Because it’s a pain in the butt. You end up keeping track of who’s charged you what. You end up being a full time accountant and adding a value judgement to every little thing you do. It’s just another thing chipping away at you constantly. Another distraction and another treadmill.
Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?
21–30 of 194 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?
#22Processing a credit card costs $0.02 per card, plus interchange of up to 3%. Debit processing is $0.22 cents plus 0.05%. Both of these are the baseline cost, your merchant processor often won't be able to even get these rates for their own wholesale rates. Now try and build a micropayments ecosystem ontop of this infrastructure that is very expensive to interact with (in the context of $0.01 charges). Amazon can do i…
I doubt that any transaction costs some percentage of the transaction's value. The true cost shouldn't differ whether I charge $1 or $10 (maybe large transactions incur extra costs for security measures). It's just a convenient way of pricing for the credit card company.
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?
#23Because a lot of news sites know you're not loading them intentionally in your browser, but landing on them because of shares or search. Meaning you may only see their pages 10x a month or similar even without a paywall.
The hope with the paywall is if you keep seeing it, you'll go ahead and pay to unlock it, and the amount you're paying offsets the transaction fees.
1000 users each paying 20 cents for ten articles (so assuming -double- the rate you propose, and charging only at the end of the monthly billing cycle) is still a loss of likely around 1/4th the revenue even with a cut rate payment provider (due to the large fixed cost of 2-4%). So might make $50. It's -negative- if using something pleasant to integrate with (because they will charge for that convenience with a larger fixed cost, like Stripe, who will charge $.30 + small percentage per charge), unless you work with them to design a new pricing model for you.
Converting 50 of those thousand (so just 5%) of those people to paid users at $5 each is going to be north of $200 you keep, even if you use Stripe and don't negotiate anything.
And for those users that -will- load up a news site intentionally, the economics are even starker; a subscription means you'll likely go to their site, and stay there. Pay-as-you-go pricing incentivizes you to not visit the site, and instead find other, cheaper news sources.
AWS pricing works because of the scale of the resources people tend to use, and that for businesses, using those resources = additional revenue. It is spending money to make money.
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah. For example, thats why people like all-inclusive hotels. The reason is that you dont have to think about the prices all the time. You just go through the package only and thats it. The less tranactions, the better. At least for the majority of us. It is very rare to prefer doing many small transactions over one big.
How do you explain paywalls then?
Paywalls typically ask you to get a subscription, not to pay for that particular article.
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?
#25My two cents: https://www.finmoorhouse.com/writing/micropayments
The bottom line is network effects, I think.
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you explain paywalls then?
Everyone hates paywalls
Yes, because they want you to pay for a monthly or yearly subscription and you just want to read one article and maybe never come back to their site. But if I can do a 1-click "pay 1/2 cent" to read the rest of the article that would be totally fair
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?
#27People don't like to do transactions. It taxes our brains and makes us make decisions constantly. We like all you can eat and watch as much as you like. Paying for things sucks even if you just pay small amounts.
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Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?
#28The idea is akin to a driver going through a modern toll. They take a photo of your license plate and send you a bill in the mail after looking it up in the state registry. For those who registered (have an express RFID chip or similar), that process is cheaper and you get a cheaper bill that is summed up each month/quarter.
To stay strictly with the analogy, 1) what is our online license plate? 2) how would one send a bill after translating license plate to home address?
To me, these are fundamental web browser capability deficits. Tim Berners-Lee envisioned this and put some HTTP response codes in the registry with a TODO bookmark and never got around to it or something like that. It is possible but we will have to call in the committee.
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?
#29I'm kinda happy they're not. It'd be much harder to track expenses that way, and literally everyone would be constantly asking for money.
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah. For example, thats why people like all-inclusive hotels. The reason is that you dont have to think about the prices all the time. You just go through the package only and thats it. The less tranactions, the better. At least for the majority of us. It is very rare to prefer doing many small transactions over one big.
How do you explain paywalls then?
The main reason I don't sign up for more paywalled things is not concerns about money, it's sheer inertia. Signing up takes effort, and it's yet another subscription to manage.
That extends to relatively low-friction cases like Patreon. The number of podcasters and bloggers where I've thought, quite earnestly, "I really like what this person is doing, I should kick a few quid their way," and then just not done that is near infinite. And it's never because I was feeling stingy; it's because I couldn't be arsed.