Wholesome Django 🥰💻 #0010

April 18, 2021

Happy sunday!

After a few weeks of running DailyHabits, we have finally decided to add a pay wall. 

At first we thought we would block usage once the 30 day free trial was over and display a modal that forces them to upgrade, but then Preetam came up with a better idea.

What if we allowed them to continue using the app free of cost even after the free trial gets over? But then how do we make money you ask?

Well, what if we introduced a small inconvenience to them in the app that will keep bothering them until they upgrade? 

This way they can continue to use the app for free but if they want the inconvenience to be removed, they would have to upgrade.

The inconvenience looks something like this:

Every time they open the application, those who have exceeded the free trial will see a modal like this. 

One can dismiss this modal by clicking on the cross button or clicking anywhere outside the modal. However this modal will show up every time they open the app with an interval of 1 hour in between each invocation.

Along with this, they will also see an upgrade prompt at the header of the page that stays there until they upgrade.

We are hoping that this sort of a system will ensure that serious users do end up paying because they do not have the bandwidth to keep cancelling the modal every time they access the app.

The users who don't mind this inconvenience are probably the ones who don't use the app very often in which case it is not right for us to ask them to pay anyway. 

It is basically a win-win situation. Or at least we hope that is the case and we ll only find out if folks actually start paying.

What I wrote this week

While building DailyHabits, it occurred to me that I needed to have a way to find out if there are any unhandled errors on the server.

I have a standard way of doing this for all my Django applications. I basically use Django’s inbuilt way of sending an error email when there is an exception. This seemed like a good topic to write about.

I also made this philosophical tweet about what price are you willing to pay for freedom.

Interesting finds from the depths of the internet

To take the topic of setting up a pay wall in your application, here is a piece I wrote a while back on when is the best time to ask for a user to pay.

This great tweet thread about how to earn $700 / month passively.

Achieve your goals more efficiently by treating 3 months as a year.

Can magic mushrooms be used for treating depression?

See you next Sunday ✌️