Re limiting the number of searches - I'm concerned that people may just register throwaway accounts to get the free searches (and thus never paying). I could use cookies or IP smarts to counteract this, but it doesn't seem a good solution. I also don't want to make the sign up process harder.
To be honest, I don't know how to get revenue in the long term. What I want to do is to break even so I can justify investing more effort.
I would love Sprixi to be free and then money around the edges (e.g. API). However, that will require more work. Being bootstrapped and already at it for a few years, I can't keep working for free.
Interesting idea about moving the pay wall - thanks.
I do like that idea. Being bootstrapped I needed to be a bit more direct with getting revenue from the majority of the traffic visiting us in the short term.
What do you think of our very lightweight freemium model? (Searching for dog or cat is free, other searches are behind the pay wall.)
Thanks. Currently it only uses Flickr, OpenClipArt and uploaded images. So it's not exactly a crawling search engine as such, more a search tool. Frankly I'm not interesting in indexing millions of images, I only want the useful ones!
I do want to add to the list of websites it talks to however. WIP.
No. Currently Sprixi shows CC commercial-ok licences and public-domain-like licences. So CC-BY images are indeed shown, but there are no filters to hide the others.
Thanks for the feedback truebosko. I agree it's not ideal and I'm playing around with various ways to solve it. I think a combination of community rating and moderation will be the long term solution.
Re limiting the number of searches - I'm concerned that people may just register throwaway accounts to get the free searches (and thus never paying). I could use cookies or IP smarts to counteract this, but it doesn't seem a good solution. I also don't want to make the sign up process harder.