This attitude is why the internet is full of ads. Doing shit for free doesn’t happen on an empty stomach. I’d rather pay a fair price for software and services I use. I’m not saying anyone’s pricing is fair, just pointing out I don’t agree with this behavior.
I’d rather, and I do, donate to apps like Blender, LibreOffice, Wikipedia, and Lemmy, etc. Free to use for people who can’t afford to donate. I donate monthly to those because I use them a lot and I can afford it.
Sounds like we’re in agreement, great. Not everything can have that scheme but I support things as best I can, again as long as it’s fair. Affordability is different for everyone.
That’s not really my point, but for what it’s worth I don’t mind if I was paying for something and it allowed you to use it because you can’t afford it.
Nothing in life is free, someone’s paying for it. If I use a service, I think it’s fair for me to pay a fair price.
Naah. People actually paying for the subscription what drives it. YouTube was ad free backing the day. And when they allowed adds. It was intentionally to create an annoyance that they cooked profit from- so that when they offered a add free, they could ALSO profit from.
A one time fee, I understand. A monthly rate to use a web browser is shameful.
Most platforms usually start ad free and with no restrictions. That’s how they capture a chunk of the market. Then, once they have an established customer base, they typically introduce ads or a subscription so they can actually pay for the hardware and bandwidth the service runs on.
This is what YouTube, Google, and pretty much everyone did. It’s the standard play book.
One-time fees are not feasible for this type of business model. If the server costs are ongoing, meaning you have to pay for the user’s usage constantly, then you need to either constantly charge them too, take money out of your own pocket to subsidize it, or sell customer data to once again subsidize it. Nothing is free.
A one-time fee would have to be absurdly high (think hundreds of dollars) to take into account multiple years of usage, otherwise it’s too risky and you’re most likely losing money.
This mindset that subscriptions are all evil when hardware and bandwidth are billed to you every month/year is ridiculous.
Kagi at least is honest from the get go and never tried to trick customers into believing their service would be free forever. That’s what’s actually shitty behavior, when companies put out a product that they then enhsittify for the purposes of extracting profit.
Kagi was a subscription from the get go and told you that’s how they pay their bills, and in return you get the service they promised with no compromises. I’m not arguing whether the price is fair, but at least the business model is honest and doesn’t try to take advantage of me and my data.
At least make prices fucking progressive. If you’re under certain poverty threshold, you don’t pay anything. If you’re over that same threshold, you pay an amount equivalent to what you actually have, so if you’re barely over the threshold, then you pay drastically less than the ones that have the more money.
I don’t understand this line of thinking. A one time fee for an internet service you could potentially use for a decade? I host a number of small projects online and if I scale them way down in terms of hardware resources and don’t add a database or external services (required for basically any functionality), I’m still paying a few bucks a month. Add a database to it and it doubles. Now add a fucking crawler and your egress data rates are gonna climb quick. Not to mention the domain name itself is $12-15 a year.
A one time fee is not compatible with an online service. Ads historically have filled this gap for recurring revenue. If you don’t want ads, there’s literally no other ethical choice to make sure you can stay in business and ideally turn a small profit.
You keep mentioning YouTube was ad free, and sure. But that’s the classic Silicon Valley model. Offer a great product cheaper (ad free) than others, gain adoption, and once you have a huge user base, start to ratchet up the price. Either via ads or subscriptions. You need deep pockets and lots of VC money to make this work and ultimately you’re pulling a bit of a bait and switch on your users. Is that the model you want to support?
Youtube also didn’t have a subscription option back in the day, and it also limited the length of videos you could upload. Things cost money to run, and something on the scale of Youtube costs a lot of money to run.
Now to be clear, I don’t pay for Youtube or watch ads, but that’s more because I object to directly giving Google my money with how much value they already generate just tracking and selling what browsing habits I am unable to obscure from them. If there was an option to pay Google $5-10 a month with the enforceable assurance that it came with absolutely no personal tracking and data collection, I would strongly consider it.
You would understand a one-time fee for an active, ongoing, online service?? I’m a fucking communist, please don’t make me defend capitalism…
Even back in the day, people would buy versions of software on disks and updates were limited. There’s a reason why the idea of perpetual licenses died hard and fast and every company everywhere either reneged or died.
I pay for Kagi. If they offered a “one-time lifetime purchase” I’d probably just stop because that would be a giant red flashing neon warning sign.
Why don’t you make an alternative without ads or subscriptions? I’d love to use a video platform as big as youtube without having to pay with money or my attention.
Quick question, how were you planning to cover costs?
Aaah! So you weren’t around when YouTube was add-free for over a decade.
EDIT: it’s amazing how many people flock to defend the monetizing of YouTube and how they run their shit, yet so many people whine about how they monetized.
Actually that’s a quite typical time for tech start-up to break even. The whole time they’re funded by business angels.
But for some cases, the loss can be considerable, and still the “start-up” keeps finding investors. Ex: Uber, lost 30 G$ on over 14years before turning around. Or just look at all the AI pure-players companies right now.
Yes, that’s quite typical, if you manage to find a rich investor. But that only happens if you have a way to eventually make a profit. If you say from the start you’re never going to have ads or subscriptions so you’re never going to make money with this, you’re not going to find an investor.
YouTube started with a lot of angel funding, which is why it eventually monetized in the way that it has
YouTube began as an angel-funded enterprise working from a makeshift office in a garage. In November 2005, venture firm Sequoia Capital invested an initial $3.5 million,[20] and Roelof Botha (a partner of the firm and former CFO of PayPal) joined the YouTube board of directors. In April 2006, Sequoia and Artis Capital Management invested an additional $8 million in the company, which had experienced significant growth in its first few months.
