It'll be tough to avoid supporting the hardware. If it's provided by you and used to run your application, then you're going to get the support calls.
You can push the client to call the hardware vendor ("we don't support hardware, read your contract, here's the number for Dell"), but that's going to frustrate the client and reflect poorly on your business.
It sounds like a losing proposition unless you price the hardware and hardware support into the cost of your system.
Yeah, good point. We already get hardware related calls and just deal with them. Getting more of those and actually being responsible for them, especially from around the country, I don't believe would be worth the cost if can be avoided.
Perhaps we could just provide consultation services for the client on what good and applicable hardware they could purchase. That is something most of them already need, since they have no IT department or IT knowledge, and at the same time it would be removed enough from us.
One could possibly provide the hardware on a capital lease agreement and then use their retained ownership to obtain warranty service on behalf of the customer from the hardware vendor...though IANAL.
And lock down the OS as much as possible. It will be bad enough supporting genuine issues, dealing with 'your laptop doesn't run XYZ' would be even worse.
I've never done it, but I suspect the easiest way to get "permission" (and I use the term loosely) is to add a section to your standard T&Cs, which customers agree to when they sign up, that allows you to identify current customers in your marketing materials.
If it isn't too late to select a payment gateway that supports a secure vault, perhaps Recurly.com would fit your needs? Personally, I don't know of any services that provide only the vault without the gateway or billing logic attached.
Plus, if a service had an API to transmit customer credit card data to your server so you could forward it to the payment gateway for processing, I don't see how that adds much security over encrypting and storing them on your own server (yes, I know this is a bad idea). A malicious individual with access to your server could still compromise your customer data.
I checked out SEOmoz, but I didn't know they offered an ad-hoc rank checker until you pointed it out. PRO members can check 100 ad-hoc rankings per day, which isn't quite enough for us on a busy day (a 3,000/mo quota would likely be plenty, but 100/day would leave us short some days).
Plus, I don't see an API for that particular tool (they have an API for other tools), which makes it tough to integrate into our internal toolkit.
If you do release your tool to the public, please let me know. I'd be interested in it as a subscription service or installable server-side software.
I've taken note of your email address and I'll certainly let you know. I'm not far off from being able to provide testing access to the data through a RESTful API, so you should hear from me within a couple of weeks.
Returning things in a different order is a total deal-breaker, and the mere possibility of that happening makes me wonder if screen-scraping is the only way to get reliable data.
All the factors you mention do influence ranking (local, preferences, etc), but I'm content to get de-personalized, non-geotargeted search results for this purpose.
How are you going to handle gathering model releases for the individuals in the photos? For example, iStockPhoto has detailed requirements on which photos require a model release (http://www.istockphoto.com/tutorial_9.0_modelrelease.php).
That's a good point. I'm not sure if this will fly, but as I understand it, getting a model release is the photographers responsibility. I will simply require them to "agree" to a statement that declares they have the permission of all people in the photo.
While you can probably indemnify yourself against legal responsibility of a photographer not getting a model release, based on your target photographers (teens and twenty somethings taking photos with camera phones i.e. in a hurry), this is something that could quickly kill your reputation if someone uses one of your images and gets sued because the photographer never got a model release. One suggestion on this would be to have something in your mobile app that would allow the user to collect the model release at the time of capture. I'm sure there are a lot of legal issues with what would be considered an appropriate signature.
One of the reasons people feel comfortable using crowd sourced stock photo sites like ShutterStock and iStockPhoto is that they are willing to take up to a certain $ amount of the legal responsibility you get sued for using an image (as long as you use it within their guidelines). If your target buyers are news outlets (who are allowed to use images more liberally than for commercial use) this might not be a huge issue, but I'd be kind of wary about using a stock photo site that basically took the stance that I had to counter sue the photographer. Not a idea killer, but it's worth looking at what the established players do to see if it makes sense from your business perspective.
I was piloting Chargify with about dozen customers to see if I wanted to make it the default platform for all of my customers. Now, definitely not. This bait and switch shows a complete lack of respect for everyone who has invested in the platform.
Chargify, I'm sure you'll be laughing all the way to the bank, but not with my money.
Does anyone sell an installable non-SaaS replacement for Chargify that integrates with Authorize.net CIM?
Even if your target user thinks your tool is the greatest thing since sliced bread, do they have the authority to get out a company credit card and spend $10 on the spot?
Do people want to use a "beta" product for production work? (I assume very few people do GIS file conversions for fun.)
What happens if a customer gets a slightly different source file and needs to convert it again? Does that cost another $10? Instead of charging per-conversion, what if you offered a thirty-day "all-you-can-convert" plan?
In general, the website doesn't inspire confidence and it certainly isn't optimized for conversion. Payment information is lacking (yes, I see it's buried in your FAQ).
You can push the client to call the hardware vendor ("we don't support hardware, read your contract, here's the number for Dell"), but that's going to frustrate the client and reflect poorly on your business.
It sounds like a losing proposition unless you price the hardware and hardware support into the cost of your system.