Laterpay – Buy digital content, pay later

[patio11]

This business model was previously tried by Kwedit. I was sort of disappointed when they abandoned it, because it deprived the world of kwedit default swaps.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1099811

[jonnathanson]

You made a good point about Kwedit back in the day, which I believe applies just as well here. Namely, micropayments on the nickel-and-dime scale are seriously challenging. How does a vendor price them effectively? How do you get a consumer to wrap his/her head around them?

Everybody understands the value of a dollar; nobody understands the value of a nickel. Coins, pseudocurrencies, and loyalty points seem much better suited to overcoming that psychological barrier.

[ntaso]

The concept is interesting. However, I don't think that the concept of "use now, pay later" is really what prevents people from doing micro transactions. The real work is to convince content providers to hide their stuff behind cheap paywalls and use their system.

Flattr never gained enough traction and I don't see how laterpay solves this problem.

[quarterwave]

Good point, I was wondering how the link was made to the content provider.

[PaulHoule]

some people do better than minimum wage at http://gittip.com/

[bananas]

A digital loan shark that will only let you have €5. Sound business model there...

[jere]

>Why buy 200 coins in a game when you only need ten?

Great. Another psychological trick the F2P devs can add to their toolbox.

[Pitarou]

That made me stop short, too.

When do you ever "only need 10"?

[jheriko]

> otherwise they will just fill up with throwaway accounts.

this is exactly the kind of strategy that 'poor' people take to maximise the effectiveness of 'freebies' (which includes credit). i hope they have some strategy in place to mitigate that risk...

[danbruc]

Assume you want to read an article because it relevant for work. Assume your salary is $25 per hour. If you think for just 5 seconds whether you should pay for the article or not this will costs your employer 3.5¢. So at least in that context a price of 5¢ or 10¢ per article should absolutely be a no-brainer.

What I have no idea is if you can sustain a business at that price - content producer and payment provider. And I am also unsure how well that translates to non-working time. It is at least often argued that you should value that time just like your working time. Psychological barriers as mentioned by others are a very different matter, too.

[mattmaroon]

Content producers and techies want something like this (microtransactions) to work so badly that they keep trying to make it happen, despite the fact that people quite simply don't want it. They keep thinking "maybe I just need to make it more usable" when PayPal has been quite usable for nearly two decades.

People don't want to buy a bunch of small stuff a la carte. They just don't.

[Ruska]

>People don't want to buy a bunch of small stuff a la carte. They just don't.

Are you familiar with In App Purchases? The fact that so many apps are moving towards being free with paid content after purchase/install kind of goes against your statement. If anything, it would support the argument that people are willing to use a system like this if it is usable and trustworthy.

[jagermo]

Paypal has fairly high transaction fees, as they mention in the article. If you pay one euro for an article, 40 cents go to paypal.

Don't get my wrong, paypal is awesome for other stuff, but not for microtransactions

[bryanlarsen]

counter-example: the billions of apps sold for 99 cents on the Apple app store.

[carlio]

As a publisher, I'd question when I'd actualy get money for the content I sold, if I have to wait for every "customer" to accumulate €5 before they forked over cash. Until LaterPay has significant market penetration, the likelyhood is that small publishers will never see any revenue.

[PanMan]

Sounds similar to tipit.to which friends of mine did. Unfortunately, like a lot of money transferring services, they ran into a lot of fraud. Any money -> something -> money service online makes it really attractive to launder stolen credit cards.

[mobiuscog]

"no upfront registration" is a misnomer, as you will obviously have to sign-up in order to partake of the service.

I would assume you will also have to register a payment method, otherwise they will just fill up with throwaway accounts.

[dewey]

According to this german blog post (It's an interview with a famous german blogger/tv presenter who is working for Laterpay in a consulting position) [0] you don't have to sign up to use it at the beginning. You basically just say "I want to pay for this later" and once you are hitting the 5 euro mark it'll prompt you to sign up and pay for it.

[0] http://meedia.de/2014/03/21/richard-gutjahr-ueber-laterpay-p...

[ycaspirant]

I'm having a hard time understanding what I can use this service for. Can somebody please provide one or two concrete examples of potential use cases? Thanks very much in advance!

[KhalPanda]

I like how the login/sign-up button click boxes conform nicely to the central circular 'or' area.

...but that's about it.

[NoodleIncident]

Quite clever. The white border on the circle is pixel-perfectly tuned to match the white margin between the buttons.

...sounds like hell to fix for IE. Glad I don't do css.

They also have a .call-to-action class for that green color, which is cute.

[killercup]

I like that as well. Except, I'm seeing the content in German and this button reads "Jetzt registrieren OR Anmelden". Well, I guess "ODER" would have been too wide anyway.

[bachback]

missed the bitcoin train.

[dewey]

I don't really see the connection between Bitcoin and Micro-Payment services at all. Bitcoin is hardly easy and instant unlike Flattr (Although I'd say Flattr isn't really that easy and straightforward as their intro video wants people to believe) and this service.