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How can I manage/secure user payments for web apps ?
5 points by thaddeus 5823 days ago | 9 comments
I'd like to sell a web application (developed in arc) for $5 per user per month.

The obvious complications with web applications:

   1. Users can share logins to piggy back.
   2. Many users can be using the same IP (typical with companies).
   3. Browsers have no access to machine specific parameters
     (machine name etc).
   4. 3rd party tools like citrix allows users to all use the same cookie.
So assuming I am not going to have an audience of millions, I am left asking myself how I can make any money.

Anyone else have ideas to get fair pay for work done ?

Thanks, T.



8 points by CatDancer 5823 days ago | link

There are two classes of people: people who want to pay you, and people who don't.

Consider focusing all your attention on people who want to pay you. How can you make it really easy for them to pay? What do they want, and how can you do more of that for them? How do you find more people who want to pay you, how do you let them know you exist? Is your app so great that the people who want to pay you are telling their friends who want to pay you?

People who don't want to pay you don't make any difference whether they're using your service or not (you're not getting any money from them either way), unless there are so many of them that it's costing you something in server load or your time, in which case you can do something about it based in the specific pattern of abuse that you're getting.

It think that trying to force people who don't want to pay you to pay you is probably wasted effort, they'll just go away and not pay someone else :-)

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3 points by thaddeus 5823 days ago | link

I think you're right. I am focusing on the wrong stuff.

Thanks, T.

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2 points by shader 5823 days ago | link

I think it's too much work in many cases for others to bother free-riding your service with tools like citrix. If they like it that much, you're doing well!

Here are a few things though that might help keep the free-riding down.

1) Have a reason to need separate user names. I don't know what your service is, but you can almost always add some sort of 'identity' to it that people will want to keep for themselves.

2) Prevent people from loggin in too much from other locations. In many cases, people will want to keep their PC to themselves, so you can block free riding by checking cookies and ip addresses.

3) Charge more for overuse. Even if this is unlikely to actually catch people (i.e. the limits are set rather high) it can still make the person who's paying for the account less likely to share it with others.

4) Give a limited time free trial. This will cause people to create their own profile that they may be "invested" in, and want to keep. They will be less inclined to use someone else's account after they have their own, and if you price it well enough, they may be interested in buying it.

5) Price it well, and have reasonable expectations about how this will turn out. Odds are you will have some free-riding. Charge enough to cover your costs, and just deal with it. In many cases, the amount of discomfort it would cause your users and time it will cost you to cut down on free-riding will be higher than the damage you are preventing. Think carefully before you make drastic changes to your system to prevent "stealing".

I would suggest that you implement your service, and then see whether it's actually worth it to implement restrictions. It may be that you don't actually get that much in the way of free-riding. Or the free-riding could possibly be considered a cost of advertising. In the end, it's up to you.

Good luck! I can't wait to see your app ;)

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1 point by thaddeus 5823 days ago | link

Point 1 & 3 - I should have been thinking this way (and the rest for that matter).

Thanks, T.

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2 points by pg 5823 days ago | link

I'd just do the obvious thing. Charge per username, and when someone logs in with username x, log out anyone else currently using it.

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2 points by thaddeus 5823 days ago | link

I had thought of that originally, but the nature of the app is where a user would log in for 10-20 minutes per day (at least to start) and read the data. The maximum possible audience is limited to about 1000 people. Currently users pay $600 to 800 per user per month to the competition (data by email only).

I am thinking I should increase the cost a little to account for the freeloaders.

Thanks, T.

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1 point by CatDancer 5823 days ago | link

Are you able to offer all the data your competition does? $300/month would be half off ^__^

Also, is there some way to include the user's name in the downloaded data? No doubt they could edit the data to remove their name before passing it on to their colleagues, but that might be more trouble than it's worth to them.

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1 point by thaddeus 5823 days ago | link

no doubt they could edit the data to remove their name before passing it on...

I could as they do - watermark on PDF, but my model is to make the data more accessible/usable and in doing so I am making it easier to freeload, hence why I am trying to make it cheap enough that users would just sign up and pay the monthly fee and get the benefits of some customization, rather than freeload.

Also the real money isn't in the data it's in other things, but I need the audience so I'm going to offer it really cheap, get the audience, get them famliar with the software then sell modules (the real pot of gold). I could jut get it out there for free, but I need to learn this pricing/billing stuff.

T.

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1 point by CatDancer 5823 days ago | link

That all sounds good, my only thought is if you are charging $5 for something your market is used to paying $600 for, you may appear to lack credibility... imagine going up to a guy who gets $100 haircuts and offering him a haircut for $3. Would he take the risk of getting a $3 haircut, even if it looks like it would be just as good as his usual $100 one? But, of course, if they're getting other stuff than just the data for the $600, offering just the data for $5 plus expensive modules might be perfect ^_^

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