The toxic side of free – how I lost the love for my side project (part 4) • Hacker News Board

Re: The toxic side of free – how I lost the love for my side project (part 4)

#81

Post by fixermark » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 8:40 PM UTC

saidajigumi wrote: post #68

> I can't win the complaint. The card was stolen, the £6 belongs to the original card owner, no question. This is so wrong. Business owners, on average, have little to no information or power to deal with this. The only agencies that have ultimate ability to deal with fraud are the card issuers and banks. IIRC, it was Bruce Schneier who first clearly articulated this for me. By placing all fraud risk on the issuers,…

But it's not in the interest of Stripe et. al. to subsidize fraud. The fact that they have the penalty set so high is because they don't want services like JSBin acting as basically defrauded card authentication gateways (as a side effect of their legitimate business).

Unfortunately for Remy Sharp, he built a fraud enabling system that doubled as a pastebin, and the financial system responded as appropriate for an open fraud portal. It's a bit like calling foul when email gateways start mistrusting your server because it's a proven open-relay node for spam. Not fair, but the system has to protect itself and its users.

Re: The toxic side of free – how I lost the love for my side project (part 4)

#82

Post by mingabunga » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 8:41 PM UTC

JoshTriplett wrote: post #52

masklinn wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the obligation to pay customers' VAT goes back way before VATMOSS. Yep, VOES was put in place in 2003 and that was a simplification, before that businesses were supposed to register themselves with each country's tax office and fill VAT everywhere. For non-EU businesses VATMOSS mostly updates the scheme: register yourself in any member state and use their MOSS portal as a non-EU business, the tax office is…

A business outside the EU has no obligation to do anything , unless it makes itself subject to EU jurisdiction. Just as you don't have to collect US state sales taxes for any US state unless your company has a legal presence in that state. That doesn't help you if you're in an EU country, of course.

This is correct. Our payment provider GlobalCollect has passed us on a court ruling from Netherlands to state we don't need to pay any VAT since we're not physically there, even though we do sell there. A lot of payment processors like FastSpring, Avangate and Cleverbridge act as resellers for your products and are therefore obligated to charge and pass on VAT even if your company is not located there.

Re: The toxic side of free – how I lost the love for my side project (part 4)

#83

Post by Nexxxeh » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 8:44 PM UTC

umziehennachbar wrote: post #42

If $6 is too cheap and encourages fraudsters to test credit cards on your service because banks don't get concerned about transactions at that cost, how much should he have charged at a minimum? $10 $20?

It was £6, which is closer to $10 USD. But good question.

Could you require the first payment to be for say three months upfront, and rolling monthly after that?

Or discount quarterly billing and hike the rolling monthly above the threshold?

Re: The toxic side of free – how I lost the love for my side project (part 4)

#84

Post by Detrus » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 8:46 PM UTC

rokhayakebe wrote: post #24

There is a need for services that can let indie developers do what they do best, and handle all the admin, business, marketing for them for a significant % of revenue and % of ownership earned over time.

Publishers handle that in the gaming industry.

Re: The toxic side of free – how I lost the love for my side project (part 4)

#85

Post by tormeh » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 8:53 PM UTC

PhantomGremlin wrote: post #48

daxelrod wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a US customer, I'm hesitant to use 3D Secure because: 1) The implementations by Visa and MasterCard have security weaknesses, terrible usability and look like phishing: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/fc10vbvsecurecode.pdf 2) My understanding is that my bank shifts liability to me for 3D Secure transactions. Why would I want extra liability?

Yeah, "Verified by Visa" is exactly like phishing. Good paper. Fortunately here in the USA I haven't been asked for my credentials in at least 10 years. So it seems to have died the death it so richly deserved. Do people encounter this on a daily basis?

Norwegian here. It's very common. It doesn't say "3D-secure" or "verified by visa", but logging in with your bank credentials (Bank-ID) sometimes feels like it's more common than not.

Re: The toxic side of free – how I lost the love for my side project (part 4)

#86

Post by Nexxxeh » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 8:53 PM UTC

chejazi wrote: post #70

JS Bin is a service that appeals to techies. As such, it should see moderate success accepting Bitcoin! Bitcoin transactions are non-reversible, which would solve the fraud complications.

But would it fuck him on the VATMOSS? Would he lose the ability to verify the address via the cardholder billing address?

A question I don't know the answer to.

Re: The toxic side of free – how I lost the love for my side project (part 4)

#87

Post by petercooper » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 8:56 PM UTC

I pay for Gmail, because I need real business email accounts.

Did I get lucky with being one of the early Apps for Your Domain users? We don't pay a bean for our company's Gmail accounts but seem to get most of the features (no ads, custom domain, etc).

Re: The toxic side of free – how I lost the love for my side project (part 4)

#88

Post by jessaustin » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 9:00 PM UTC

Mahn wrote: post #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.

The shitheads who are testing stolen cards will probably skip the free tier so they can, ahem, test their stolen cards.

Re: The toxic side of free – how I lost the love for my side project (part 4)

#89

Post by paulus_magnus » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 9:18 PM UTC

tobr wrote: post #44

paulus_magnus wrote: post #35

Why don't you "motivate" frequent users to start paying? ex. by making the free version (gradually) worse until you see revenue. ex. - non pro user pastebins last 5mins, 5 views etc - non pro users can post 1 pastebin per day (cookies, IP) - non pro user pastebins are max x characters long. - you get the idea - there are clever people on this forum who will come up with good ideas to help you out. - do everything BUT…

You're confusing pastebin.com with jsbin.com. None of those restrictions wouldn't really make much sense for JS Bin I think.

None of those ...

Hope you got my point. The above are only meant as an example.

Main idea is to cripple* the free tier enough to push a chunk of current users from free into pro. Some will leave but you don't want them anyway (they will never pay).

* how exactly cripple? This is the product design / product-market-fit stage work that was skipped when building jsbin.com

Re: The toxic side of free – how I lost the love for my side project (part 4)

#90

Post by justincormack » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 9:23 PM UTC

Symbiote wrote: post #59

PhantomGremlin wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, "Verified by Visa" is exactly like phishing. Good paper. Fortunately here in the USA I haven't been asked for my credentials in at least 10 years. So it seems to have died the death it so richly deserved. Do people encounter this on a daily basis?

It's ages since I've seen it used in the UK, although not 10 years. More like three or four. (The redirect sometimes happens, but it's automatically approved.)

I used it the other day. It did say 3d secure will change soon.