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Pinboard →

Pinboard is basically what del.icio.us used to be: a minimal no-nonsense utility for managing bookmarks.

As Gruber points out, it has a clever one-time signup fee model:

(number of users * $0.001)

This model is a brilliant move for a little web startup.

  • It shows the developer is going to stick with it. Paying money for a service comes with an implication of commitment on the part of the developer.

  • It filters your users, leaving only people who care about the product.

    For example: I’m passionate about the attitude of utility and functionality that was behind the original del.icio.us service. The faux-minimalist, badly thought-out “re-design” of that service bugs me. Evidently it bothered Mr. Maciej enough to build a service, which basically makes us friends. Heck, I want to pay him a small reasonable fee for a service I appreciate.

  • It brings in lots of users, but not too many. As more users come to the service, the fee increases, giving me a great incentive to be an early adopter. As the fee increases, the number of new users will slow down to a trickle. This gives the developer time to cruise along with a fair-sized bunch of real customers, helping him focus on what real customers want. He also has time to iron out bugs and figure out how to scale.

  • It defrays initial development costs, and then some. This matters a lot when you’re bootstrapping a little startup. After your users flood in, you’ve got a reasonable chunk of change that you can use to focus on your project.

I payed $4.22 for my account, Mr. Gruber payed $2.91 for his yesterday. Evidently, Mr. Maciej’s idea is taking off.

Update: Alex King brought up one potential pitfall of this model in a conversation today. In the event that the developer can not attract enough customers to make the service self-sustaining (given whatever business model he puts in place after the initial buy-in period), he is left in unhappy situation of having to shut down the service. The one-time fee will not cover the recurring costs of hosting and upkeep forever. Of course, this would leave his once-passionate payed users feeling cheated and they would be likely to channel their passion in his direction. It should be noted that if you do not feel comfortable charging at least what it costs to create a product, you shouldn’t be creating the product in the first place.