skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been slowly integrating Chargify into my app for the last several weeks and was blown away to read about this just now. One of the big selling points for me was the fact that it was free for up to 50 customers. I thought this was brilliant on their part because neither Recurly or Spreedly offer this. It got you locked into using their service, which is huge.

That being said, I bet that 95% of their users are under the 50 users/month threshold and it must cost a bit to support them all. They must have calculated that it just wasn't worth it.

I wish they would offer a cheaper plan for up to, say, 100 users. I think that would a great middle ground for new apps.

I wrote a blog post a few weeks ago comparing the costs of Recurly, Spreedly, and Chargify and concluded Chargify was way in front [1]. I think they're way behind now.

[1] http://www.mattmazur.com/2010/08/comparing-recurly-spreedly-...
Not reading the whole thread, I see. The 3G version would just require someone to plug it in, no fiddling required.
Silverstein's old Stanford homepage is here: http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~csilvers/ Interesting to get some idea of what his background was when he went to Google.
I love that clip (and pretty much everything else in The West Wing).

But there is actually a reason the Mercator map (which distorts size) is so widely used, which isn't really mentioned in the clip.

EDIT: Actually it is mentioned in the clip! Treats me right to rely on memory :) I'm leaving the explanation here for anyone that hasn't seen the clip. Thanks yummyfajitas for pointing out my mistake.

The gist of the reasoning is this: take any 3D object, and try and map it onto a 2D surface, and you're going to have to distort something. In the case of the Mercator map, the plan was to make a map that clearly showed "shipping lanes", i.e. if you draw a straight line on the map from one point to another, you can travel in a straight line in the real word between those points. This is important for sea travel (the Mercator map was created in the 1500's). The trade-off to this decision was that sizes were distorted.

More reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_map
Based on this, the Winklevoss twins should have lost their lawsuit against Zuckerburg no?
What's worse is that if you're already using them, you basically have no choice in the matter since the alternative is trying to get all of your customers to sign up again, which is basically a non-starter. Note that they also doubled prices for their first tier of paid customers from $600 to $1200.
What EmailOracle does is to enable prosumers with the ability to deal with outgoing email overload. We are a business tool and we have studies that show that this is a feature that is well-received and well-intentioned in enterprise communication.

This is also evidenced in how MS Outlook provides read-receipts for their emails, and Blackberry messages that also automatically do read-tracking.

Makers of a kitchen knives cannot really prevent customers from using the tool for nefarious purposes. We do our best to preserve the privacy of recipients and allow opting out as well.
You will thank me later:

git log --graph
I believe the browser does ask if you want to go over the limit. At least Safari's setting suggests that:
http://imgur.com/wfMDA.png
I've found the absolute best thing you can do is to switch positions frequently. I've got terrible posture - I'm frequently curled up & twisted in my chair - and yet have never had RSI or back problems, probably because I don't hold that posture for long. At work, I usually migrate between my desk, the futon, a beanbag, and the massage chair. At home, I switch between couch, floor, bed, and balcony, with frequent breaks to get up and pace.

When I don't get up and switch, I frequently do have problems, like I threw out my shoulder leaning on the couch while reading the NaNoWriMo forums last night. Vegging out can be hazardous to your health...
Far from it. If cars were less dangerous to bikers and pedestrians, people could actually use bike lanes safely, and cross at walk signals.

Besides. I never said nor implied "perfect". Merely better, and being better is easier without other human drivers, who can far more quickly take a bad (or good) situation and make it worse. Bikes don't go 60+ mph and weigh over a ton. Neither do pedestrians. And very few of either of those carry large quantities of gasoline.
The initial reviews have been great (even from Apple fanatics like Gruber, Mossberg, and Pogue). The WP7 development environment is great and utilizes APIs with a wealth of existing experience out there.

