Will you use a website builder that allows you to associate your custom domain under a free plan?
I am very motivated to create a website builder that allows you to attach your custom domain under a free plan. But I do have some concerns. I am voicing them out here. If you have any suggestions, feedback or even concerns, that would be great!
All the website builders I have come across (Wix, Squarespace, Webflow, Versoly, Carrd, etc.) have a free plan but as soon as you want to associate your own custom domain, they want to charge you a subscription fee. I understand that attaching a custom domain is probably the reason that most people upgrade. But do you think there is a way to disrupt the market by letting customers attach a custom domain for free?
Doing back of the envelope calculations, it costs 40 cents a year (not month) to support one low-traffic site. Attaching custom domains doesn't really increase this cost. So why not let customers attach a custom domain for free and charge them based on the value that their website is providing to them, for e.g. traffic, number of contact form submissions, etc.?
What issues do you see with this approach? Here are a few concerns that I have:
-
Website builders are already pretty cheap and making them free isn't a disruptive competitive advantage.
-
The conversion rate from free to paid will be very low just based on traffic or contact form submission numbers. I won't be able to be profitable even at scale.
-
DDoS or other attacks will probably increase my bandwidth costs and as a result, 40 cents a year cost is an underestimate.
-
This is not a niche idea and for this business to have any chance of success, it needs to be huge. So it's very difficult for a indie hacker without funding to pull it off.
If you have any suggestions, feedback or anything else that I should be worried about, please let me know!
As someone who has spent 4-5 years building a Website builder, 2 main reasons
Every time I do a PH launch I get a ton of live chat messages about free this and that. I can't imagine if I had free custom domain as well. They would get further into the product and start demanding a ton.
Ugh. Yes. If it's free. Consider making human customer service a paid plan thing.
I see many people across many different industries having more revenue and less stress from having fewer but higher paying customers. I bet free plan services has some pareto law to them (80% of your customer service is for the 20% that pay the least/are on free plan).
@volkandkaya Thanks for your feedback! :) I didn't consider Spam. I do understand that customers who want free domains will demand more resources but unfortunately there is no way for me to estimate that.
BTW great job on building and growing Versoly! I am still considering whether it makes sense for me to build a page builder or not. I am not sure if competing on price is a good strategy. But even if I do, my target is going to be small businesses. So the options in the right sidebar of the editor will be super simple.
I have seen cases where people will have 100s of sites and then spam FB messenger and drive huge traffic to them.
Then you have to deal with AWS messaging you and giving you X hours to take the site down or have server removed.
Good luck with small business Squarespace, Wix and others have that locked down and are willing to spend $$$ on it.
I have seen some interesting use cases like 1 guy niched down on landing pages for phone repairs. But that sounds boring to me, but depends on your end goals and what makes you happy (and will to grind for a while).
@volkandkaya Wow! Although I don't plan to host on AWS over the long term, spam will be a concern. But isn't it a concern even for sites on a paid plan?
The primary reason to have a custom domain included in the free plan is to have a competitive advantage while competing with Wix, Squarespace, etc. I am not sure whether people will care about $12/mo that they have to pay to Wix or Squarespace that they'll look for cheaper options. If they don't, then my product won't fly.
I didn't know that there is a big enough market for landing pages for phone repairs! I don't plan to niche down to just one type of business but do plan to create templates for businesses that have high search volume (photography, church, etc.)
AWS is one of the best options, cheaper hosts might just nuke the server.
They don't care about price, Squarespace have nearly doubled pricing since I started and increased during the recession.
If they have high search volume Squarespace will be bidding $100s for them.
This is a great idea. But not great when seen from the angel of revenue generation. How are you going to make money if you give things for free ?
What you can do is create a website builder for a specific industry or profession. Then allow them to attach the domain.
Now for that eco-system you can create a few services , plugins that you could sell in order to generate the revenue.
This approach will keep you away from attracting unwanted customers
@sachingk The idea is to upsell the customers who have created a free website.
Your suggestion to create a website builder for a specific niche does make sense. I am just worried that I don't know the niches well enough to understand what the market size will be for each niche.
I understand you.
I am also not sure, if people who have gone for free website builder will open their wallet for the upsell products / services. Because they are spending only for domain - which they are forced to. No one is going to give domain for free.
These days having a website is a bare minimum for any business or profession. If they are not ready to spend at first step of the business then will they be ready to spend for upsells.
May be you will also end up attracting people who aren't very serious about what they are doing in first place.
