JustHumans Financial Models
A number of users have asked about reliability guarantees with JustHumans, a free hosted "form spam reduction" solution for webmasters. If JustHumans were to go down, users would loose the ability to get forms posted for the duration of the outage. This is obviously a problem that needs to be addressed.
JustHumans, while in beta at the moment, is still under active development as we iron out all of the remaining minor kinks. The idea with the project has always been to concentrate on making a 100% functional hosted service that solves real problems for users before thinking about what to do with the service. But users are asking about reliability and I don't believe that problem gets fixed without a financial component.
So we started thinking about financial models that would support JustHumans. After kicking some ideas around for a little bit, I have decided to post them here for public comment. The important thing to remember is these are ideas only. All of this is open to discussion and nothing will be implemented anytime soon. If we were to decide on a strategy and plan to roll something out, nothing would happen without a number of emails to all JustHumans users and at least 6 months of continued free service. The trust of the JustHumans community is far more important to maintain than short term financial gains.
To fix the reliability problem, JustHumans would need to have a financial structure around it that grows with the service. We see three options for this: "good", "better" and "best" for lack of better terms.
The "good" option would be to keep the free system going by having it advertiser supported. Users would complete some simple advertising awareness objective like "Click the RED Skittle" instead of the generic or uploaded pictures the system currently uses. This works well as an idea because users who are filling out forms have a vested interest in getting their form submitted and advertisers have a vested interest in capturing the user's attention. If we were to marry the two by making the user solve a simple puzzle that an advertiser has created, both the user and advertiser get something out of it.
Some webmasters won't like peddling a random advertiser's message, particularly if they are a for-pay site. (and possibly even a direct competitor of some of the advertisers!) For them, the "better" option of the JustHumans service would be a pre-paid account (say $10 to start) that would be charged 2 cents per legitimate post through the system. This way, heavy users would pay more for the service than light users yet the cost would still be small enough for the average not-for-profit to cover. In the event that a user's balance in this pre-paid system were to go to zero, they would automatically switch back to the advertiser supported option above. Emails would go out before the account got in danger of being converted and the user could always recharge their account at any time.
The "best" option would be to purchase the JustHumans code so it can be made to run directly on customer's websites. (ie: Make it no longer a hosted service) This is the only 100% failsafe option in terms of JustHumans reliability. We don't have the code packaged up for sale yet but we were thinking a $500 price tag.
To be clear, we are a long way from actually doing any of the above options. Nothing is decided and everything is open to discussion. We will send an email to all of the JustHumans users about this if we actually decide to put a financial model in effect and give at least 6 months of free service past when we make such an announcement.
We would love to hear from you, our users, about these ideas. Please leave your comments and let us know what you think about them. Would you continue to use the service if it were run in this way? What plan would you likely go with? Do you have a better idea on how to make JustHumans reliable? How could we make this better?
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To send a trackback, use the URL of this story appending ?page=tb at the end.Comments (2)
joshb from md
I couldn't find any details on the justhumans site, but wouldn't it be trivial to brute force the form with a 16 percent chance of success?
Anders from RTP
Joshb - Yes, but the result would be very limited because JustHumans throws out repeated clicks from the same user. The more entries it gets from an IP within a short period of time, the less likely it is to listen to that click. This solves the 16 percent issue but leaves a distributed attack vulnerability. (much harder for an attacker to implement) For that, strengthening the puzzle is probably necessary. (something like "click the kitten, then the duck" or "click all the animals with four legs")
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