Sure they were late to the game, but from what I can see, they'll already become a player. The same dismissals were issued against Microsoft for other late-comers-that-became-hits like the XBOX series, Active Directory, and .NET.
More like Coruscant or Trantor. (Star Wars and Foundation, respectively.)
Open-rate tracking is only one of the features we are providing with EmailOracle, and we see many other business opportunities in this space.
If anyone wanted to burn their relationship with me, spying on what most would consider to be unwatched activity, involving something as specific and interpersonal as email, would be a pretty good way.

It's just... creepy.

If you have a legal need to make sure I've received something, use registered post.
the use of an image resource that never actually loads, but does a sleep/redirect loop so it can track how long the message has been open

Hmm, very interesting. So they essentially make their server side script sleep for a few seconds, but not long enough that the client gives up waiting, then they send the client a redirect to the same script again. When the client stops requesting the fake image then it is safe to assume that the email is no longer being read.

That is a great idea, very innovative. I wondered how they were measuring how long the email was read.
I am unable to locate any hard numbers for the adoption rates of Silverlight (there doesn't appear to be any officially published figures), but something tells me it's a lot less then the 41.7 million 360's sold.

I think that you're right that both are "successful." But I believe I'm not alone in thinking that the 360 was a far greater success.

edit: Further research shows 56% of browsers for September sport Silver light (http://www.statowl.com/custom_ria_market_penetration.php), but this is hard to compare apples to apples. Personally, to me a ~$300 purchase is worth a lot more then a free plug-in download anyway in terms of how successful something is.
Strange that they say it's only been around for 4 years. I seem to remember the first time this story came through Reddit was about 4 years ago, and the phenomenon it described had been going for several years at that point.

It's actually surprising to see it here now. I was expecting to see a [2007] tacked on to it.
It's smaller, yes, but not by much. The USA is 9.8 million km^2 and Europe is 10.2 million km^2. Though that does include Alaska.

I think the thing that took me the longest to "get" was simply the distances between things. If you'd asked me a few years ago how far one coast of the USA is from the other, I'd probably guess at around a thousand miles. Top to bottom maybe 500.

Mind you I also didn't realise Washington wasn't in Washington state.
The old Lemonade simulation on Apple computers had such an optimal solution. Unfortunately, it was relatively easy to find. (Much to the chagrin of my teacher, who tried to use it to teach economics and business to my grade school class!)
I'm not sure I understand - what does the free developer option give you? Just the ability to integrate with your site (but not actually charge anyone)?
German study finds happiness is based on choices, not genes
We have about 35 customers in Chargify, and growing steadily, but $99/month will eat almost half our monthly revenue. Really disappointed.
In C99, integer types can have padding bits that may not be writable, and writing all ones can be 'a trap representation' (except for the cas of unsigned char). So, I would guess that the portable way to do this requires taking the address of the variable, casting to (char unsigned *), and writing sizeof(var) all-ones unsigned char patterns (however that has to be done). I am not a C expert, though, so feel free to correct me.
But then, it's not knowledge you ever really need to know.

If you're European and living in Europe, that is. Knowing the relative size of your surroundings is pretty useful.
That's a pretty huge price increase. With all the competition in this space (Recurly, CheddarGetter, Spreedly, many others), I would assume the prices would be going down, not skyrocketing up.

They obviously are banking on the fact that their customers are already tied up with their API, so it would be difficult to switch. This is pretty sketchy, and it's going to make me very suspicious of these guys in the future. Also.. no grandfathering clause for existing paid clients?
The drink trick is perfect, but beware you will be going to the bathroom often. Also be aware that you may develop a habit of sipping on your cup very often and that can lead to bad habits while drinking alcohol.
I think that is why they have kept it. It will give them insanely high publicity. Moreover, I think they might be able to keep it too. It's not like Oracle sued Matrix team for having an Oracle. :)

Also, to the people who are saying images are not displayed in most of the email clients, browsers, don't forget smartphones where there is no option of blocking images.
If possible could you tell us what the "high volume of people who enable images" is exactly? Is it 50%, 75%?

