jhartist

Two answers:

• The operating costs are very low, since all Easyful does is email your customers your content when they buy it.

• Our team at nicer.io is primarily a product agency, so when we make our own apps like Easyful, SimplePerks and Smallchat, they don't have the pressure to be highly-profitable. We often end up getting good connections, agency customers and referrals from these apps, and keeping them running and supported is pretty low-cost for us.

We’ve run Smallchat, a default-free saas app, for a few years now, supporting millions of users. Our experience: with low-operating-cost saas apps like this, you can add a paid tier with pro features if you get a lot of traction while keeping the base app free.

With Smallchat, for example, a small percentage of paid users more than covers the operating costs of our mostly-free user base.

Good question: because we’re not handling payment processing or anything, just emailing users your content, we think Easyful can be default-free forever. If we get a bunch of usage, we might build some more advanced pro features and sell those features as a paid tier. We’ve had success with that model before.

Yeah, I wonder about that. My hope is that other platforms’ fees are high enough to motivate creators to switch, and the transition to Easyful is pretty fast for most users, especially if you already have a Stripe account.

But I guess we’ll see whether we get any traction!

Easyful is a layer on top of Stripe Payment Links that handles the fulfillment for you. All Easyful users are using Stripe Payment links.

Definitely check them out - they're great. Easyful is just a fulfillment layer that plugs into Stripe payment links for emailing customers your content when they buy something.

Good question: we are not a merchant of record, and Easyful doesn’t even process transactions. We’re just a fulfillment layer that plugs into Stripe payment links.

Gumroad is great! But their pricing model (flat 10%) doesn't make sense for many creators.

We think it's better for most creators to own their own Stripe accounts and use a lightweight fulfillment platform like Easyful instead.

Good question: we mostly built Easyful to use ourselves, but if it gets a significant of usage we might build some more advanced pro features and sell those features as a paid tier upgrade, while keeping the base app free.

We've had success with that model before with Smallchat, a saas app we launched several years ago, and it's still going strong supporting millions of free users.

With low-operating-cost saas apps, you can get away with offering a pretty generous free tier. A small percentage of paid users can more than pay for your mostly-free user base.