentlinks

Yeah, I wonder about that. My hope is that other platforms’ fees are high enough to motivate creators to switch, and the transition to Easyful is pretty fast for most users, especially if you already have a Stripe account.

But I guess we’ll see whether we get any traction!

Stripe actually handles taxes for you with Payment Links, and Easyful is just a fulfillment layer on top of that.

Check out the Stripe docs page about it: https://stripe.com/docs/tax/paymentlinks

Easyful is a layer on top of Stripe Payment Links that handles the fulfillment for you. All Easyful users are using Stripe Payment links.

Definitely check them out - they're great. Easyful is just a fulfillment layer that plugs into Stripe payment links for emailing customers your content when they buy something.

Good question: we are not a merchant of record, and Easyful doesn’t even process transactions. We’re just a fulfillment layer that plugs into Stripe payment links.

Gumroad is great! But their pricing model (flat 10%) doesn't make sense for many creators.

We think it's better for most creators to own their own Stripe accounts and use a lightweight fulfillment platform like Easyful instead.

Longer answer to your question here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37055297

tldr; we might add some paid features in the future but keep the base app free since operating costs are low.

Good question: we mostly built Easyful to use ourselves, but if it gets a significant of usage we might build some more advanced pro features and sell those features as a paid tier upgrade, while keeping the base app free.

We've had success with that model before with Smallchat, a saas app we launched several years ago, and it's still going strong supporting millions of free users.

With low-operating-cost saas apps, you can get away with offering a pretty generous free tier. A small percentage of paid users can more than pay for your mostly-free user base.

Hey HN!

I built https://wsbindex.com this week, a site that uses the Reddit and Pushshift APIs to compile popular posts each morning from r/wallstreetbets for fun and (maybe) profit.

The site uses incremental static regeneration, an easy way to add stale-while-revalidate data to your Next.js site. It’s especially handy for API integrations with rate limits.

If you like seeing Reddit-inspired projects like this, consider donating to the Pushshift API through its Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/pushshift

Pushshift is a free Reddit API that powers a lot of great Reddit bots and data-driven sites. I’m not affiliated with Pushshift at all, just a fan of free tools that lower the barrier to entry for devs to build cool stuff.

Hi HackerNews - Smallchat dev here.

There are a lot of great chat platforms out there. Smallchat is different in one way: we built it for the little guys. The freelancer. The local business. The small team launching a side project.

That means Smallchat has a free tier with no limits on the number of visitors, conversations, contacts, or operators. Your bill shouldn't go up if your site gets a wave of traffic or a new member joins your team.

We use Slack's new threads feature to keep all your conversations in one channel, so Smallchat doesn’t clutter up your Slack team with a bunch of new channels.

Smallchat's just getting started, so leave a comment if you have any feedback or advice on what features should be highest priority on our roadmap.

The endgame for Uber is replacing their drivers with self-driving cars. The legal distinction of employee/contractor can only matter for what, 15-20 years until that happens?