I really like the purpose behind Micro.blog and I’m eager to watch it evolve.
But I’m not sure about the $5/month price, it feels steep. Is it temporary during this early stage, or is it intended to be permanent?
@chartier I wonder if something like $1-3/month for real accounts, and a slightly cheaper price for automated bot accounts, would be more accessible to people and encourage more of the bot creativity we’ve seen on other networks.
@chartier $5 for a fully hosted Jekyll blog seems like a low cost when you have the option to host your own and push updates via an RSS or JSON feed, no?
@chartier The way we think about it is that it's $5/month for full blog hosting, custom domains, SSL, site pages... 🙂 And there's always a free option to use WordPress. But it's good feedback, and if a better model comes along, we'll consider it.
@manton I keep wondering if it would be clearer and seem like better value if there was a greater brand separation between "Micro.blog" and "Micro.blog Hosting". As is, I have to do a lot of explaining to people about where the boundaries are.
@chartier It's a great value and I know @manton will continue to enhance it. Introducing a discounted annual fee will make it more palatable for some (i.e. $50/year). Key thing is you are also "investing" in helping develop a new paradigm for a unique social network wrapped around independent blogging.
@benjohnson It might be clearer, although some of the value is in combining social network + blog platform, so a unified name is nice too.
@manton $5/month for all that is a hell of a deal. And the peace of mind knowing the people behind it are genuine.
@manton I hesitated on price as well, at first, with VPS also at $5/month. But after going through all the current features and the rate of improvement it is well worth it. For my case, only a few features away from being a slam dunk in fact.
@ronguest Glad to hear it! The rate of improvement is one of my favorite things too, seeing how far we've come and can still go.
@chartier to be honest I find the $5/mo on the steeper side too, considering my site is free and I could just push content to Micro.blog via a feed for free. Having said that, Micro.blog is a worthy project in its promise and philosophy and I choose to pay for it.
@chartier I’m not sure I really want “bot creativity” on here. But, you can self host your bot elsewhere, feed to M.b via rss/json and get the responses back via webmentions. This will cost you nothing on the M.b front.
@chartier I think $5 makes sense now as I think a lot of us also want to contribute to the development of the platform. There will need to be cheaper easy options (WP does not count as easy) though in order to move past early adopters. The good news is that anyone can write an RSS server that supports micro pub and offer it under whatever terms they want. So eventually as long as the platform continues to grow I think there will be a lot of good options.
@manton Agreed. However, I can see @benjohnson’s point — if not many people lean towards owning their domain, hosted blogs might end up being like the profile page on any social network. Hope doesn’t happen if this’ to succeed on its main goal - freedom to post to your own site.
@manton Having said that, $5 is really not too much for a hosted blog. You shouldn’t worry about changing that — this place is too valuable. Features are great and so is intent.
@manton i think the price point is fairly irrelevant, but the clarity of usage and purpose is. Right now, i struggle to understand the various options, and I figure I will until I put pen to paper (or mouse to omnigraffle) and draw the hell out of the options. i literally still don’t understand fully what goes in, what goes out and who reads what where 🤔
@seishonagon Thanks for the feedback. We still have some work to do explaining how it all fits together. Don't hesitate to send an email if there's anything we can better document.
@manton I think though the security around storing credit card details needs to be documented somewhere. I did not find any reference to that anywhere.
@manton I feel like a free loader because I use a Wordpress blog and pay you nothing. But I don’t want to have a dedicated micro.blog site for management reasons.
@benjohnson I’d just like to +1 this. When I signed up it was entirely unclear what the $5 was for; I thought I either pair or installed microblog software or else the service was unavailable. Wasn’t clear how microblog interlinked with self hosted WordPress.
@daiwei yes if the blog exists for tinkering with like yours and mine, a hosted version won’t cut it ;-)
@manton I’ve just been looking for the payment section. User feedback: it’s too hard to find! Looked all over my account settings, help pages, etc, and finally found it under New... But this doesn’t make sense for me. I don’t want new. I want to pay for what I have now.
@canion Thanks. In an effort to not annoy users with an up-sell, we may have made it too difficult to pay us.
@manton always a balancing act, but I think you could be a bit more upfront without looking like a money grabber. I think when I first signed up on the beta you didn’t even have that $2 plan.