I'm in a similar position now, so if anyone is looking for a full-stack TypeScript engineer with open-source background (https://github.com/mishushakov) let's chat!
When I first added analytics to my website, I couldn't afford to pay for his then plan (There was a plan for opt-in pay for personal use and paid plan for commercial use. Or something of that sort IIRC). But when I move to a new gig, I wanted to pay for [name redacted] monthly plan but he stopped it in favour of github sponsors for some reason.
I highly recommend and wish he moved back to the old pricing where he was allowing people to use it for personal use but was charging for commercial use. And it was super flexible since if you couldn't afford it, he mentioned you can email. Many more would pay for sure.
My guess is he change it because most of the people who could almost use the product were commercial users. In addition, none would pay for commercial use as they’d just use google analytics, etc for free. In turn, he probably didn’t have many, if any, paying users at that time
Compare that to Plausible: Over $2M in revenue last year.
Plausible started in 2019. Not sure when [name redacted] started. Clicking on "blame" for the readme file in the repo, I see a commit from 5 years ago.
I can very much empathize that adding a "buy" button is a hump to get over when you just wanna build something cool and share it with like-minded people. I have the same issue with every project I build. I guess one should train to jump over one's shadow in this regard.
Plausible also has a co-founder who does marketing, and is evidently very good at it. That's perhaps a more important factor in success than simply offering a paid plan.
It undermines the nominal reason for the enterprise's existence (competition) but once a single competitor begins practicing it, everyone else also has to- not to any benefit, but just to maintain their status quo.
One of the dumbest takes I've seen in a while. Good customer service is like juicing in athletics. You can get away just fine without it but once those pesky competitors stop yelling at their customers, you're kinda forced to do the same as well. Not to any benefit but just to maintain the status quo.
This is far, far too cynical. Marketing is not cheating. To keep the sports metaphor, marketing is training. It's unglamorous, time-consuming, and (for most) not fun. But, if you want to succeed as a professional, you have to do it.
As a single business, marketing is a totally rational way to boost sales. Collectively, it’s just a tax.
If no one was paying, but people were still writing, the best solutions would likely bubble to the top. But as soon as someone pays for placement, everyone needs to. You end up with a new normal that’s the same as before (modulo those products that are better at marketing) but everyone had to pay a bunch of money.
Short of literally banning advertising, there’s no way around it/any serious business needs to do it. But I get the take that it’s a cost that is only necessary because everyone else is doing it.
You're confusing paid advertising with marketing. Marketing is interweaved in almost any business activity. No marketing means you literally register a company and then wait in your house for someone to randomly walk in and pay you for you services. And if that miraculously happens, you treat them as badly as you can and do the worst possible job, just to make sure you don't inadvertently get some word of mouth referrals.
Training actually improves the product (athletic performance). Does an athlete going on a commercial to hawk shoes make them a better athlete or make the shoes better? Would the answer be different once we change domains back to software? Marketing may be a necessary business activity in the current environment, but it is not at all like training in its fundamental effect on the quality of the product. (Though in that regard, I think juicing was a bit awkward as an analogy)
- "Hey, here's something interesting you might be interested in!"
- "Drink Coca Cola"
The second type of marketing is the sort of zero-sum game you're talking about. Everyone already knows about this, Coca Cola and Pepsi spend phenomenal amounts of money, and it kind of just cancels out.
But the first type of marketing is rather different. The simplest kind is making something and then telling people that you made it.
This assumes all potential customers know all products and services somehow, without the enterprises communicating their existence? Without marketing, how would we know that website analytics as a service even exists?
Sure we could guess and randomly reach out to companies to ask if they provide it. Answering those inquiries could easily be considered marketing, though.
Bringing attention to the existence of a thing isn't juicing, it's a necessary part of making something useful. If you build something that's potentially useful but no one ever hears of it, it isn't actually useful until someone hears of it.
Ignoring financial incentives, you're claiming that a specific method of dissemination (word of mouth) is all that anyone could ever need, or some such. This doesn't make much sense. How can only one very specific communication method be the end of all that be, when it comes to a multimedia world. It's like saying one ever only needs masks to mitigate every communicable respiratory diseases. Masks are effective but far from reasonably being the end of the tech tree, the pinacle of all methods that ever will be.
Also it seems like your gripe is actually with advertising, which would be more sensible. Simply being against marketing is merely proof that you can't possibly understand what marketing is.
That only applies to heavily saturated markets and it's only "zero sum", because the market isn't growing anymore, not because marketing is bad.
