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Ask HN: How to monetize our web clipping app?

9 points by jaysonelliot ↗ HN
Our site / Chrome app - http://clipular.com - has about 7,500 users so far, and is one year old this month.

With it, you can draw a box anywhere you like to clip a web page, saving exactly the area you select (snap to div is optional). Our users like it because it's very simple, with a keyboard shortcut and no extra actions to take.

The clips are kept in a password-protected quilt that only you can see. The full text of the site is indexed no matter what portion you clip, so you can search for words on a site you've saved, even if they're not in your clipping.

Now we need to decide how to monetize our app.

We're considering premium features, like group sharing, public sharing, or enterprise versions. Advertising and data collection have been discussed, but we don't really like turning our users into products.

What do you think? Premium features for a fee? One-time or monthly? What would be good features? Is there a better business model?

6 comments

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jkaykin
Clickable: http://clipular.com

Awesome product! One unobtrusive way to monetize is to simply allow users to store up to 10 shots (for example) for free, if they want more space they can pay something like $10 a month for up to 100 shots. The more space needed, the more they pay.

Also, providing an enterprise option might be a good idea as well.

jaysonelliot
Thanks! We're really trying to focus on making the experience as unobtrusive as possible.

What kind of things would you expect to see in an enterprise version?

jkaykin
A few things I would expect to see:

Profiles for people to showcase their shots (sort of like Instagram has).

The ability to share shots with others.

The ability to have private scrapbooks that you can share with certain people.

Charge per month($50) plus per user($2)

justhw
This is a very neat and simple application. Here is what I think you can charge for.

1. As jkaykin mentioned, limit clips for free users and unlimit for pro.

2. Provided a clean organized layout for pro users which can make them efficient.

3. Allow signup via email. I personally went to signup and was turned off by the two choices. No matter how many times you tell me, you don't spam my facebook wall, I will never signup via those two services. That's just me, but I'm sure plenty of HNers have the same approach. May be that's where your money is. Don't block us. </sorry>

4. I suggest one-time like pinboard, and up-sell a simple annual plan that has some neat features. You probably don't want to do monthly because, every time users see the charges in their bank, they will subconsciously reevaluate whether they should keep paying or find an alternative. So, having an annual/one-time/quarterly plan will minimize that reevaluation moment. This is all assuming that your product is easily replaceable.

Goodluck

helen842000
Please please allow for printing of clips. You'll have one up on Evernote if you do & people are desperate for it!
davidww
I think clipular is great, I only have one other requirement and that to share a subset of my clips with another person - our designer. I'd pay for this feature, maybe $10 per month.

Thanks for a great app!