alt Hacker NewsWhy does everything have to make money? People like to built things as a hobby. If you stay away from expensive cloud providers and use cheap vServers, you can host a site like that for around 5-20$/month (depending on number of users).
Replies
culopatin • today at 2:22 PM
You don’t know anything about my app though. I just couldn’t believe that many people would pay this subscription to keep it going. I’m not trying to make money, I just don’t need it to drain my account
GJim • today at 8:54 AM
Some people wonder why kids climb trees.
>Why does everything have to make money? People like to built things as a hobby.
The gp asked a reasonable question. Your admonition about making money is misplaced because your assumption about it being a hobby is incorrect.
The website was developed by Flighty LLC. To answer the gp's question: Although the website itself doesn't have direct monetization, it acts as "inbound marketing" for the paid iOS app. Clicking on "Download Flighty" takes the user to the Apple App Store:
The website's hyperlink url to the App Store page also has a tracking id so the company can attribute downloads/sales back to the webpage. This lets them see how well the "free website" is converting to paid customers. As a vehicle to generate sales leads, it seems to work very well. To wit... Wikipedia says the company has been in business for 7 years and it's been upvoted to the HN front page and we're discussing it. (The Flighty website is an example of the old saying, "The best advertising is free advertising.")It's not just a $5/month VPS. Some cursory googling says Flighty gets data from the FlightAware Firehose api which costs a lot of money. The cost would exceed the financial resources of most people to make an equivalent free hobby website. (https://www.flightaware.com/commercial/firehose/documentatio...)