[bgdam]

I might be in the market for a forms service, and have been researching them a bit over the past few weeks. As a potential customer, here is the single biggest thing that made me instantly say no: free. Even worse it's unlimited free, not even freemium.

That means either the service will sell my information, or the information of my customers (if not now, eventually), or that it's going to die shortly. And I don't want to put in the effort of migrating my sites to your service in either of those cases.

So my advice to you is to start charging.

[27182818284]

I didn't quite have this harsh of an outlook, but I also immediately scrolled to see what "paid" versions there were as a "seriousness" check. That's interesting.

[fludlight]

I looked for the "pricing" page to see what the actual features are.

[yupitszac]

This is good feedback, and quite honestly something I haven't quite figured out how to communicate to future potentially skeptical users. Basically it's just a personal project, that I host on my personal AWS account.

I literally just made it because I didn't want to pay for a service anymore for my static sites that need to collect information.

Maybe solidifying some of the verbiage on the website, and giving it time to not be so new are the two biggest things I can do to solve this?

[freddyym]

To make matters worse, the site is using third party trackers, so your data is already being abused the second you open with the site. Its also closed source. I may sound paranoid, but I won't be using the service.

[satvikpendem]

In SaaS, you're not going to find many products that don't use trackers and are open source, as much as that may be philosophically interesting to see. I actually want a SaaS company to track my behavior so they see what's wrong, fix bugs, and improve the product as a whole.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

Why do they need to use external services to track you?

[yupitszac]

It's a personal project that I built and maintain in my spare time (nights and weekends). My only real goal with tracking is to understand how people use the service and where they might be getting stuck.

I'm by no means a UI or UX expert :)

[bryanrasmussen]

because external services have a free tier and they think it would cost them too much to make themselves.

[satvikpendem]

Well they don't have to, but I think most companies are not going to spend time and money creating their own tracking tool like Hotjar and screen recording when they could spend those resources on their own product. Comparative economic advantages and all that.

[XCSme]

I have actually built a self-hosted alternative to Hotjar[0] and there are also some other platforms I think, so you can indeed have great analytics without relying on 3rd party services or having to build your own tool.

[0] https://usertrack.net/

[satvikpendem]

Wow that looks great, I might give it a go. Where is the screen recording feature, I saw it was advertised on the landing page but don't see it on the demo. Also is it open source?

[yupitszac]

This is super interesting. Thanks for the share! :)

[freddyym]

I'm all for analytics, as long as it is done in the most privacy respecting way possible.

[lasagna_coder]

There's a donation button at the top of the page. Also, perhaps it's going to gauge volume and costs before developing a premium model. Looks like an early adopter model. Also, providing a service like this with the trade off being able to use and learn from the data for improving the product isn't uncommon (google forms, google mail...).

One thought I had that could avoid the harvesting data aspect would be to encrypt the data with a public key and then allowing the host to decrypt it locally with a private key. I think that's how products like Lastpass work.

[couchand]

... but where would the encryption happen? You're still just hoping they don't harvest before the encryption step.

[lasagna_coder]

It would be cool if there was a way to sandbox part of a website so that it could be sandboxed against specific functionality.

[tomaskafka]

On the other side, I'd love an indie-accessible service where I wouldn't pay more than a total cost of a cheap VPS and a domain for a single SaaS which forms like a 5 % of user experience.

It seems that everything is either pay-with-privacy, or $100/year, with no middle ground, and that's sad for me as an indie.

(Btw, I am trying to fit into this gap with a $1/mo subscription for a commercial-quality weather forecast complication for Apple Watch: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/weathergraph-weather-forecast/... )

[brudgers]

If a business cannot afford $100/year for a critical service, the business is not viable. Or to put it another way, if a forms service is not worth a large multiple of $100/year, it's not worth having a forms service.

[cweagans]

A forms service is not just useful to businesses. I'd love to have a real contact form on my website, but it's all static and I don't really want to run the infrastructure myself. $100/year is _way_ too much for that case.

[brudgers]

Back of napkin calculation: assuming low costs, $100/year is on the order of 1000 users per software engineer if the engineer also does support. Make it $10/year and the engineer has 10k users to support. 10x users mean 10x probabilities of long tail support events. The long tail of support is unbounded in negative consequences while the best support interaction is zero bound.

It’s not worth building a business for unprofitable customers in general. A forms service falls into the general case because a million customers is a highly unlikely. It’s also likely to require an undesirable business model. For example $10/site/year is going to be too dear for people with multiple hobby sites if $100/year is too dear.

