[A1kmm]

How are you planning on getting traffic in the long term? There are free alternatives like http://search.creativecommons.org/ so I suspect most customers will be people who don't know about the alternatives.

I'd be sceptical if you could get many people to pay for it unless you found a good source of people who weren't very Internet savvy.

I think if your search engine is better at finding images compared to other sites, the best thing to do might be to let people search without logging in, but only show them a thumbnail, and to find out where the image comes from, they need to pay. However, you will still need to find a way to attribute images if the license terms require that.

[Goldy]

To be honest, I don't know how to get revenue in the long term. What I want to do is to break even so I can justify investing more effort.

I would love Sprixi to be free and then money around the edges (e.g. API). However, that will require more work. Being bootstrapped and already at it for a few years, I can't keep working for free.

Interesting idea about moving the pay wall - thanks.