[kredd]

If supporting paid model costs more than what they make from paid users, why would a company implement it? Me, you, and most of engineers are in extreme minority for our willingness to pay for stuff to avoid ads. So you’ll get a very tiny percentage of people paying for a service where you hope you’ll recoup your investments after some years. Maybe never.

[DaiPlusPlus]

> If supporting paid model costs more than what they make from paid users, why would a company implement it?

But bnce the code is written to handle it then it's there for everyone to use (though yes, billing infrastructure does requires continual upkeep) - it could even be an internal garage/passion-project/hackathon thing. Companies like Twitter want to attact "the best", and people like that will want to build products that they themselves want to use - why stop them?

Plus there might be other intangible benefits to supporting power-users: it means the power-users will talk about how great something is, and you can't buy word-of-mouth influence like that.

> Me, you, and most of engineers are in extreme minority for our willingness to pay for stuff to avoid ads.

People said the same thing about paying-for-YouTube, and yet YouTube Premium is here to stay, and I'm glad that Google was willing to experiment with the concept, and it worked - but what about all the companies that aren't willing to at-least try to find out?

[jjfoooo4]

There is no such thing as “once the code has been written”.

A passion project is great until the passionate project flounder moves on, then it’s unmaintainable junk.

[DaiPlusPlus]

A passion-project that’s been productized just becomes a regular software project to anyone else besides the original creator - no-one is suggesting we take garage-projects and ship-it immediately.

It’s kinda like how Microsoft handled easter-eggs in the 1990s (before they were banned completely around ~2003), where the egg is just another engineering feature-project, with a spec-doc, a dev timeline, a test plan, and accountability - even if the end-feature is designed to be hidden.

[kredd]

You really can’t apply that to a payment feature. Unfortunately everything that touches money needs constant attention, even if you “just use Stripe”.

[tensor]

And yet many of these sites put enormous effort into combating ad blockers. So clearly the fact that users don’t want ads is fairly significant to them.

[kredd]

Users who don’t want ads aren’t exactly the same as users who are willing to pay. Prime example — myself. What I’m getting at, companies have calculated that in most of scenarios having paid model isn’t worth it. There will always be exceptions for services that people use a lot — Spotify, Netflix, Youtube and etc. For websites where you go on for a few minutes, people aren’t willing to pay up.