[cweagans]

I understand why one wouldn't necessarily target users who just need a contact form for noncommercial use. However, you could have a business product that allows for team access to forms + support that offsets the cost of the super low cost personal accounts that can't share forms or form results or use support. The actual computational resources required by personal users is likely to be minuscule, especially for something as simple as a form to email service.

> It’s not worth building a business for unprofitable customers in general.

I mean, Uber seems to be doing reasonably well.

[brudgers]

Can you get a year’s Ubering for less than $100?

[LoSboccacc]

the difficult part is finding the right perk that divide the users from indie and professionals.

for something like git number of accounts or private repository count can be enough of a signal to act as differentiation in plans, but for something like forms it's going to be hard, maybe authentication or sso, idk.

[lukevp]

What about 1000 submissions a month for a cheap plan vs unlimited for business/pro? Most businesses would insta buy the top tier to avoid any potential of not accepting a submission even if they never got close.

[divan]

Second the opinions above, but I was also looking for some sort of explanation of why is it free (maybe some innovative idea allowed to reduce costs for long-term support or smth like that)

[yupitszac]

This is something that admittedly, I haven't communicated well.

It's a personal project that I built because I didn't want to keep paying for a service to process forms for my static websites (though as mentioned by someone in one of the threads above I still have some forms to convert)

Maybe I'll record a video explaining that and put it on the front page

[eitland]

I'm kind of the same. Write something about what the business model is.

There exist free services that I kind of trust because it doesn't matter (irc-style technical discussions or postcard-level greetings on Telegram) or because it is freemium and they seem to have a grasp on the problem of free (free matrix accounts: they sell hosted servers, mewe: limited free storage)

[pjc50]

The thing is, this is right next to "I wrote a SaaS product because the internet made me believe it'd make me rich" on the HN front page ...

(Realistically your best bet is to be Pinboard: not rich, but a comfortable living, built up over long years, and by picking up several waves of refugees from collapsing VC-funded competitors)

[bryanrasmussen]

I assume Maciej Cegłowski qualifies as rich, although certainly not wealthy.

[florg]

As a small business owner in Europe I have the same perspective. Maybe it's even just a gut feel of "if I pay money it's a more serious business relationship and I can depend on some rules", e.g. SLAs and data handling.

The thing I immediately look for as well is GDPR information.

Besides all that: it looks like a great solution! :-)

[yupitszac]

Ah, GDPR. Yup! On it

[7ewis]

I agree, companies are happier paying for things as they have someone to blame when something goes wrong.

Maybe if they just offered a paid support plan, but kept the actual service itself free?

[quickthrower2]

Yep you can only do free if you can show your burning VC money

[radmin]

Yes, please start charging. Aside from the effect it has on perceived trustworthiness, longevity, etc., giving away your work for free undermines others' ability to make a living selling theirs.

[onion2k]

giving away your work for free undermines others' ability to make a living selling theirs

If your product isn't better than the free one why should anyone pay for it?

If it is better, why are you worrying about competition that offers an inferior product? If anything, that should drive more customers to your business.

[Hamuko]

>giving away your work for free undermines others' ability to make a living selling theirs.

That's not his problem.

[digitaltrees]

But it is. It’s called a race to the bottom. While it’s a normal price setting function of free markets that doesn’t mean its rational.

[CM30]

So people shouldn't have a blog, since people read that content instead of paid books, magazines or newspaper articles? Or post videos on YouTube, because TV and films aren't free? Or work on open source software, since that might save people the need to buy software from companies that are selling?

Truth of the matter is, an awful lot of things that were previously commercially viable simply aren't any more because people are happy giving them away for free or releasing them with ad support. Few people will buy a web browser or CMS or programming language compiler/interpeter/envrionment, because free competition has made commercial ones obsolete.

Either way, it's just life. Things that were once expensive services only available to wealthy became commoditised and affordable for pennies, and new types of business became viable in their place.

So if you're running a company selling a form service and free competition is outcompeting you, then you'll have to adapt or die like anyone else. Or find some value proposition people are willing to pay for in that area (support, customisations, lots of new features, a glossy design, etc).

[Hamuko]

If you can't compete with a free product that comes with no support or guarantee, maybe the problem is not the person who made their product free.

[LoSboccacc]

if your product is just the code, you have no product anyway.