yourtrace.online is my sideproject that reads 100+ tech news sources and turns them into one feed and a short daily email. for months it was paid, $5/mo for pro, and i spent most of my time on paywalls, trials and pricing pages. i was making $27 a month. on oct 13 i made the whole thing free and open source. no pro plan, no paywall, every feature free. i figured revenue would go to zero and i was fine with that. instead i added one small "promote your tool here, $19" box in the sidebar. two people bought it in the first two weeks. now i'm at $38 a month, which is more than pro ever made. when it was paid, people bounced at the paywall and never saw the useful part. now more people actually use it every day, and that's what a sponsor is paying for. also i stopped building pricing pages and went back to making the product better. it's not big money but it covers the server, and i'm way happier building it. if anyone's thinking about going free, i'd say try it. site's yourtrace.online and the code is on github if you want to look.   submitted by   /u/Tarun122 [link]   [comments]