I guess the two issues are:
-- would selling them now hurt future revenue? I don't think so. In 4 years ($25 * 4), we should be big enough that a few permanent accounts not paying shouldn't even make a dent in revenue. The money's always more important when you're small. LJ's not as small as it used to be, be money is still very important.
-- does this devalue other permanent accounts? functionally, no, but perhaps it'd kill some people's elite feeling, but I think that's a little silly. I think the point is to help LJ as much as it is to feel special. Hell, some people told me they got them just because they're lazy and didn't want to think about renewing them in a year.
Another $10,000 or so would be nice to buy more hardware. Now that we've got the load balancing issues under control and database replication working, it'd be nice to keep adding stuff since it's easy now (all the hard stuff has been setup). LJ's fast now, but I want it to always be fast.
If we do sell them, how many? 50? 100 again? 200?
Fun things to spend money on if we had it:
-- Huge friggin' RAID array, for photo server and/or database (this is like $10k by itself)
-- more web servers
-- more memory for directory database (to speed it up)
-- more web servers
-- MySQL support license
-- Pay foobar for the Big-IP he's sending us
Actually, I'm paying foobar for the Big-IP load-balancer anyway. But that got me thinking... we could then hook up the raid array to kenny (since it won't have to load balance anymore) and that could be the photo server.
Damnit ... I need to get back to homework.
Summary: Don't need money. We'll do everything eventually, but money lets us do it sooner. Money fun.
Thoughts? Sell or don't sell?
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