When you are tapping a new market, absolutely nobody knows about your company, your product and the problems it solves. In fact, often you even have to educate your customer that they have an opportunity to improve their business/life with your product.
> Plausible also has a co-founder who does marketing, and is evidently very good at it. That's perhaps a more important factor in success than simply offering a paid plan.
Yes, I agree. This is also what I told the NLnet people a few years back, but while there's a lot of budget for specific technical things, there isn't really any money set aside for more "soft" aspects like this.
[name redacted] started a few months before Plausible.
Giving it away for free didn't help, but "making money" was never really a goal as such. I think "being free" is important if you want to be a viable alternative for Google Analytics. €9/month is nothing for a business, but who is paying that for a blog or hobby site (or even some small businesses)?
I already decided a few years ago that "covers hosting" is good enough. It's just that circumstances conspired to put in this rather uncomfortable position.
> but who is paying that for a blog or hobby site (or even some small businesses)?
I was trying to. I highly recommend you to bring back the paid plans. Just leave it as it was. Opt-in for personal and for small commercial websites, paid plan. Like someone else mentioned, for a business, invoices helps a lot to bill as expense if they want to pay you.
Always ALWAYS have a way to give money that results in a professional-looking invoice for a professional-sounding product. That’s a great way for people in business to get the cost expensed.
Thank you for making it free! I've used it on my blog (https://vgel.me) forever, since back before I ever would've paid for analytics, and it's been rock-solid the whole time. Some of the most "set it and forget it" software I use. I definitely owe you a donation so I'm glad I saw this!
It’s very very risky to optimize for just “good enough”. You have to build some reserve, or you risk being in the situation you are in.
You don’t need to optimize to earn tons of money, but minimum threshold should more than just good enough. So, if things go wrong, you can spend that reserve and actually be on a “good enough” position until you figure things out
One difference I see is I heard very little about [name redacted] (first time was mid 2023), but Plausible pops up every few months to the top of HN. So they for sure have marketed harder.
This also validates that maybe something like Setapp for SaaS or Spotify for SaaS might be a good business model.
Agreed. A paid plan with a proper invoice is so so much easier to file as a business expense, both at a big business and as an independent. I don't know how to even start doing that with a donation.
Reminds me a lot of the boat I'm in - based on his CV it looks like he's self-taught and started around the same time I did. This market right now is killing us, and I've got to wonder if AI tools are filtering out self-taught devs more aggressively than they used to. In the worst case scenario, I have family I can move in with, but I don't know how to function in any other role after dedicating myself to this since childhood. Just going to keep refining skills and hope things turn around soon.
> I've got to wonder if AI tools are filtering out self-taught devs more aggressively than they used to.
I hope not. I have a CS degree, but some of the best and most prolific developers I've had the pleasure to work with have all be self-taught. One of the most talented .Net developers I've ever worked with had a masters degree in philosophy and was a trained furniture maker, when those things failed to pay the bills he taught himself C# and was easily the most talented and creative developer on our team.
Selecting developers based on education is moronic, the self-taught people are often really talented and I can easily find CS majors who can't program at all. Education has almost zero reflection on your ability as a developer.
This is not true. There is a fairly strong correlation between formal education and ability as a developer, and I say this as someone with close to 2 decades of experience in the problem space. A CS/STEM degree, as degree quality (where the degree was obtained), makes an enormous difference in the average case.
People who say the opposite are thinking of developers, often themselves, who were able to become skilled without a CS degree. That is indeed quite possible, and I've met many individuals in this category. I'm not going to say the best developers I've met had no degree, but I've met great developers without a degree. But I wouldn't say it is common; most developers without a CS/STEM degree whom I've met were, indeed, mediocre engineers that often had no business being there.
I've also met many poor developers from great schools and great developers from schools with poor reputation. But, as a thought experiment, if I was to pick a developer based solely on whether they have a degree and where they got this degree, lacking any other piece of information, I'd always pick the ones with a degree from a reputable school.
They said "some of the best and most prolific developers". The average case is meaningless. Self-taught developers who thrive are almost certainly above average.
If you discriminate based on having a CS degree, you are lopping off a big portion of the right tail which is where all the people you actually want to hire are.
In my experience the best developers are self-taught programmers who then went on to get a CS degree. Probably followed by people who got a STEM degree and then went on to become self-taught programmers (with a jump-start from the little programming they learned in their STEM degree). Getting good with only a CS degree or only self-learning is much tougher, though of course there are examples of both.
I've come across so many devs with "good" CVs who were full of themselves and couldn't do a single pragmatic thing. CVs, degrees, titles seem completely inflated and mostly meaningless in North America and in tech in particular. Sometimes I'm wondering whether people like you – assuming you are good at your job – shouldn't simply lie on their CV to get their foot in the door.
