HN Explorer

Ask HN: If you had to pay ~5$ per month for an online service, what would it be?

14 points by _ques ↗ HN
I'm not really fishing for startup ideas, but I'd like to get a sense of consumer pain points that are severe enough that people will pay moderate sums of money for.

Good Examples:

File sharing / hosting / management: Github, Dropbox, Flickr

Dating / Networking / Communication: Skype, LinkedIn, Match.com, OKCupid

Tasks / Todo / Personal Search: Evernote, Basecamp

Others: Eyefi, Wakemate

Basically I'd love to hear answers that are like "Oh, I'd LOVE IT if someone fixes X --I'd totally pay 5 bucks for it!"

21 comments

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cperciva
I'd pay $5/month for somewhere I could direct my cron email to which would (a) store everything for future reference, and (b) intelligently compare them from day to day and forward me the emails where something significant changed.

The hard part is (b), of course -- you'd need to figure out things like "the number in the 'up X days' line changes each day, so that's not worth flagging as important".

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shadowpwner
Huh, I could make this for free as a side project. Hmmmm..
veb
Dude just said he'd pay $5 a month for it. Where's your business sense boy?!
antonioe
A blog alert that would, via email give me a way to email my comments to blog topics I am interested.

So say I am interested in Entrepenuership, NYC Pizza, Van Gogh Paintings. I'd get a nice digest in my mail of that days blogs with a way of commenting on them without leaving my Gmail.

frou_dh
Thought for a few minutes and I honestly can't think of anything lacking. Surprising.
albahk
A secure dashboard for my websites or projects where I can see data pulled from Google Analytics/Mixpanel, sales, domain expiry alerts, pingdom uptime, server load, monitoring stats etc. To quickly check all these things requires a significant chunk of time when really my intention is just to "glance" at them to make sure everything is still ticking over.

Eventually I will build and self-host something like this but its a significant development investment for an internal tool.

I would pay $5 a month for this.

chrismiller
You should check out Geckoboard. It is pretty much exactly what you described. It is also free, so you can spend that $5 on an extra coffee every month :)
iworkforthem
Oh, I'd LOVE IT if someone make another drop.io with the file expiry option or single file sharing --I'd totally pay 5 bucks for it!

Oh, I'd LOVE IT if someone give a localized version of twitter, and tell me what is trending, what's hot, etc. --I'd totally pay 5 bucks for it!

jorkos
- send me a weekly email with a few cool events / venues going on in my city (think private thrillist)
veb
I'd pay $5 a month for this site. Definitely.
revorad
It just occurred to me charging $5 a month may be a good way to control HN addiction... unless we end up with an addiction which also costs money.
runT1ME
DropBox. I wish there was a middle ground between the free and $20 a month option.