Ask HN: Which of those services would you pay $5/mo to use?

[andr]

I want to measure how much of a bubble there is around social media services and similar. "Everyone" is talking about it, but some statistics show that it's not very pervasive (e.g., 60% of Twitter users stay for less than a month.)

So I'm trying to have people put their pretend money where their virtual mouths are. If the following services charged $5/month each, which ones would you pay for?

As a baseline, 84% of the US population pays for a cell phone.

[tallanvor]

I would have to say I wouldn't pay $5/month for any of these... In fact I already stopped listening to Last.fm rather than pay $3/month (I can listen to Norwegian stations online for free, and I never cared for Last.fm's selection algorithm - Pandora's was much better, but I can't be bothered to use a VPN or proxy to use it).

[chromoose]

I'd be much more comfortable with a yearly rate - $20 a year is a much easier price point for these types of services (look at flickr, I think it nailed the subscription service model).

I don't want to worry about monthly bills.

[boredguy8]

That's actually not true, but I'd have to do some digging to find the article that examines this across a broad spectrum of services.

Paying monthly for a product/service tends to make that product or service used more, because people feel the need to justify seeing that item on their bill.

This is why, for instance, so many gyms moved away from 'buy a year' plans. People would sign up in Jan / Feb / March, go a few times, and never go again. When it came time to 're-up', they wouldn't because 'we never go to the gym'. However, when people were billed monthly, the would go maybe even only once or twice a month, but it kept them using the service and the 'hurdle' for payment each time is much lower.

Lest you think it only apply to gyms, the study also looked at cell usage when the only thing billed per month was overages, and you paid the full contract up front. They saw a similar type of usage, where even with something as common as a cell, the annual cost was higher and the average monthly use was lower.

Bill monthly (or even 'micro' -- 'on use') and you make more money overall.

[jgrahamc]

I would pay $5/month for reliable, fast, secure off-site backup. Actually, I already do... I use JungleDisk with my own key.

[LargeWu]

Mozy also offers this service for $5/mo.

[joe_bleau]

I'd pay $5/month for unlimited access to books and journals, but it would have to be a very big library, quick, reliable, and allow for some form of offline access.

I'm not interested in most of the other options, free or not.

Although at one time I considered buying good usenet access, there just aren't that many interesting and vibrant newsgroups left.

[GvS]

I would and I do pay for quality weekly newsmagazines. It's getting harder and harder to find decent, in depth articles written by real professionals. Unfortunately I've seen some good newspapers closing down or turning into crap full of ads and low quality products called "news". I wish there would be more people like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryszard_Kapuściński

[swombat]

Social networks like Facebook, Twitter, really need to find other kinds of monetisation than subscription fees, if only because they become exponentially more useful the more people use them. Restricting the number of users by charging them wouldn't help them.

[uptown]

If social networks aren't able to find ways to successfully bring in revenue using advertising they deserve to go out of business. One of the big challenges in advertising is not knowing whose eyeballs are seeing your ads. For TV they may have a crude demographic of who's watching ... but it's not very granular. Social networks are the exact opposite of that. No only do the users of these networks willingly provide details about themselves down to the most granular level, but they also provide a linkage to their friends that are doing the very same thing. It's the perfect combination of information for advertisers to use in order to serve relevant advertising.

[tdoggette]

If any of those services charged $5, they'd instantly have a dozen competitors started by the kind of people that read HN.

[ashot]

not facebook, and soon not twitter

[bayareaguy]

Most of my work is on unix. However once in a while I would like to verify my stuff on windows just to see what things work and what things fail. I'd pay a few dollars a month for occasional VNC/RDP access to a windows desktop where I could compile and test short programs. I know of some services out there that offer things like this but they are overpriced for my level of use.

[mahmud]

I would pay $5 for a vanilla Windows XP box with IE6.

[kiwidrew]

For me, just about the only online social service which is useful enough to justify paying for it is e-mail. And that's definitely one area where the free services (yeah, GMail) are lightyears ahead of any paid service. So apart from 'infrastructure' stuff (like hosting, domain names, etc.) my online existence is completely free. And I honestly don't see that changing, ever.

[rythie]

Except you probably pay for home broadband, a mobile and possibly mobile broadband.

[pieter]

I might pay $30-$40 / year for all google services together.