I am curious because part of my startup-in-progress will eventually include tracking of email notification reading using images, or other tricks.
It needn't be T-Mobile to have prodded HTC in this direction. In fact, it's more likely to have been another carrier who said "We'll only start to carry this phone if you lock it down like this."
Actually, all but the middle plan seem to be "out of stock".
There was no stimulus
You should get the pumpkin over the top of your page when you have it. Only one person gets the pumpkin at a time!
IPad manufacturer Foxconn faces new accusations in wake of suicide
While we're on the topic, anyone have tips for having a good posture, but packing your setup in a bag? I want to work remotely but not kill my back in the process.

So far the best suggestions seem to be to use a nada-chair and a laptop stand + light external keyboard.
> we do need to migrate everyone to the new pricing

You can't change your pricing upwards for existing customers, ever.

You can change your price to anything you want for new customers.

You can decrease your prices for anybody at any point in time.

Something like chargify is the basis for the business models of other parties, if you made a deal in the past you have to honor it, so that your customers can honor the deals that they made.
IIRC they didn't win it, it was settled out of court. If you believe the standard line, it was settled to avoid the random chance that a civil jury would decide based on emotion rather than merit.
Wow.

I'm about to launch a pretty involved startup, and we're bootstrapping. Chargify, you just DOUBLED our monthly expenses.

Thanks a lot.
Reading this was very surprising for me, because I'd always assumed this kind of thing was impossible.

After going over the comments here, there is apparently a (well known) trick of adding images to email, then tracking hits for that image on your server, thus giving you "email analytics". Apparently this is one of the reasons that most email programs block images by default. In fact, I've long wondered why images are blocked by default, and only now found out.

Always amazes me how many things I have yet to learn!
This seems like a big shoot-self-in-foot moment. To get to 50+ users you have to start at zero. Cut out all your <50 customers and you'll never have any >50 customers. Seems blatantly obvious to me. I guess I must be missing something.
This is also evidenced in how MS Outlook provides read-receipts for their emails

Which everyone who is aware of it disables. I'll be blocking your service on the firewall, just good information hygiene. Thanks for announcing it here!
If it's not an app anyone can try (this are not only social apps - we can try anything we can download or use over the web), than you obviously cannot get user feedback from a very technically oriented community (which is usually a great feedback).

That doesn't mean you cannot describe your solution, the business idea behind it, the way you designed and implemented it, the way you plan to distribute it, get users, and in the end make some money while making the world a better place - either for everyone, or just for yourself. Be it here or through a blog post. You can probably get some very useful suggestions from this sort of info, maybe even find somebody in the same area of business as you are.

It would certainly be nice to hear and read more about different types of startups.
Well, they settled. I think they were arguing that they had an implied contract with Zuck, not (primarily) that he stole their idea.
Until today they offered a plan that let you use their service for free until you reached 50 customers.

Now there's no free plan that you can use after you've launched your site. And for existing apps that use Chargify and have less than 50 customers, they're going to have to start paying $99/month to keep using the service.

Edit: I understand your question now. Yes, the current free plan lets you integrate it into your site, but you can't actually start charging customers until you upgrade to the $99/mo plan.
I found out about the change of pricing friday and I was really bummed about it. 50 free users were the perfect amount of user to guarantee some steady income before tackling the expense. It's also true that with a $25/mo you would need 7 clients to at least cover the billing costs (chargify/gateway/merchant acc.). Maybe instead they could have just change the free plan to 10 customers + no support.

I looked at Spreedly, I loved their simplicity, but at the same time I feel they are missing some important features like discount and coupons management.
Face Recognition and Privacy
You should take ~45 minutes and go through their "Riak Fast Track." https://wiki.basho.com/display/RIAK/The+Riak+Fast+Track It's fantastic (all software should be so well documented!) and will give you a much better idea of what it can do for you.
avoid the random chance that a civil jury would decide based on emotion rather than merit

That's precisely my point. In theory, crawford is right in claiming that 'nobody owns an idea'. But in practice, the OP should protect his ass.
The U.S has a population density of 32/km^2 which is only slightly higher than the population density of Africa, which is 30/km^2.