@sachingk I agree. This is the biggest concern that the free to paid conversion rate will be minimal.
There is certainly an opportunity for it on the market. Why other folks are not really going for it - I would guess your reason #2 would be the biggest blocker. Yes, you will get a lot of customers that.. would never ever pay.
I am exactly one of the folks on the low budget (and with a hobby of comparing a lot of options before making a decision) and just lately I made quite long study on what's needed for the cheapest possible no-code/low-code SaaS landing page with all the bells and whistles (analytics, waiting list, etc) and the only inevitable costs were exactly the domain name and no-code hosting - https://www.indiehackers.com/post/free-and-very-cheap-tools-for-a-full-featured-landing-page-19-year-domain-price-67666faf3b
It's hard to beat carrd's $19/year , but if your solution would be free - I'd go for it yet.. I wouldn't pay anything. Landing page [for many SaaS landing pages] is a single use thingie - once I was able to create an okay one, I won't need any extra services and even upselling based on usage is hard: if it's cheap e.g. after 1000 visitors, you won't get much money from me; if it's expensive - I'd be scared of the sudden popularity costs and won't even start with you.
This all is from a point of view of a person that just needs a landing page for a future SaaS service. For people that need a real website, the situation could be different and you could be able to invent good services to upsell on top of a free domain offer (e.g. maybe you integrate payments very smoothly and take a cut on every payment).
Bad stuff sites
And then if you allow it exactly precisely for free, then reason #3 might come into play - automated porn posting, etc. That could be solved with primitive moderation though
@ArtemF Just curious, why is porn posting bad? It shouldn't be my concern what the customer shows on his website, right?
It's not the "porn" part of a phrase that mattered, but an "automated" :) Bots abusing the hosting just come more often with the porn stuff. You know, these guys have content to be downloaded. In one of my past companies that was hosting images it was quite a regular problem to fight these bots who'd just use your free service for image hosting and backlinking.
If you actually do not mind proper porn services, that's a different story. I guess not very easy one as providers of various services you use might actually stop serving you if you are in the porn industry (IIRC for example PayPal refuses to do anything with the porn business). Sure you can get over it, it is just likely to be a different business with the different infra providers.
@ArtemF Thanks for the feedback about automated porn bot. I hadn't considered this. I didn't even know that if I accept porn on my platform, then I may lose access to other standard solutions such as PayPal.
@ArtemF Thanks a lot for your detailed and honest feedback! My premise is that I'll be able to upsell the free customers into upgrading but as you mentioned, it could prove challenging if the custom domain is included in the free plan.
I would underline that IMHO it is also much about how big bang for a buck you'd get there. If you are working with folks who went for absolute zero (which is not that easy to find even, so they took an effort to find exactly the cheapest thing), you might upsell them to $5 a year and.. how much work would you need, how much support would you need to provide to achieve such upselling?
Again, it is most probably doable, I just speculate that the top of your funnel will be people who won't pay much anyways, so even a very-very useful feature might not get you much money from them while you need to implement and support that feature. If you figure a way on how to support them super cheaply (e.g. maybe no support at all or you get a huge investment to use economies on scale), then maybe it works.
But again, it's all just speculations from my side. Heck, I myself would probably give your service a try if it indeed costed zero, just don't expect me to pay more than closest competitors are about (such as Carrd).
@ArtemF I am thinking that for the free plan, it'll only be forum-based community support. This will also create user generated content which will boost SEO.
Or maybe you could provide custom domain for free, but charge on some other basic necessity, so just play with repositioning :)
For example, if going after a SaaS-specific landing pages, one such solution could be "domain name free, but you start paying per lead once you get 50 leads" or something like that.
@ArtemF Yes, that's what I am thinking. A few examples could be upgrade for more than 5 form submissions a month, or upgrade for higher storage and bandwidth. If there is enough volume, I could even become a domain reseller. One another upsell could be local SEO optimization service.
The problem with this idea that I see is that competing just by price is always a race to the bottom. If this really catches on, next thing you see is that the bigger players will adopt your model to compete with your pricing so you have to lower your prices even further and so on…
A better differentiator would be convenience. People would pay for a solution that is more convenient than the others.
@FLUXparticleCOM That's a great point! And that's one of the biggest reasons I am still contemplating whether to build this or not. At this point, I am only competing on price. In future, once I have customers, I could take their feedback and build features based on those and charge for those features. But it's a long journey, which has a high chance of failure if I don't start charging right away.
I tried the same with my plugin. But as it turned out my users were already happy with the free version and didn’t need any other features. So I think it is a good idea to know what the paid value of your product will be before you build it.