Regardless, you should have better chances of not being filtered out with small, profitable, companies.
A billion of these stories never prepared me for the utter shitshow that laid itself bare to me when I first became a hiring manager. I’m self-taught, am strongly philosophically opposed to educational or past employer ‘prestige’ like working for FAANG or whatever. Still, I learned pretty quickly to not trust a bunch of naive ‘intuitive’ signals.
I began my career in a startup where pretty much everyone else but myself was an Ivy grad, with many coming from FAANG internships, and I have very high opinions of them. We all were very driven and all had things to teach each other. I don't want to downplay the notion that it's an indicator of high quality talent. I just think that it shouldn't be downplayed that growing up developing software out of an interest in the work is a strong indicator too.
Thanks for making me laugh, I think that's worth a few bucks.
I donated every year to Wikipedia until I learned that (1) they have a huge chest of money, (2) their expenses could be much lower if they were not a 500-man SF company.
I was sponsoring him on Patreon for $2/month but it looks like he deleted his Patreon back in mid-2021 and I didn't notice.
I'm using him for 4 of my personal websites ( 172, 1135, 25 and 22 visits in the last month ). Satisfied with the product so I've sponsored him on github.
Same - i dunno if i ever have a use for the project/software, but when he wrote that he doesn't want to "Jimmy Wales" people i just had to :D
Also: sometimes, life is just brutal - admitting you actually do need help (and even moreso in such a public way) itself has to be rewarded and commended!
I have a different take. I think it's a warning to people that use the software: they can either chip in a little bit, or have no expectation whatsoever for there ever to be another release. I think that there is an ethical obligation here on the part of active users to donate at least $2 each, assuming that the developer isn't making up a story.
If one needs the code to be maintained, not supporting may mean that the code may stop being maintained, which may mean that one will stop being able to use it in the future.
This may or may not be related to ethics, depending on what one calls or defines as ethics, but the reality is that free rides always carry a risk, even if there is no ethical obligation to pay for the ride. Of course, that depends on what value one gives to the code, and stuff like the cost of not being able to use it in the future due to lack of maintenance, or the cost of having to put in effort to maintain it oneself. But while there are no such ethical obligations tied to the use of some free software per se, imo there are ethics (or "ethics") tied to the interdepedencies and connections within such a social system in the sense of it being sustainable and able to self-perpetuate.
You should read about psychology of gifts and how it helped the white man to conquer America. Native Americans were such honourable people that they felt every gift must be repaid and more.
> ...assuming that the developer isn't making up a story.
Even if the developer is a millionaire, it's proper to chip in a few bucks for free stuff that you use and enjoy. Sob story or no sob story.
But honestly, the real solution is for people to stop with this open source nonsense and start charging for their work. There are thousands of potential customers for every boutique app or code solution.
Nobody is entitled to free code, especially not the billion dollar companies who are the main beneficiaries of the hard work of open source programmers.
Maybe they have a hard time finding a software dev job, they seem to be self taught. Or perhaps just maximizing the process as in applying wherever possible.
I don't understand why do developers provide hosted version for free? That too when you are short of cash. You have already provided opensource sw, whoever wants to use it can selfhost and bear the infrastructure costs. You can also provide paid version of it for people who don't want to self host. If you do want to subsidize have some other source of income. IT almost feels like self-inflicted pain.
The infra costs are covered, with some to spare; that's not really the problem. It's more "I have this thing anyway, so might as well ask people using it for some help now I really need it." That's why it's in the release notes (never expected it to be posted here).
The hosted platform is specifically for small projects and personal homepages, not for big businesses. The platform they run probably have monthly expenses below 50 USD/month, I don't think that's their biggest expense, if you compare to rent and groceries...
This is slightly adjacent to the topic but I think a very important one.
I do not know much about [name redacted] and the creator but after looking at his resume, I feel he obviously has a very marketable skills and with over 10+ year of experience, I feel one should have enough put away for rough times like this (forgive me if I am missing some context about this specific case, but I think this point applies in general to everyone imho)
I've had my own troubles in the past (and learned from it), where I made unwise investment choices and when some unforeseen circumstances came up, I found myself cash-poor and struggling a bit, even though I was employed at that time.
Here's the wiki from bogleheads [0] that gives a good framework on how to think about investing and what to prioritize. First thing to do if you do not already, when the times are good is to build an emergency fund.
Well, there's a long chain of events over the last ~3 years leading up to this point, but I don't really feel like explaining everything in detail (and I don't think it's all that interesting in the first place). Also I never made that much in software dev in the first place.
