{"id":1658,"date":"2014-09-04T10:40:04","date_gmt":"2014-09-04T16:40:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/?p=1658"},"modified":"2014-08-27T10:42:37","modified_gmt":"2014-08-27T16:42:37","slug":"i-want-to-pay-you-money-except-when-i-dont","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/archives\/1658","title":{"rendered":"I Want to Pay You Money! (Except When I Don&#8217;t)"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure style=\"width: 240px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" title=\"Money by 401(K) 2013\" src=\"http:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/6355220839_982b1263d5_m_money.jpg\" alt=\"money photo\" width=\"240\" height=\"180\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\"><small>Photo by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/68751915@N05\/6355220839\" target=\"_blank\">401(K) 2013<\/a> <a title=\"Attribution-ShareAlike License\" href=\"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-sa\/2.0\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/plugins\/wp-inject\/images\/cc.png\" alt=\"\" \/><\/a><\/small><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>I saw <a href=\"http:\/\/apievangelist.com\/2014\/08\/20\/why-i-am-continuing-to-integrate-zapier-in-my-business-workflow\/\">this post from Kin Lane<\/a> talking about Zapier and how one of the many advantages it has over similar services is its pricing.\u00a0 I completely agree.\u00a0 While I like free as much as the next person, when I&#8217;m building on something, I want to pay for it, or at least have it monetized in some fashion (Kin has a nice <a href=\"http:\/\/monetization.apievangelist.com\/\">list of ways for API providers to monetize<\/a>).\u00a0 Paying for a service means:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>the company can survive<\/li>\n<li>great employees can be paid<\/li>\n<li>when I complain, the company has an incentive to listen<\/li>\n<li>the value I get from the service is above what I&#8217;m paying (aka <a href=\"http:\/\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/articles\/CamelsandRubberDuckies.html\">consumer surplus<\/a>), if I&#8217;m a reasonable facsimile of <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Homo_economicus\">homo economicus<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>All of these are really nice attributes of a technology I&#8217;m going to build on (not just &#8216;date&#8217; as Kin says).\u00a0 This is an interesting dichotomy, because the fastest way to growth is to provide a free service&#8211;then there&#8217;s no friction to signing up.<\/p>\n<p>I guess the answer, at least for software products where the marginal cost is very very low, is a freemium offering, like Zapier.\u00a0 Get the user in, show them how your value proposition works, and then ask them for money when they are hooked.\u00a0 Just don&#8217;t <a href=\"\/wordpress\/archives\/719\">make the freemium level unusable<\/a>!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I saw this post from Kin Lane talking about Zapier and how one of the many advantages it has over similar services is its pricing.\u00a0 I completely agree.\u00a0 While I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-apis","category-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1658"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1658\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1665,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1658\/revisions\/1665"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}