They seem serious about protecting your data and they are providing a free service so where is their business model? People will essentially be giving them access to all of their online conversations so they should probably clarify exactly how they will be making money on their homepage.
Thomas isn't the first one to ask us how we can keep Dexrex alive without charging. I'll admit, while profit isn't our primary goal, keeping the service financially sustainable is pretty important. We have to pay for all that coffee somehow! But in all seriousness, it is nice to have a little assurance in knowing that the service won't take all their information and nosedive into the dead pool.
Some people have suggested making Dexrex a subscription service. A few users have even written suggesting that they pay for it! While a nice sentiment, I don't really like that idea. A lot of the people whom Dexrex could help the most couldn't or wouldn't use it if they had to hand over their credit card info. Worst of all, I can't go around saying that we're "saving the world one message at a time for only $2.95 a month". It just doesn't sound as good. To put it simply, I think we can do a lot more for the world as a free service.
For that reason, I want to make sure Dexrex will always be free to the public. I think the first step is in keeping our costs down. That's why Dexrex was designed from the ground up to be efficient and affordable. Our costs stay low because we have a small, bright, close knit team, and storage, processing, and bandwidth costs are falling everyday. Because of the increasing efficiency in data management and storage, we expect Dexrex to become even more affordable all the time. If Youtube can host countless videos for free, I think we can manage to host little text messages for free, too.
As for covering our costs, I think we could work a little like Gmail, placing relevant and discrete advertisements on our site and using our own analytics to understand what's on everyone's mind—the buzz. In fact, we're considering making large-scale statistics publicly available, kind of like an anonymous census of Internet chat. We may be able to provide slightly more sophisticated statistics to researchers and avoid advertisements completely—like a Nielson Media Research of chat.
Of course, no one would ever need or be able to read users' records. Everything could be performed by an automated computer system that uses anonymous information a bit like what you see in the analytics section of our site. But, unlike a lot of other free sites, we don't want to trick anyone into sharing anything they want to keep private. We won't perform any sort of analysis and advertising placement until we're sure we can do it while fully respecting the safety, security, and privacy of our users' information.
That said it's a pretty comforting thought that people are concerned and want to make sure we are making enough money. We don't need golden flying cars, but its nice to eat on a regular basis.
Derek Lyman
CEO & CoFounder
Some people have suggested making Dexrex a subscription service. A few users have even written suggesting that they pay for it! While a nice sentiment, I don't really like that idea. A lot of the people whom Dexrex could help the most couldn't or wouldn't use it if they had to hand over their credit card info. Worst of all, I can't go around saying that we're "saving the world one message at a time for only $2.95 a month". It just doesn't sound as good. To put it simply, I think we can do a lot more for the world as a free service.
For that reason, I want to make sure Dexrex will always be free to the public. I think the first step is in keeping our costs down. That's why Dexrex was designed from the ground up to be efficient and affordable. Our costs stay low because we have a small, bright, close knit team, and storage, processing, and bandwidth costs are falling everyday. Because of the increasing efficiency in data management and storage, we expect Dexrex to become even more affordable all the time. If Youtube can host countless videos for free, I think we can manage to host little text messages for free, too.
As for covering our costs, I think we could work a little like Gmail, placing relevant and discrete advertisements on our site and using our own analytics to understand what's on everyone's mind—the buzz. In fact, we're considering making large-scale statistics publicly available, kind of like an anonymous census of Internet chat. We may be able to provide slightly more sophisticated statistics to researchers and avoid advertisements completely—like a Nielson Media Research of chat.
Of course, no one would ever need or be able to read users' records. Everything could be performed by an automated computer system that uses anonymous information a bit like what you see in the analytics section of our site. But, unlike a lot of other free sites, we don't want to trick anyone into sharing anything they want to keep private. We won't perform any sort of analysis and advertising placement until we're sure we can do it while fully respecting the safety, security, and privacy of our users' information.
That said it's a pretty comforting thought that people are concerned and want to make sure we are making enough money. We don't need golden flying cars, but its nice to eat on a regular basis.
Derek Lyman
CEO & CoFounder
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