Pay What You Want

We do not charge users. Instead we kindly ask them to provide an affordable voluntarily service fee. One advantage of such an approach is that we can put all available resources into actually building a great product rather then designing the perfect service tier model and tinkering with payment provider APIs.

That sounds great, but does such an approach work at all? Let's look at the numbers.

The numbers

In the year 2022 so far we received 350 Euros from 26 distinct payments.

In this year we had about 430 users which integrated at least one domain into counter.dev so far. Of course only a portion of this number become active users. Measuring - or better said defining - active users is hard, but for us to get a taste of it, let's follow a thought.

In the last 30 days we had 200 users which logged in into their account. Let's subtract new integrations from this time period - considering these users are in "trial" mode - and we land at 160 active users.

If we split this years donations into passed months and divide these by our active users, we arrive at a real world service fee of 27 Cents per user per month.

Conclusion

I like to think how easy one could just go without paying the bill after eating at a restaurant. Nevertheless not many people actually do that. If that happened the experience of eating at a restaurant would have to be much worse in order to ensure guests actually pay. The additional cost for restaurants to hire more staff to check for receipts at the exit would ultimately be passed to the guests.

By prioritizing user value beyond almost everything we will stick with the PWYW-Model for a while. In fact counter's technical architecture is build to at least cover operational costs with such low service fees. But should you use PWYW for your next project? The answer might not surprise you: probably not, except you think you know what you are doing. In the end I want to thank all paying users and say that I truly appreciate all donations. There are users which are onboard from the very beginning which makes me very happy. I hope many users start with a free service but in the end become paying customers.