Founders

There are 3 business models for apps.

1. Free with ads
2. Subscription
3. Transaction fee

The common thread for all three models is the user—a person, business or AI—has money to spend. 

That’s obvious for 2 and 3 since the model involves spending money directly with the app.

But for 1, if your user base doesn’t have money to spend, the ability to monetize via ads will be low.

Working on Farcaster and Warpcast. Longer thoughts at https://dwr.email

funny how no option includes a token. I found tokens are rarely if not never a good monetization model for apps.

AI builder. Ex-High Frequency Trader/Wall St.

Building @freegpt (meme) in public and @sortino (alpha) in private.

I've spent a while doing the math/revenue model to figure this out for @sortino (AI agent). My conclusion was for the long-term, subscription model > token-gated.

Revenue with token-gated app:
- Sell treasury/token (incentivizes pump/dump)
- Trading fees (incentivizes constant attention generation)

Side effects:
- If too much revenue too quick (pump and dump), no incentive to build the vision
- Focus on shills, partnerships, exchange listings etc etc rather than better product/user experience and PMF
- Speculators might lock real users out of the app if price is high
- Success of product is decoupled from token

web2 subscription model just overall felt much better: predictable revenue + focus on PMF rather than managing a token.

How does the company make money from it?

What drives demand 1 year in the future? 10 years in the future?