I don't want to worry about monthly bills.

Paying monthly for a product/service tends to make that product or service used more, because people feel the need to justify seeing that item on their bill.

This is why, for instance, so many gyms moved away from 'buy a year' plans. People would sign up in Jan / Feb / March, go a few times, and never go again. When it came time to 're-up', they wouldn't because 'we never go to the gym'. However, when people were billed monthly, the would go maybe even only once or twice a month, but it kept them using the service and the 'hurdle' for payment each time is much lower.

Lest you think it only apply to gyms, the study also looked at cell usage when the only thing billed per month was overages, and you paid the full contract up front. They saw a similar type of usage, where even with something as common as a cell, the annual cost was higher and the average monthly use was lower.

Bill monthly (or even 'micro' -- 'on use') and you make more money overall.

I'm not interested in most of the other options, free or not.

Although at one time I considered buying good usenet access, there just aren't that many interesting and vibrant newsgroups left.

I really only use them because they're free. There are enough other services already I'd switch too if some of them became payware. I'm really not attached to any of the services. My gmail is filled with email forwarded from my own domain, so I could switch my mail provider without changing email address (as it should be).

Now, DNS, I am willing to pay for :).

I guess it depends on the service provided, but I'd definitely not pay $5/month for Facebook, but I might consider paying $25/year.

Being able to moderate in a way that costs someone $10 can really help reign in the more destructive members of the community. There are people who keep resubscribing, but they subsidize the site for everyone else as they get banned over and over.

I'd argue that HN is a prime candidate for spawning equally good alternatives were it (hypothetically) pay for.

Before this "scene", hackers talked about "PHBs" and "cow-orkers"; working for The Man was a necessary evil that everyone had to put up with, witness the talented but bored BoFH, who LARTs lusers and generally channels his unhappiness with work through mischief and abuse.

Nowadays "lusers" are hackers' best friend, we're busy finding solutions to better their lives and improve our economic situation at the same time. Colleagues are peers, hand picked and chosen by us. It's a true meritocracy.

I would pay for HN (with the option to ban Tech Crunch posts and other fluff mongers, at least until the official launch date of my startup ;-)

Other stuff: Chatterous (the second most useful tool in my arsenal) Jing (you can actually pay for this :D)

Posterous: no because hosting my own blog is about the same and gives me more control (i.e. I can have a personal front page etc.). FriendFeed, Facebook, Twitter: no because for me they have little actual value. They connect me with interesting people but I could live without it :D

As far as services, I checked GMail and other. I use VPS to host my web apps, so I pay for that. I pay for the ACM digital library, as I see a lot of value in that.

I would pay for online storage (eg Amazon S3). I use GMail. The spam filtering is great. I might use the paid Google Apps for domain email hosting, but would like a cost effective and time efficient (low administration effort) MTA which I can use for multiple domains.

My biggest concern with relying on some 3rd party for essential web apps/services is 1) what happens if they go belly-up? 2) what happens if there is an irreconcilable policy change?

For VPS, I back up to home and can always recover and host on a new VPS, just some time lost. If an essential service goes south, I've lost information and/or functionality.

So aside from fungible infrastructure, I've not yet seen anything compelling enough to make me pay up every month since I stopped playing everquest several years ago.

one of my primary questions for a service is "how much effort to sync with my home network or to mirror to another service?"

I don't think I'd be willing to pay explicitly for anything else (maybe if they were bundled, but not at $5/month each).

$5/month seems steep. For comparison, LiveJournal charges $3/month or $20/year.

...tags are so much better than folders.

- application of interest that you need as an individual

- lets you express yourself

- lets you connect with others

- lets you discover more

If you observe all services catering to individual are rated higher.

When it comes to sites that let you express yourself or connect - may be the sites listed are not really niche and sites which lets u express for professional needs. If you had included linkedin, flickr (as against userbase on picasa) etc - may be these would have got better votes

sites that let you discover more content - guess it would be a very mixed response on the value of such sites given no single site would provide me all the material I would like to have stumbled upon.

I haven't officially launched yet.

You can try Hybir Backup for free before we launch. www.hybir.com use the promotion code HACKERNEWS. Accounts are very limited.

It is windows only for now. The killer feature here is that it is full backup but extremely fast especially with backiing up the OS, popular programs and media files.

Hybir Backup can back up a clean install of windows 7 on my hardware in less time than it takes to install it (Less than 10 minutes) over broadband (2.0Mb)

You can roll back to a previous point in time in just a couple of minutes registry and all.

These services seem unsustainable from a monetisation, cost and environmental perspective.

I'd probably pay for a lot of other random small sites to if a single micro payment provider got universally supported.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=436214

I don't like bittorrenting everything you know. But at the same time, I'm not paying $30k+ to fill my iPod. A reasonable monthly fee is a good compromise and I'd happily pay it.

Anyways, what is clear is that the difference between a bought song (20-100c) and a listened song (0.0???c) is only a difference in freedom to choose. Sooner or later the two must come to a compromise.

If you want a license that allows user choice - as in allowing you to specify which song you want to hear and then have it stream directly - it costs a hell of a lot more in licensing. Having said that, this calculation is applicable for ASCAP licensing; if you were willing to get access to less (for example, only from a specific label), you could probably get a slightly better deal.

However, change that to 0.7c per song and it's reasonable.

But, that's just a point of negotiation nobody actually pays that much. So finding the actual costs is rather hard.

But if you go and try the "request" approach, then you have 1000 users requesting god knows how many songs. The trick is to manage to pay about as much as before (0.007c), but let each user choose what to listen instead of broadcasting the same song. Problem is, if two users want the same song, but 10 seconds one after the other, will you pay 7 cents or 14?

Who wants to make a legal oink?

The catering alone was $2k. Fruit isn't free.

What, exactly, are you hoping to get paid for? I don't mean that sarcastically, I really want to know. In an economic sense, what value are you providing? Entertainment has always made its money in one of four ways: by limiting access (theaters, concert halls), by selling physical objects (books, cds, paintings), by draping it in ads, or by pure patronage.

You've still got 3 out 4, and yet you're on here bitching just because someone told you how much money they're willing to pay you for one form of content delivery.

I'm not expecting this to be new to anyone here, as most of these arguments have been on the internet for years now.

We're hoping to be recompensed for our time and effort and recoup our costs plus some profit to invest in the next film. It's how all business works.

$5 a month is a very low number. I work in a cinema, your $10 to see a film just about covers cost.

Hulu would get my money.

If a service of the same quality can be offered for less, it will tend to be free as competition increases.