I really only use them because they're free. There are enough other services already I'd switch too if some of them became payware. I'm really not attached to any of the services. My gmail is filled with email forwarded from my own domain, so I could switch my mail provider without changing email address (as it should be).

Now, DNS, I am willing to pay for :).

[marcusbooster]

I think the annual rate is a better way to convince people to pay. I really don't need another monthly bill to deal with, yet I barely think about forking over for my annual dns and web hosting bills.

I guess it depends on the service provided, but I'd definitely not pay $5/month for Facebook, but I might consider paying $25/year.

[ananthrk]

Hacker News

[bendotc]

I prefer the SomethingAwful forum model: start out free, start charging a one-time $10 fee for new memberships, and then be liberal about banning people (who can pay another $10 to become unbanned). There are other premium options available for other one-time charges.

Being able to moderate in a way that costs someone $10 can really help reign in the more destructive members of the community. There are people who keep resubscribing, but they subsidize the site for everyone else as they get banned over and over.

[noor420]

I would pay upto $100/year for HackerNews.

[ErrantX]

I picked Gmail (backup email = worth it) and Last.fm (useful - im considering a Spotify subscription).

Other stuff: Chatterous (the second most useful tool in my arsenal) Jing (you can actually pay for this :D)

Posterous: no because hosting my own blog is about the same and gives me more control (i.e. I can have a personal front page etc.). FriendFeed, Facebook, Twitter: no because for me they have little actual value. They connect me with interesting people but I could live without it :D

[blogimus]

Our household shares one mobile phone between two adults. How does that fit into the 84% baseline?

As far as services, I checked GMail and other. I use VPS to host my web apps, so I pay for that. I pay for the ACM digital library, as I see a lot of value in that.

I would pay for online storage (eg Amazon S3). I use GMail. The spam filtering is great. I might use the paid Google Apps for domain email hosting, but would like a cost effective and time efficient (low administration effort) MTA which I can use for multiple domains.

My biggest concern with relying on some 3rd party for essential web apps/services is 1) what happens if they go belly-up? 2) what happens if there is an irreconcilable policy change?

For VPS, I back up to home and can always recover and host on a new VPS, just some time lost. If an essential service goes south, I've lost information and/or functionality.

So aside from fungible infrastructure, I've not yet seen anything compelling enough to make me pay up every month since I stopped playing everquest several years ago.

one of my primary questions for a service is "how much effort to sync with my home network or to mirror to another service?"

[Maro]

I'd pay $5 for gmail, but not for crappy webmail.

[mahmud]

Only if they didn't "read" my mail. I am in the online ad business and for some discussions to take place I have to attach an encrypted zip file like a mafioso.

[mooism2]

I'd pay for webmail on the assumption that they have the scale to filter spam better than I could manage on my own.

I don't think I'd be willing to pay explicitly for anything else (maybe if they were bundled, but not at $5/month each).

$5/month seems steep. For comparison, LiveJournal charges $3/month or $20/year.

[ajdecon]

I'd probably pay $5/mo for Pandora or Google Docs, GMail, etc., but most of the other services here either rely on network effects or are better advertising-supported. As they are, anyway: I can imagine premium features for almost all of these which I would be willing to pay for.

[Radix]

Likewise, I might be willing to pay for Pandora, though I don't currently, and I would be willing to pay for gmail. But, I don't like the idea of having a recurring cost to use email unless I can copy all of my mail out into another program.

...tags are so much better than folders.

[jyothi]

Typical the services cater to one of this:

- application of interest that you need as an individual

- lets you express yourself

- lets you connect with others

- lets you discover more

If you observe all services catering to individual are rated higher.

When it comes to sites that let you express yourself or connect - may be the sites listed are not really niche and sites which lets u express for professional needs. If you had included linkedin, flickr (as against userbase on picasa) etc - may be these would have got better votes

sites that let you discover more content - guess it would be a very mixed response on the value of such sites given no single site would provide me all the material I would like to have stumbled upon.

[bjelkeman-again]

I pay for Flickr Pro och MobileMe. Anything else we host for ourselves or use free services. I voted Twitter (but I doubt they will charge $5/month) as I have found it really useful.

[ngsayjoe]

Online backup!

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[rudenoise]

It seems to me that if each of these services was peer-to-peer they can sustain their free nature. They are nice to have rather than essential, and everyone participating sharing the load fits perfectly with the "community" ideals.

These services seem unsustainable from a monetisation, cost and environmental perspective.