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by mrgalaxy 1458 days ago
Definitely interesting idea! Congrats on shipping.

My two cents: Switch up the pricing plans. I certainly would never pay $50 per month (and my gosh $100?!?) for this service, but I may want to watch more than 10 pages your $10 plan has.

My suggestion, is to just simplify all the pricing. Get rid of all the tiers. Keep the free and $10/month tiers. Make the $10 tier do unlimited pages. No one needs 10 min or 1 min updates. I think do hourly updates on the $10 tier.

I think you'll find that more people are willing to subscribe if you bring the price down while providing more value for that.

3 comments

Thanks for checking it out and for the feedback! I will probably keep the minute and 10 minute checks because some pieces drop and are sold in under 2 minutes of dropping (Greg Capullo, Jim Cheung, and Paul Smith in particular sell sketches insanely fast)!
I think I slightly misunderstood the point of this site, people probably do want fast updates. But I still think the price should be brought down. You could probably save costs by pooling the crawling, eg. if multiple subscribers request the same page, do that crawl once for all of them. You may already be doing that.
RE: pooling - yup, pooling for the win! As a self taught programmer, this was one block of code I was particularly proud of :)
Crawling too fast from the same IP addy can get that IP blocked. Per 10 mins prob ok, per 1 minute may be too much depending on the volume being downloaded and the sensitivity (you mention saleable stuff in another comment so this might well make a difference). FYI. I did a reasonable amount of scraping myself.

(err, crawling = scraping? or maybe they different things)

Edit: tidy + clarify

Having higher priced tiers works the other way, more people subscribe because it seems like a good value