Ask HN: Next Step for Monetizing our Site

Dear HN: I'd apprehiate some feedback on taking our site in a new direction.

http://www.ecalc.com

We have a great online scientific calculator called eCalc (been around for about 1 year). We have a steady amount of users each day (around 10k) and recently released a new version of the calculator with a downloadable version for Windows and Mac ($15).

However, the conversion of the download product is very low and most people are not downloading the product from our site at all, instead they just use the free online version (but who wouldn't right?)

We'd like to make a monetization model from this product.

1.) Should we handicap the online version with a nag screen to encourage downloads?

2.) Should we try to sell ads on the site(note: average user is on page for 5-6minutes)

3.) Should we create a subscription model for say ($10 a year to use the calculator).

4.) Lower the price of the product to say $5

5.) Add more features (graphing, variables, sharing)

Any advice is much apprehiated...

Yes, these are all good points. I really want to find a way to keep the online version for free. The advantage of the download (desktop version) is that users can run in a borderless window with six color schemes and the ability to close the side palette.

I'm sure there are many students in poor countries that enjoy having a nice powerful online calculator that is easy to use, but nice is not a good business model.

We don't have a good way to prevent pirating and my thinking was that even top products like Adobe get cracked pretty quickly and distributed (so I figured it was a lost cause...)

Anyway, we have plenty of great ideas for additional features that we can add into the palette. Maybe we make a "pro version" that has these extras...

We tried creating a calculator store and linking to Amazon, but the conversion is pretty bad there as well. If people are looking for an online calculator they don't real want a handheld... Thanks for the feedback.

This is a valid idea - though there are already a ton of calculators on the iPhone store and so we'd be competing against a saturated marketplace. One reason we did this project was the fact that most online calculators have terrible user interfaces and don't support things like complex numbers, or a traditional stack.

There are already graphing sites out there, but they're more data oriented than calculation oriented (not sure if that makes sense). But basically if you could hook the calc up to a graph and make them really easy to create and share you would be able to get some virality. If you had a ton of graphs out on the web with ads on them you (like millions of them) you could make some money.