Reading that other people donated helped me to do so. I'm writing this to help other people get over the decision hump.
I self-host his [name redacted] on a fun site of mine. I like this style of app: small, simple binary that can share a machine with lots of other things.
Isn’t this obvious candidate for a paid SaaS? Maybe someone more familiar with matter at hand can enlighten me on why the developer doesn’t simply make the hosted version a paid-for service instead of asking for donations?
> why the developer doesn’t simply make the hosted version a paid-for service
Because it's not always simple and being a good developer in many cases doesn't overlap with being good at marketing or business as it's not what they are passionate about. There's a good blog post about Plausible Analytics before and after the marketing co-founder joined, wasn't able to find it right now though.
Here's a one time donation. The project looks interesting, I'll give it a spin next time I need something like that. If it's embeddable as a library that's even better!
Here are a few ideas to build the next great analytics tool, these are the main reasons why I build my own little tool for my websites:
1. Find a way to also count users with Ad Blocker. Google Analytics and even Plausible (unless when self hosted) don't track users with an Ad Blocker.
2. Show how many users are using an Ad Blocker, this is a very important metric when a site is relying on ad revenue. It turned out that 30-33% of my traffic was using an Ad Blocker, which prompted me to implement a fallback where I show the user a banner with an affiliate link instead.
3. Offer an unlimited free tier, under the condition that a summary of the stats is visible to everyone, a bit like Github used to work. Users can then hide to make their stats private.
The first two aren't technically possible. And also not desirable, IMHO. That said, [name redacted] can import pageviews from logfiles like goaccess, so that's kind of the closest you can get (although then it's harder to filter bots, so it's more skewed the other way).
That said, I do wish tools like uBlock would make it easier to give people more choice in what to block and not block, but that's not up to me (also in terms of ads; the other day I saw a site which has just <img src="/ad.png">, which I don't really see any problem with, and uBlock goes out of its way to block that – meh).
I recently had a page import something like site_stats.js (site meant as in a physical building/location) from the same domain as the html request and ublock blocked it.
Had to rename the bundle.
Thanks for [name redacted] btw, I've got a little website that hosts useful information that's hard to find otherwise for a little community (~20 visits / day) and [name redacted] has been reliably telling me whether or not people still use it for a few years now.
I don't dislike Jimmy Wales. "Please donate to Wikipedia" is one of the most common "please donate" type messages, and at least in the past it was usually written from the first person with a picture of Jimmy Wales' (usually unshaven) mug. It's just a joke. Nothing more.
Wikipedia used to have this huge banner with the cofounder staring right at you as if making eye contact[1]. Inevitably, it became a meme for a time with other people seeking donations creating graphics mimicking the original.
It's not for Jimmy Wales specifically, HN just tends to have a kneejerk reaction towards any NGOs asking for money. Mozilla, Wikimedia, Gnome, FSF, Creative Commons, it really doesn't matter. Any thread even tangentially related to such orgs is always met with dozens of comments where people go out of their way to either justify not donating, or saying how they used to donate but stopped because of X, Y and Z.
The only exception to the rule is the Internet Archive.
I was sponsoring this guy on github for some time. Then I wasn’t seeing any updates, for like a year or so and stopped sponsorship. Now using umami for analytics.
If the author has a seemingly popular and monetisable (sic) product with real users, yet has failed to achieve the state of ramen profitable, then perhaps this is fate.
Perhaps he's not able to be at the helm of a product that people would rely on in their production apps.
What if the author of this app is unable to run the product successfully and is forced to close it down. What happens to the thousands of users who have integrated his product in their stack? An expensive migration. Loss of profit for them.
Perhaps it's better to choose another product that is able to be profitable.
>What if the author of this app is unable to run the product successfully and is forced to close it down.
That’s why many businesses would not consider a free service or a product. The developer of SQLite sells licenses for his public domain code for this very reason.
Maybe your comment comes as a too harsh of a portrayal of the person who provides valuable product or service for free but IMHO from business standpoint its true.
If you want money ask for it and I don't mean donations. The strange dynamic where you collect street cred in exchange for your work and expect to be taken care for doesn't work. Even if he finds a job and doesn't need donations, he will be working for people who wanted money and asked for it. It's the same thing with directly asking money for your services but with extra steps where you pay other people for doing the asking.
I disagree, there's no contract or expectation of performance with a donation. People who depend on products like paying for that product because this sets expectations.
I should have updated this last week as I had raised enough money and I'm starting a job next Monday. So things should be grand going forward for now.