From what I know 95% of users are not interested in contributing ideas to a product they use. If they don’t like it, they don’t use it.
@FLUXparticleCOM I am a little averse to just asking for what is valuable to potential customers and implementing that feedback based on face value. I had done this for a previous product. There were about 10 people who agreed on what they wanted. This was a niche, high-value product so 10 was not a small sample size. But when I asked them to evaluate the product once built, I heard crickets and excuses of why they didn't get time to evaluate it.
I do agree that most users are not interested in contributing ideas to a product that they use. In most cases, I don't do it myself.
Github pages has free websites with custom domains?
@MichaelKatz True but it doesn't have a website builder. It's only accessible to developers. I am targeting small businesses.
Someone who is not shy of doing a bit of research could find https://mobirise.com/
@FLUXparticleCOM Thanks! I have found out at least 20 page builders and I thought that I had exhausted the whole universe of page builders. But it seems that there are infinite number of them. :)
BTW mobilize looks really good. I'll download it and give it a shot.
How have you come up with the 40c a year per site?
@polly3223 It requires ditching cloud services such as AWS, GCP and Azure and using dedicated server hosting. AWS, GCP and Azure cost you an arm and a leg for outgoing bandwidth. Dedicated server hosting providers such as https://www.1gservers.com/10g-unmetered-dedicated-servers.html don't.
Let's consider the following scenario. On average, each free site uses 1GB of bandwidth a month. Assuming a million sites, that comes to 10^15 bytes of bandwidth per month. This bandwidth should be covered by a single 10g unmetered line. So the real cost is storage + CPU.
Assume that on average, each free site uses 1GB of storage. With a million sites, it comes to 10^15 bytes of storage needed in a month. 1gservers.com allows you to add a 3.8TB of NVMe SSD drive for $50/month. For 10^15 bytes, the cost increases to $13,000 per month, i.e. $156,000 a year to support a million sites.
As per what I have read, nginx should be able to support 3,000 static file requests per second on a 10-core machine. 1GB of bandwidth equates to about 4,500 requests per second. So a new AMD Epic server with 48 cores should be able to handle the load pretty well. This comes to about $14,000 a year.
In other words, cost without any redundancy should be about $156,000 + $14,000 = $170,000 a year. I am adding in about $230,000 of dev + support cost making it $400,000 to support a million sites, i.e. $0.40 per site per year.
Granted that the above infrastructure doesn't have any redundancy but it also doesn't take into account optimizations such as:
Static files can be zipped, stored and served directly using nginx. This should reduce disk space requirements.
Use FreeBSD vs Linux. Nginx performance is better on FreeBSD.
You forgot about some points.
Redundancy
High Traffic Spikes
Connections
Legal (Not 100% sure about that one)
@Leon338 Thanks for the detailed feedback!
Sites on free plan will not get multiple servers or CDN.
Yes, if I have many US customers, all visitors will visit the sites during the day. So my cost can potentially double.
I have taken into account that 1 page view is a lot of requests. I have not taken into account the handshake with the server. I am guessing that the handshake happens only the first time a browser connects to the server and not after that. Am I correct?
If I am responsible for what's hosted on my server, then this is a huge problem. I'll research more into this. Any idea how other hosting companies deal with this?
It would be good to add cost-per-site for 1,000 sites, 10,000 sites, and 100,000 sites.
@MichaelKatz The infrastructure cost of 100,000 sites will probably be 3/10th that of a million sites. So yes, the cost per site will increase. But the absolute cost will be lower.
This is a great answer. The figures still doesn't fully conviced me but it really seems you have done your homework, it still is at least 10 times less than what I thought:)
Also I think services like netlify and vercel can ask steep prices in the first place because they are CDN so they serve the content extremely fast anywhere in the world, but I think there could actually be a market for an extremely cheap hosting that just has the drawback of being a bit slower due to latancy based on where the requests are coming from. Good luck my friend!!
@polly3223 Yes, I'll have to forgo CDN to reach these prices. The target market will be small businesses which probably don't care as much about latency, especially if there are not paying anything for the site.
its valuable contact thanks for sharing this
thanks buddy sharing this
The HipStore app is routinely updated with the most recent applications and games, ensuring that users always have access to the most recent content. https://sites.google.com/view/hipstore-app/home
I will rather go with wordpress or blogger than a website builder. Never used one, never recommended one and dont have any plans in the next 100 years.
@kodytools Thanks for the feedback!