[ChuckNorris89]

Paying for software vs phones is not really an apples to apples comparison.

A better comparison would be how people gladly pay ten bucks a month for spotify/netflix but would probably never pay that for messaging and IMHO that's where the industry should be going.

People in the past also thought music and movies should be free and pirated the shit out of them, but by making it simple and accessible, for ten bucks a month, most people with a job just won't bother with piracy anymore, even though they gladly pay for something they'll never actually own.

So, the billion dollar question is, how do we transfer that model to messaging?

I keep dreaming about a Pied Piper like decentralized internet.

[lillecarl]

What i don't like is that "everything" is 10$ a month. I would like to subscribe to some payment aggregator where they charge me X dollars a month in one transaction, then pays it out to developers/service providers. This way things could go down in price too, since the fees would be lower because of less transactions. This way cheaper services like messaging could be 1$ a month without being eaten up by fees.

[barell]

Netflix and spotify give me quick access to lot of content and I value it. I don’t care what software gives me this content.

With messaging it’s different. Transferring messages is relatively simple topic to do as a software. But the cost of running and maintaining it is hard and that’s what users don’t care.

[bdamm]

Paying for avatars and stickers.

[dave_sid]

Paying for coins in a game.