Based on the metric on the chatmail website, you can run a server for 100k people for roughly $40 per month.
If you charged each user $1 per year like the original Whatsapp business model, you should be making enough profit to cover hosting costs but also the labor cost of maintenance, upkeep, etc.
Do you think that would also be enough to cover costs when people are sending photos and attachments? Also, is this hosting cost including group messaging? Someone said to me just now
Nice… Although relays of direct messages have never been expensive anyways, and there has always been free ones including tunneling relays for webrtc etc.
It is hosting and worse; relays for many-to-many that are expensive as f-ck and most probably impossible to make cheap.
I’m a big fan of transparent and honest business models. Are any chatmail servers trying this paid model with a simple stripe gateway or anything else (bitcoin, monero, etc idk)? How would that work if a user has multiple profiles? What are the privacy implications of it?
any kind of limitation to user-payment would add layers of complexity…
probably the best thing is just to keep spawning chatmail servers and thanks to the multirelay option it would be good if the default server in the app would just be a couple of long time trusted servers
but as every decentralization software, if every local hackerspace would spin an instance and directly ask local people to sign from there would be ‘‘easier’’
edit: and there is in the work the way to contact people on the server so nudging for donation or doing a yearly campaing would be better
This never worked so far in the past, but maybe you have some secret sauce that you did not explain above.
There existed FOSS service providers
in times with much stronger economy,
with much less global disturbances,
originating from a wealthy country where members are supposed to be able to afford anything,
offering a wide palette of services including email, expensive chat platforms, storage, website, shells and more,
all they requested is a minimum donation of $1/year and even that was possible to be waived away on request if the member was facing temporary hardship.
They still went bankrupt after a couple of years due to a too low amount of active users and high churn.
I’m also not sure how a chatmail service provide would differentiate themselves from the hundreds of other existing nodes. What could they offer that would make switching to them worthwhile?
Stop asking. Require it. WhatsApp charged $1 per year and millions happily paid it.
An honest and sustainable business model. Which is more than other free providers could offer.
Very true. WhatsApp also had the benefit of integrating the server and client. So the payment was easily handled. Although, payment could be handled through the chat itself. Each provider could operate a delta chat account and payment could just be handlled there in a chat.