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Ask HN: Will you pay 1$/month for?

29 points by tuyguntn ↗ HN
For what kind of thing you are ready to pay 1$/month?

I am from developing country and 200-300$/month addition will make good sense.

I do lots of freelancing and making decent money, but I want to create passive income generator.

Please share your idea and if possible please estimate possible number of users who might use it.

25 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 71.7 ms ] thread
MichaelBurge
Sometimes my sink get clogged up, and I have to spend a couple minutes unclogging it. I'd pay $1/month to somehow ensure that it never gets clogged again. Probably tens of millions of people would also use a solution to this.
cromulent
An app where I can register peoples' birthdays.

For example: Anne, 27 Sep 2005.

Then, it emails me a month before with relevant gift suggestions from e-commerce retailers for female age 10.

For Christmas, I get a long list of everyone.

You could probably make the $1 off the affiliation links. However, I would like it to be multiple e-commerce sites, not just Amazon.

SchizoDuckie
Seriously? I just added the people important enough to congratulate outside of facebook to google calendar with a yearly returning reminder (oh, and birth year, not unimportant)
mattm
The value is in the gift suggestions.
J-dawg
Just before quitting Facebook, I made a point of adding friends' birthdays to my iOS contacts, which are shown in the calendar on my iPhone. However there is no option to be automatically reminded of all birthdays, so I still sometimes miss them. I feel like this should be available as a standard feature of iOS. I'd pay for an app that would simply read all the birthdays from my contacts and create a calendar reminder for each one. Not a monthly subscription, but definitely worth paying a few pounds for.
zeckalpha
Not sure about iOS, but on Mac OS X calendar: Preferences > General > Show Birthdays Calendar.
tuyguntn
Challenge accepted, will work on crawling gifts and gift matching algorithm. crawling is easier, should think about matching.
aswinshibu
1$ per email lead generated for sales or marketing? We do that service!
going_to_800
Haha, looking for something like this myself, but at least $20/month. I want to challenge myself in 3 months and get it to $1k...don't know if possible.

I would pay $1/month if you give me each month 10 ideas that I could build in a weekend with the potential of making $1k/month.

Raed667
I'd pay for something that would help me manage my time. The app needs to find the sweet-spot between "inefficient" and "annoying"
brudgers
Just some random advice from the internet:

Pricing at $1.00/month means that new customers + retained customers - non-collections = 200, $10.00/month means 20, $100.00/month means 2, and $2400/year means just one.

It's harder to acquire 200 customers than 20. It's harder to retain them. It's more work to process their payments and more costly due to per transaction fees. The channels that are used to reach such customers have to be lower cost and generally that equates with noisy -- think of app discovery for $1.00 apps in the appstores -- and $1.00 services are always directly competing with free.

I was going to say "web hosting/email", but then I realized that I wouldn't really trust a $1.00/month web hosting or email provider because at that price it doesn't suggest a sustainable business, and if it goes under after eighteen months, the pain isn't going to be worth the cost savings.

Pricing is signaling.

Good luck.

tuyguntn
Thanks for advise, agree with you about cost and sustainability of business.

If possibly could you tell then for what kind of service will you pay 10$/month?

brudgers
I pay about that for hosting + email. But it goes to a big company and I've been using them since 2007 and the company is bigger now than it was then. To emphasize my point, there aren't many small companies that I would trust to bill my credit card on a recurring basis.

What will you do for me for $1/month?

natdempk
I'm going to second this and say that besides micro-transactions and apps, pricing at $1 is essentially signaling to the user that the product is near worthless. Its hard to imagine a product I would actively go out of the way to pay for that would cost $1 per month.

To me $1 per month signals that I should be looking for a free alternative or that it is an introductory rate that will increase later on. Gaming companies go out of their way to implement micro-transactions that are priced that low in another currency for a reason: it signals higher value to the user to spend "more". I'm not trying to give you a hard time, but this is a topic that has been covered time and time again on HN, and if you search you can find plenty of discussions around charging higher SaaS prices being more effective on almost all fronts.

kamphey
I'd pay a dollar per month if you could track all my clients' social media in one place.

I help people on Twitter and instagram and YouTube.

Might be cool for following anyone you're a fan of on multiple platforms.

tmaly
I would pay $1 a month for quick feedback on my website. Give me a quick 10 minute look and try things out and tell me what works, what is confusing etc. Sort of like customer feedback. I am sure you would have a large number of users as usability testing is expensive. There is not really a price point in the $1 range as far a I could tell.
ry_ry
I'd pay $1 p/m for a regularly updated list of viable passive-income startup ideas, their potential market size, ideally all in the $1 recurring subscription range.
J_Darnley
A dead man's switch service to send out pre-composed emails to given addresses when no action has been taken in a given amount of time.

I might pay for that to send out an email revoking my PGP key in the event of my death.

tuananh
To low, users won't think it's sustainable. To high, they won't pay for it.
sidthekid
I would pay $1 for a service that matches my skill level to various open source project issues on github and gives me an intro to make a PR for them. This service once stable and dependable could be sold to Comp Science depts of universities as real-world programming projects for their students.
swanson
$1/month for a twice-a-month email that lists 2-3 shows/movies worth watching on Netflix/Amazon Instant. Could be new release/added or older 'gems'.

Bonus pts if it could sync up with my accounts to not recommend things I've already seen, but not required. More bonus pts if it could use my ratings for smarter recommendations.

Seems ideal to test out without writing any software -- just research and collect a list of 5-6 items and type up an email in MailChimp :)

eecks
Music, mail, tv/movies, ties