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Free is expensive - My entrepreneurial journey

zooboole

Published By zooboole

I have not shared a technical experience since I started this journey of building a SaaS product. I intentionally omitted technical challenges in the previous post in which I discussed the challenges I face in this journey.

For some time now, I have developed a strange habit of visiting startup websites and then starting by clicking on the "pricing" page. Two things motivated me when I do that:

  1. I get the feeling of knowing that that startup makes money. And that's motivating. Sometimes, the pricing is set in such a smart way that you realize how people have a clear understanding of their business.

  2. I get to know the crucial features of such a startup business. For example, Shopify will charge you to have your "custom domain" point to your 6567ygyy8yyu.myshopify.com. We will discuss more of this feature in this article

  3. Lastly, I wonder why they all have the golden "Pricing" link.

I thought I could make a difference by building a useful product for free for my people. I did. www.yakoo.store is free. The founders of WhatsApp had the same vision. But, after Facebook acquired the company, they decided to use WhatsApp to generate some income.

The hard truth is that there is nothing that's completely free. If you, as the end-user, are not paying anything, the creators are surely paying something on your behalf. The extent of what you enjoy for free depends on how much and for how long the creator is ready to endorse for you. And at some point, it becomes unbearable. That's where the pricing starts. While we wish to give for free, there are so many things that simply can't be free because the cost is so high to take care of for a long period.

A good example in our case is that we decided to offer cool and free subdomains to our users right on our main domain(alice-boutik.oyakoo.store), unlike Shopify or others who give you some ugly subdomain to force you to buy a nicer domain from them. We know many users will be completely fine to have such a domain for free and forever. But, aside from that, we have the more-established businesses that would like to use their custom domain names to access their oyakoo stores. So instead of using https://alice-boutik.oyakoo.store, they will just use https://alice-boutik.com. Sounds great right? It's cool to have a fully branded domain to show your store.

As a software developer, I have had experience with configuring domain names. I know we can forward domain names, redirect them, or even set Canonical Names(CNAME) to achieve something like mentioned above. So, I have always thought it was going to be an easy step. Well, let's briefly explore what each one of these functions does:

  1. Redirection: This feature is simple. When the user visits https://alice-boutik.com, they will be taken to https://alice-boutik.oyakoo.store. The browser's address bar will now contain https://alice-boutik.oyakoo.store leaving the user in owe, what website is that? how did I get there? Am I being tricked? etc. Plus the search engines have a particular use with websites redirecting users anyhow.

  2. Domain Forwarding: This feature allows the visitor to enter http://alice-boutik.com in the browser address bar, then the site at https://alice-boutik.oyakoo.store will be loaded. But, the domain in the address bar remains http://alice-boutik.com. But, the domain cannot have https. Plus, sometimes, the query strings are not appended which is not good for SEO.

  3. Setting a Canonical Name (CNAME): This feature allows us, in the domain DNS settings, to create a record that says, when people visit https://alice-boutik.com simply assume they are visiting the same site located at https://alice-boutik.oyakoo.store and you don't need to show the original(canonical) address(https://alice-boutik.oyakoo.store). But this doesn't simply work like that. When you have a domain name not linked to the destination site's server, it doesn't just work. It will require some crazy setups to get the domain name to load a distant website.

This is just brushing on the surface of this issue, and as an entrepreneur, I am quite sure that, by now, this sounds already crazy. So you might need help with this because it is beyond your capacity, so you might have to pay. I discovered Cloudflare and they seemed great, but the cost was beyond imagination. Then while reading articles around the web I found this site called SaaS Custom Domains. They give you a user dashboard where you just put the custom domain and the destination domain(site), and they do the magic. And the cost compared to Cloudflare was better for me. $19/month for the first 100 domains. And this brings me to some of the reasons we have to charge at some point. Now at oYakoo, we can allow our users to have custom domains for a small fee.

Why charge?

There are so many reasons and motivations why we need to charge. Let's have a look at a few:

Entrepreneurship:

It's about offering a solution and having a financial reward. It wouldn't make any entrepreneurial sense to offer a completely free service all the time.

Seriousness and quality:

Having premium customers will make you take your product more seriously and you will tend to do your best to offer a better quality of it.

Maintain and sustain your services:

Everyone's life involves a cost. You will need a way to sustain yourself and your team. If you lack sustenance, you will lose the motivation to continue working.

Investors and sponsors:

Your investors expect some ROI.

Customer acquisition:

In this new era, it's almost impossible to have organic conversions. You will need to advertise and that costs.

Bottom line

And so many other reasons that you will always face in your journey. You might notice how most free services lack maintenance and continuous improvement. We can even notice this problem in our developer community where many open source packages die off due to lack of support. We have to face the fact and accept to pay and get paid for services for quality and sustainability.