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Show HN: Easyful – A Free Gumroad Alternative

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Re: Show HN: Easyful – A Free Gumroad Alternative

#41

Post by lolinder »

snvzz wrote: post #39
lolinder wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that half of those submissions were flagged to death. I don't doubt that there are some legitimate stories here, but one of those is a repeated repost with verbatim content from months earlier, and others are very vague about what sort of business they were running. It's become common knowledge that making a big stink on HN can get a lot of attention and sometimes resolve your problems, so even people who were s…

Seeing the discussions in these submissions doesn't give me that impression. Instead, I am inclined to think that mass-flagging is being done by Stripe sockpuppets as a means of mitigating negative impact on Stripe's public image.

The person who called out "Don't Use Stripe" [0] tied a very legitimate account to their accusation.

jacquesm is a very prominent user, and called out another one for being too vague, with no reply [1].

The third was clearly selling an NSFW AI service [2] and admitted it.

The other three I'm willing to believe, I'm just cautioning against believing every submission you see.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34036111

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34272248

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36969195

Re: Show HN: Easyful – A Free Gumroad Alternative

#43

Post by tansan »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #35
jhartist wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stripe actually handles taxes for you with Payment Links, and Easyful is just a fulfillment layer on top of that. Check out the Stripe docs page about it: https://stripe.com/docs/tax/paymentlinks

Stripe does not act as Merchant of Record. So it is not directly comparable to Gumroad, Lemon Squeezy, Paddle.

Could you share the implication this?

Re: Show HN: Easyful – A Free Gumroad Alternative

#44

Post by coder9874 »

lolinder wrote: post #41
snvzz wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seeing the discussions in these submissions doesn't give me that impression. Instead, I am inclined to think that mass-flagging is being done by Stripe sockpuppets as a means of mitigating negative impact on Stripe's public image.

The person who called out "Don't Use Stripe" [0] tied a very legitimate account to their accusation. jacquesm is a very prominent user, and called out another one for being too vague, with no reply [1]. The third was clearly selling an NSFW AI service [2] and admitted it. The other three I'm willing to believe, I'm just cautioning against believing every submission you see. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34…

Thanks for diving into the evidence for us. It's an important lesson not to believe everything you read on HN.

Re: Show HN: Easyful – A Free Gumroad Alternative

#45

Post by coder543 »

tansan wrote: post #43
wahnfrieden wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stripe does not act as Merchant of Record. So it is not directly comparable to Gumroad, Lemon Squeezy, Paddle.

Could you share the implication this?

I’m not an accountant, but I think the distinction is that the MoR will handle both the collection and remittance of tax for you, including filing any necessary paperwork. You get money deposited in your bank account, and you deliver product to customers, but you’re not worried about remitting taxes.

If Stripe collects the tax and sets it aside, that’s helpful, but it still means you have to figure out which jurisdictions you owe tax to, and figure out how to get the taxes delivered and reported to those jurisdictions (“remitted”), which can be a headache, to say the least.

Re: Show HN: Easyful – A Free Gumroad Alternative

#46

Post by ojbyrne »

keerthiko wrote: post #21
fredley wrote: post #12

Have you read Sahil Lavingia's blog? https://sahillavingia.com/reflecting

Is any content in this blog particularly relevant to Easyful's reason for existence or are you just mentioning it because you enjoyed the post? (I remember reading it when Sahil posted that first, as a fellow bootstrapped tech cofounder but I don't remember anything of note from there to discuss re: Easyful)

Presumably because Easyful seems to be directly comparing itself to Gumroad, which is the subject of the blog post.

Re: Show HN: Easyful – A Free Gumroad Alternative

#49

Post by vidyesh »

jhartist wrote: post #14
kreutz wrote: post #2

How do you plan to make money?

Good question: we mostly built Easyful to use ourselves, but if it gets a significant of usage we might build some more advanced pro features and sell those features as a paid tier upgrade, while keeping the base app free. We've had success with that model before with Smallchat, a saas app we launched several years ago, and it's still going strong supporting millions of free users. With low-operating-cost saas apps,…

> With low-operating-cost saas apps, you can get away with offering a pretty generous free tier. A small percentage of paid users can more than pay for your mostly-free user base.

Thats good to hear. Congrats. I always wondered do low operating cost SaaS apps reach a point where the interest or subscription(s) for the paid plans outweigh the cost of running the free tier accounts? And how does one tackle that?

Do you have a blog or some stats to look at? I would love to read about this and this mission of yours.

I see many people suggest that there should be a small fee to cover the hosting costs, do you think such tactics lead to the race to bottom scenario where you can't really charge properly for the paid plan as the starter plan itself is under-priced?

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