This is highly irrational behavior on my part considering there are dozens of free "social bookmarking" sites out there that certainly accomplish my very limited social bookmarking goals.

It reminds me of old carnival shows (or any nightclub with a line outside). Pay money to get inside. No preview up front. You're paying for exclusivity, mystery, and reputation instead of features.

Additionally, people who pay money for something often feel the need to justify the purchase to themselves and others. This will generally increase their happiness with the product and irrationally cause them to stick with the product through technical difficulties and feature shortages (humans are terrible at evaluating sunk costs). And because they have emotionally and financially invested in the company, there's a larger chance they will recommend this website to their friends, thus creating higher switching costs for themselves.

I'm interested to see how this pricing experiment turns out.

Too soon, guys.

Pinboard uses good old-fashioned mysqldump instead.

I went from browser bookmarks, to Delicious, to exploring (Magnolia, Simpy, etc.), to Diigo, to Selfmarks. A couple hundred bookmarks later, I haven't looked back; it's all I need.

Functional, usable demo at http://sm-demo.purepistos.net/ .

"©2009 Nine Fives Software. Pinboard is full of bugs but daily trying...

Too bad it's not going to get much test-driving: "Pinboard is free to use, but charges a small, one-time membership fee."

Yes, an interesting (first-of-a-kind?) incentive to "sign up early." Wonder if any will sign up with so many free options around?

Make it log(x) or something.

  scala> def income(n_users:Int) = (1 to n_users) map(i => (i-1)*.001) reduceLeft(_+_)
 income: (Int)Double

  scala> income(2901)
 res0: Double = 4206.45

It also makes the site stand out: probably only URI shorteners are more common than social bookmarking services, and the increasing signup fee differentiates it from all the others (I doubt I'd have given it a second thought otherwise).

But it is an excellent business model. If you can get 1,000 users to sign up each month and if you have no significant problems with scaling (because you only store small amounts of text), then you will have no trouble paying all fees.

We had an app where we'd ask for e-mail addresses. A lot of people mistyped their e-mail address, which was of course unmasked. As much as half of the non-activated accounts were do to a typo in the e-mail address. We now ask for the e-mail address twice, it made activation failures a lot less likely.

Did you track how many fewer signups you get now that you have that double email? Are you net positive on the total activated users per day, adjusted for growth?

I could've done A/B testing and I could've done a full statistical analysis of the results. But I don't think splitting hairs like that is particularly useful. I simply had no reason to believe that it would affect our growth negatively, nor do I have such reason now. We are growing very, very fast.

But what I was really referring to was the customer service overhead. Almost every account that had a failed e-mail address would cause us some customer service. People creating another account which needed approval to prevent multiple accounts per user (which is cheating the game), or just asking questions. I cannot imagine people asking less questions if they paid for an account and can't access it.

Here's an experience I had a couple years ago where a small tweak to remove a signup barrier more than doubled the number of people signing up:

http://twiddla.blogspot.com/2007/04/1000-signups-on-day-one....

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/06/back-to-basics-ditch-de...

Had a teensy bit o' cash to splurge, and signed up. Very clean look - Delicious-ish without the 'sociality'. Loved it so much I deleted my Delicious account (and now hoping Maciej doesn't pull a Zune Store!)

Also hoping last item in the roadmap's After That section comes kinda true, and Yahoo! is nice enough to refund at the same going rate (i.e. users * 0.001)

p.s: First time I've EVER paid for an online service, piddling amount though it may be..