21–30 of 32 posts
Much of what's great about the Web is exactly that: valuable, published for free access, not the basis of a full-time business, yet definitely worth supporting.
Meh, not true. I have a friend that wrote a very uninnovative, very shallow app a few years ago in a couple of months and barely works on it nowadays. He thinks he will make $60K this year and there are at least five or six different open source competitors (read last word as Daniel Plainview please.) I could write something to replace it in a week or two. Just make sure you know your audience: if you are selling to…
It is possible to compete with free if your customer base has an incentive to use your tools. That incentive can either be that they don't want to figure out how to do it themselves (e.g. non-technical managers), or if you provide some sort of value added service on top of the freedom, e.g. your tools are nice to use/easier to integrate/enables someone to do something that wouldn't take more than a few hours.
visitors.js clearly isn't this sort of thing, unless if you need/want accurate geolocation.
I just wanted to say you guys crashed my site with all your traffic. Lesson learned: don't send HN to an EC2 micro instance. I upgraded to a medium instance, let's see how it works...
Visitor.js is arguably not very innovative. The only "added value" that I would consider is having it all in one nice library. The knowledge necessary to create visitor.js is almost at the level of a beginner. How many 'hello world' tutorials aren't there on the web that display how to use cookies in Javascript by showing the last time you visited the page? The incentive behind creating something like visitor.js shou…
Maybe there's a market for that, but I'd be surprised if HN or any serious tech site would cater to the same demographic.
What's left is the geolocation. At this point I'd think a major USP is relegated to a bullet point in a feature list. I've not seen much in the way of helpful geolocation APIs, and the data needed for this costs money if it's mission critical.
You've got to maintain the database after you've bought it, you've got to run a server for that database, you've got to write a script or an API that exposes it, in JSON format, to a client-side script...
If you're not up for that commitment, or it's not worth the time or money, then surely 'geolocation.js' (as opposed to 'visitor.js') can help you out. And your commitment to it lasts only for as long as you pay.
But for anything else? Well, I'd want a server to save that for analytics, and posting HTTP response data via an XMLHttpRequest is a bit convoluted.
A few people have talked about it being trivial to create, but it's obviously not so trivial that people haven't found a free option useful to save them time.
I know this because I make a comfortable living on the proceeds of a SaaS product that anybody here could reproduce in half a day. The fact that several dozen of my customers are HN readers (and thus capable of the aforementioned feat) goes to show that even if it's possible to do something, the smart business decision is sometimes to pay somebody else to do it for you.
I actually give a full set of instructions to build your own version of the service on the site, and link to several open source packages that you can install on your server. But still there are plenty of people out there capable of multiplying [hourly bill rate] * 4 to come up with how much doing that would cost. Since that'll buy most shops a couple years of my service, the smart money goes toward the "buy" end of that build vs. buy decision.
I just wanted to say you guys crashed my site with all your traffic. Lesson learned: don't send HN to an EC2 micro instance. I upgraded to a medium instance, let's see how it works...
Consider switching to a statically generated blog using something like Jekyll. From my experience, an unoptimized wordpress install doesn't take much traffic to take it down assuming every request is hitting mysql.
I think what killed me was the micro instance only has ~617 megs of ram. The medium instance is holding up fine.
Meh, not true. I have a friend that wrote a very uninnovative, very shallow app a few years ago in a couple of months and barely works on it nowadays. He thinks he will make $60K this year and there are at least five or six different open source competitors (read last word as Daniel Plainview please.) I could write something to replace it in a week or two. Just make sure you know your audience: if you are selling to…
Would you/he be willing to post a link to the app?
If it'd been priced at $18 once off instead of $x/month, would the HN reaction have been very different? A few people have talked about it being trivial to create, but it's obviously not so trivial that people haven't found a free option useful to save them time.