That's why both the U.S and Africa seem spacious, with lots of empty space between places.
It's not you, the developer, that's important. The customers buying the phones are.

Regular people already know about Android / iPhone. There are already cheap Android phones on sale (you can buy an unlocked Android phone, with no contract, for $300 ... see HTC Wildfire).

And many people are buying these phones for the apps available. For consumers the iPhone is king. Android is playing catch-up (but it is doing OK).

And speaking about regular people, my wife owns a WinMo 6.5 phone that will not see an official upgrade to 7 because it doesn't have the right hardware. And all apps for WinMo 6.x will have to suffer complete rewrites. So all the developers working on WinMo 6.x apps have just been fucked.

> At this point, it looks like Google and Microsoft are fresh and new, whereas Apple is trying to prolong the life of an old platform.

That's new to me, considering the iPhone 4 is still the best smartphone out there.
Well, technically you have all the customer data in your gateway's info manager (like Authorize.net's CIM), but it would still be a real bitch to take that and do anything useful with it. Plus, the clock is ticking on your 30 days to get it migrated to your new setup.
My limited number of contacts at MS tell me that an Enterprise deployment solution is coming, but they couldn't get it done in time for the initial release.

I hope it's better than Apple's solution.
Seems almost identical to this company (from a previous YC round, I think):

https://etacts.com/

I really like the idea of an "expect followup with in N days" feature for GMail. It's interesting that GMail's dominance as a client for heavy email users has accidentally enabled a market of add-ons delivered as browser extensions.
A pre-emptive opt-out could work, but how exactly would you implement it?

Do I have to give you all my email addresses that I want to opt-out with?

Do I have to get an "optout" cookie so that the server with the tracking pixels and whatnot knows not to track me?

I think I'd rather block this at the email client level. This way I don't have to trust anyone's optout procedures, as well as being protected from any nefarious trackers that don't care about things such as opting-out.
Chargify handles a lot of the recurring aspect, dealing with expired cards, notifying you if someone doesn't pay, etc, etc

I talk a little about it here: http://peachshake.com/2010/06/15/saas-subscription-billing-o...

It was a great deal for the price, but now...not so much.
Somewhat more objectively - the man pages on OpenBSD are superb, and having a clear yet exhaustive reference will make it much easier to figure out how things work. FreeBSD's documentation is also good, particularly the handbook, and the slightly larger community translates to more information on forums. (That said, I also prefer OpenBSD.)
4 Web project problems content strategy can solve
It seems very clear that the free pricing was a great incentive for customers to sign up, allowing Chargify to get their business off the ground.

Now that their business is running and they have paying customers, they have little need for keeping the free accounts and helping other businesses get off the ground.

In my opinion, a really poor move and completely opposite of the mindset and spirit of their initial offering.
Just filled up my Google Reader. Awesome post.
This was very disappointing to read. If their product were rock solid I wouldn't have minded as much but it's far from being a complete solution. Unfortunately, a lot of chargify needs a lot of work. I'm especially unhappy with the metered components as they enforce integer cent prices for the components and only allow integer usages on those components. It's impossible to charge fractional usages. I guess it's time to start writing my own billing system.
The future of corporate travel
Software Engineer (Employee #1) at Snip.ly (incubating at AngelPad in SF)
My '05 BMW has 2 stage rear brake lights for regular braking and when ABS is triggered from hard braking or slippery conditions.
If you buy a copy of a copyright-able work, you are a licensee. The "copyright holder" is the person who owns the legal ability to specify and grant the rights under which the work may be copied.
That's database storage, not local storage. Currently, when you hit the 5MB limit it just throws a JavaScript error.
Being Deaf Can Enhance Sight
It is on some browsers (FireFox I think) and not on others. This would be fine with me if that was outlined in the spec, but these gray areas always produce 3-4 different implementations.
That is too late. Collecting data like this is only legitimate (or, if the reciever is european, legal) if the collection only ever starts after the collecting party has recieved a qualified declaration of consent from the reciever of the bugged mail.
If they don't get this consent before sending the mail, they are just scum.
I am that boat (existing app that uses Chargify, with < 50 customers). Sucks.
The article doesn't say, but it looks like SimCity 3000. I haven't kept up with the more recent iterations of the game, but the complexity of the simulation seemed to increase with each new release (2000 added a water system, and 3000 added garbage, among other things); I'd be curious to see how this solution's complexity compares to those in the other games.

