The toxic side of free – how I lost the love for my side project (part 4)
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Re: The toxic side of free – how I lost the love for my side project (part 4)
#2Good read, but I wonder why didn't he hire a tax advisor to deal with VATMOSS? It's usually not that expensive even if you are not doing revenue, and unless you are in the business of taxes there's little to gain in doing it yourself.
Re: The toxic side of free – how I lost the love for my side project (part 4)
#3This is incredibly interesting and something most pet-project hopefuls don't even consider. Building the project is the easy part, what comes next is where things sink or swim.
Thanks for sharing!
Re: The toxic side of free – how I lost the love for my side project (part 4)
#4Regarding his fraud issue, I found that my website was being used in the same way when I added a credit card payment form. I implemented a system that first does an "Auth". If that passes, then I pass details to MaxMind and get back a response with a "riskScore". If the score is too high, I void the auth and decline the transaction. This has saved me a lot of chargeback fees, though it's still not perfect. I prefer PayPal because a "not authorized" just reverses the transaction; there is no chargeback fee.
Re: The toxic side of free – how I lost the love for my side project (part 4)
#5> it's cost me, £21.54 to allow some shithead to use JS Bin as a stolen card testing facility.
Not sure if it's standard practice, but in our case we let the users use the "free tier" service first, and we offer the paid plans only once we can validate they have a genuine interest in the product . It works well for us to avoid these cases.
Re: The toxic side of free – how I lost the love for my side project (part 4)
#6I discovered a similar problem with writing, which is that writing an email or a comment takes no time at all, but when someone is paying for what I write it takes a lot more effort. I wrote a column for a couple of years and it wasn't until the second year that I actually took my editors advice to just send her the first version and work on it collaboratively rather than try to get it perfect.
I see side projects also get bushwacked by this mental shift.
Re: The toxic side of free – how I lost the love for my side project (part 4)
#7Good read, but I wonder why didn't he hire a tax advisor to deal with VATMOSS? It's usually not that expensive even if you are not doing revenue, and unless you are in the business of taxes there's little to gain in doing it yourself.
The VATMOSS rules mean that you need to collect, verify and store a bunch more info than previously: You need to be able to show evidence for the country the buyer is in, and check that ip address, address, credit card, etc match. It sounds like the cost came from the software development required to put the infrastructure in place to adhere to this and so wasn't something an advisor could help with.
With it being a new rule, there was very little info about the penalties for not complying. The penalties for normal UK VAT are only proportional to revenue, so not much risk for small companies getting it wrong. It wasn't clear that this was true for VATMOSS and so there was fear amongst even tiny company of big penalties for getting it wrong.
We went through the same worries last Nov/Dev, but were lucky that our billing provider dealt with adding in all the required logic. (Shout out to Recurly!)
Re: The toxic side of free – how I lost the love for my side project (part 4)
#8> it's cost me, £21.54 to allow some shithead to use JS Bin as a stolen card testing facility. Not sure if it's standard practice, but in our case we let the users use the "free tier" service first , and we offer the paid plans only once we can validate they have a genuine interest in the product . It works well for us to avoid these cases.
That's an interesting approach, but if the "pro" features are something the user really needs, then don't you risk losing a sub if the feature is withheld until you "get to know each other?"
Re: The toxic side of free – how I lost the love for my side project (part 4)
#9> With JS Bin, everything users need is given away and open source. That's honourable, but doesn't pay the mortgage.
Well that hit home pretty hard, I think I've made the same mistake with my project.
Although the great reviews and personal "thank you"'s are great, as the author said, they don't pay the bills.
Re: The toxic side of free – how I lost the love for my side project (part 4)
#10Regarding his fraud issue, I found that my website was being used in the same way when I added a credit card payment form. I implemented a system that first does an "Auth". If that passes, then I pass details to MaxMind and get back a response with a "riskScore". If the score is too high, I void the auth and decline the transaction. This has saved me a lot of chargeback fees, though it's still not perfect. I prefer P…
Definitely definitely definitely use something like Minfraud from Maxmind. The cost is negligible. We set the score we block transactions at rather low, and manually approve anything over that.
It's super cheap and has saved us tons of money and headaches!