This attitude is why the internet is full of ads. Doing shit for free doesn’t happen on an empty stomach. I’d rather pay a fair price for software and services I use. I’m not saying anyone’s pricing is fair, just pointing out I don’t agree with this behavior.
I’d rather, and I do, donate to apps like Blender, LibreOffice, Wikipedia, and Lemmy, etc. Free to use for people who can’t afford to donate. I donate monthly to those because I use them a lot and I can afford it.
Sounds like we’re in agreement, great. Not everything can have that scheme but I support things as best I can, again as long as it’s fair. Affordability is different for everyone.
Not all people can pay anything (myself, for example). I’m with him, and Kagi isn’t FOSS too so it’s even worst.
Things should be not only accesible, but also affordable for all.
That’s not really my point, but for what it’s worth I don’t mind if I was paying for something and it allowed you to use it because you can’t afford it.
Nothing in life is free, someone’s paying for it. If I use a service, I think it’s fair for me to pay a fair price.
Naah. People actually paying for the subscription what drives it. YouTube was ad free backing the day. And when they allowed adds. It was intentionally to create an annoyance that they cooked profit from- so that when they offered a add free, they could ALSO profit from.
A one time fee, I understand. A monthly rate to use a web browser is shameful.
Most platforms usually start ad free and with no restrictions. That’s how they capture a chunk of the market. Then, once they have an established customer base, they typically introduce ads or a subscription so they can actually pay for the hardware and bandwidth the service runs on.
This is what YouTube, Google, and pretty much everyone did. It’s the standard play book.
One-time fees are not feasible for this type of business model. If the server costs are ongoing, meaning you have to pay for the user’s usage constantly, then you need to either constantly charge them too, take money out of your own pocket to subsidize it, or sell customer data to once again subsidize it. Nothing is free.
A one-time fee would have to be absurdly high (think hundreds of dollars) to take into account multiple years of usage, otherwise it’s too risky and you’re most likely losing money.
This mindset that subscriptions are all evil when hardware and bandwidth are billed to you every month/year is ridiculous.
Kagi at least is honest from the get go and never tried to trick customers into believing their service would be free forever. That’s what’s actually shitty behavior, when companies put out a product that they then enhsittify for the purposes of extracting profit.
Kagi was a subscription from the get go and told you that’s how they pay their bills, and in return you get the service they promised with no compromises. I’m not arguing whether the price is fair, but at least the business model is honest and doesn’t try to take advantage of me and my data.
At least make prices fucking progressive. If you’re under certain poverty threshold, you don’t pay anything. If you’re over that same threshold, you pay an amount equivalent to what you actually have, so if you’re barely over the threshold, then you pay drastically less than the ones that have the more money.
I don’t understand this line of thinking. A one time fee for an internet service you could potentially use for a decade? I host a number of small projects online and if I scale them way down in terms of hardware resources and don’t add a database or external services (required for basically any functionality), I’m still paying a few bucks a month. Add a database to it and it doubles. Now add a fucking crawler and your egress data rates are gonna climb quick. Not to mention the domain name itself is $12-15 a year.
A one time fee is not compatible with an online service. Ads historically have filled this gap for recurring revenue. If you don’t want ads, there’s literally no other ethical choice to make sure you can stay in business and ideally turn a small profit.
You keep mentioning YouTube was ad free, and sure. But that’s the classic Silicon Valley model. Offer a great product cheaper (ad free) than others, gain adoption, and once you have a huge user base, start to ratchet up the price. Either via ads or subscriptions. You need deep pockets and lots of VC money to make this work and ultimately you’re pulling a bit of a bait and switch on your users. Is that the model you want to support?
Youtube also didn’t have a subscription option back in the day, and it also limited the length of videos you could upload. Things cost money to run, and something on the scale of Youtube costs a lot of money to run.
Now to be clear, I don’t pay for Youtube or watch ads, but that’s more because I object to directly giving Google my money with how much value they already generate just tracking and selling what browsing habits I am unable to obscure from them. If there was an option to pay Google $5-10 a month with the enforceable assurance that it came with absolutely no personal tracking and data collection, I would strongly consider it.
You would understand a one-time fee for an active, ongoing, online service?? I’m a fucking communist, please don’t make me defend capitalism…
Even back in the day, people would buy versions of software on disks and updates were limited. There’s a reason why the idea of perpetual licenses died hard and fast and every company everywhere either reneged or died.
I pay for Kagi. If they offered a “one-time lifetime purchase” I’d probably just stop because that would be a giant red flashing neon warning sign.
Why don’t you make an alternative without ads or subscriptions? I’d love to use a video platform as big as youtube without having to pay with money or my attention.
Quick question, how were you planning to cover costs?
Aaah! So you weren’t around when YouTube was add-free for over a decade.
EDIT: it’s amazing how many people flock to defend the monetizing of YouTube and how they run their shit, yet so many people whine about how they monetized.
I wonder if they’re the same people.
Over a decade of running at a loss. That is only possible for companies, like Google, that are already very rich.
Actually that’s a quite typical time for tech start-up to break even. The whole time they’re funded by business angels.
But for some cases, the loss can be considerable, and still the “start-up” keeps finding investors. Ex: Uber, lost 30 G$ on over 14years before turning around. Or just look at all the AI pure-players companies right now.
Yes, that’s quite typical, if you manage to find a rich investor. But that only happens if you have a way to eventually make a profit. If you say from the start you’re never going to have ads or subscriptions so you’re never going to make money with this, you’re not going to find an investor.
It ran at a financial loss every year until more recently.
YouTube started with a lot of angel funding, which is why it eventually monetized in the way that it has
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_YouTube
Costs that they’re now paying for with ads and subscriptions. So I’ll ask again. What would you do differently?