Perhaps more interesting would be how the optimization was performed. If I remember correctly, the manual from the original SimCity hinted at formulas used in the underlying simulation; I'm sure some dedicated players have reverse engineered such information for the newer games.
I'd be cool with that too if all the browsers implemented it. Sadly they do not :(
I'm also in central Bangalore (Richmond Town).

Rent $400 - 2 bedroom shared between 4 people
meals $100
electricity $50
internet $50 for two airtel 4mbps connections (I run a hacker space)
tranport $50 - travel by rickshaw is cheap tho I just bought a nano (car) for $4500

so, if I were being frugal my burn rate would
be about $300. As it turns out, I probably blow
that much again on alcohol and fancy restaurants.
Gmail on my smartphone (running Froyo) doesn't load images. In fact it has a "Show pictures" button which I must explicitly press to load images.
> To get anywhere in the UK you are going to have to interface with the NHS.

I would focus on private first. Completely independent is even better - do independent physiotherapists and practices exist? Leave BUPA and the NHS for later. Reasons:

1) The product is a quality one, not a value one. The focus of the people who buy for the NHS is to save money (their incentive to provide better care mainly ends up in high visibility areas such as trauma). I don't mean to sound negative. I think the NHS is great for what it does for us, but that's how it is. On the other hand, the sole purpose of private practices is to provide a better service than the NHS.

2) Once you have one private practice using your system, other private practices will look bad if they continue using just printed instructions, giving them a direct incentive to buy. This is helped because...

3) Patients talk to each other, especially so here because presumably there is a correlation between the subset of patients who go private and those with a particular socio-economic status. Patients will hear about the better product from friends and expect the same from their own therapists.

4) Validation from a smaller segment is incredibly valuable in moving up. A proven track record with independents will help convince BUPA (imagine trying without this). A proven track record with BUPA will help convince the NHS (and presumably the NHS won't accept it unless it directly reduces their costs or the expected quality of care rises such that your product is required).

Also, get this book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Crossing-Chasm-Marketing-Technology-...

Edit: fixed typos.
That's not contradicting me? Evolution is a special case of emergent behavior in a complex system.

The rules of the buggy system mean that any ad-hoc network can be replicated if a user connects to it. That creates selective pressure on the name of ad-hoc networks in that convincing more users to click on them causes further replication.

So we have a (somewhat) self-replicating entity, with variation, and a selective process applied to that variation. Sounds like evolution to me.

(Of course the names are originally made by people; but if we assume that ad-hoc networks aren't named with the intention of creating a self-replicating pattern, they're effectively random from the perspective of the ecosystem. The success of "Free Public WiFi" is a product of selection, not human design.)
Upvoted. I've just finished reading it, and even if you find fault with the process he builds in it, it gives a very good perspective on the busywork and cargo cult rituals that sink a lot of businesses. He's also got a damn good blog (http://www.steveblank.com) which gets links here fairly regularly :-)
> ... fact that every distro sucked so badly. That's no longer the case ...

What would you recommend?
'The Simpsons' Explains Its Provocative Banksy Opening