Privacy is not a Premium Feature

By David Barratt, 10 January, 2020

Lately, I have been trying to figure out what the restriction(s) on free accounts would be on Silk Floss. At first, I was thinking free accounts would only allow public content. Because public content can be cached for long periods of time on a CDN, there is little overhead in allowing only public content and making private content a "premium" (read: non-free) feature, since the costs in serving private content are much higher.

The more I think about this, the more I realize this is a bad idea. For starters, there is an ethical problem with charging money for something that should be free. No one should have to pay money to keep their content private. Perhaps even more importantly, from a business perspective, charging for private content completely misses who our customer is. The customer is someone with a message who wants to reach a wide audience, this would typically be an audience of their customers.

Reversing this will certainly increase the costs associated with each free account, but it seems totally worth it. It also sets up some interesting limits that could be put in place that we wouldn't be able to put in place otherwise. For instance, we could limit the free account to 1 user that can write and 500(?) that can read. The lowest paid tier would increase that amount dramatically and allow for public content that would not be subject to that limit.

I'm excited about this reversal, I think it makes more business sense, and makes sense ethically as well.

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