Good ideas - thanks!

Re limiting the number of searches - I'm concerned that people may just register throwaway accounts to get the free searches (and thus never paying). I could use cookies or IP smarts to counteract this, but it doesn't seem a good solution. I also don't want to make the sign up process harder.

Good point - I've hacked up a brief description in the sidebar.

That still doesn't tell me why I would use it over google images, for example.

To be honest, I don't know how to get revenue in the long term. What I want to do is to break even so I can justify investing more effort.

I would love Sprixi to be free and then money around the edges (e.g. API). However, that will require more work. Being bootstrapped and already at it for a few years, I can't keep working for free.

Interesting idea about moving the pay wall - thanks.

Hopefully a little inspiration for anyone else in the same boat.

I do like that idea. Being bootstrapped I needed to be a bit more direct with getting revenue from the majority of the traffic visiting us in the short term.

What do you think of our very lightweight freemium model? (Searching for dog or cat is free, other searches are behind the pay wall.)

That's not freemium. It's a demo. With true freemium, someone can use your service regularly while on the free plan. Very few people are going to use your service just to find dogs and cats.

Not saying you shouldn't keep it (you should. demos are a great way to get people to convert), but it's not freemium.

I think the best freemium model which with my previous comment would be to pick about 10 "dynamic" topics, along the lines of say todays current google trends http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends which would give people enough of an indication of the utility of your site.

oh is that what was going on? I had no clue. I put in a search term (scientists) saw nothing and came to the comments section to kvetch.

So yeah... that needs to be clearer that the other images are behind the paywall. It was not clear to me.

And I would not sign-up till I saw what you had...

You are correct. It pulls images on the fly from flickr (more sites to come). Two word searches are not very successful at the moment.

Of course feel free to copy images from "wallet" to "leather wallet". Though you need to register to do this.

Thanks for the feedback.

Thanks. Currently it only uses Flickr, OpenClipArt and uploaded images. So it's not exactly a crawling search engine as such, more a search tool. Frankly I'm not interesting in indexing millions of images, I only want the useful ones!

I do want to add to the list of websites it talks to however. WIP.

No. Currently Sprixi shows CC commercial-ok licences and public-domain-like licences. So CC-BY images are indeed shown, but there are no filters to hide the others.

It's on my to do list :)

Thanks for the feedback truebosko. I agree it's not ideal and I'm playing around with various ways to solve it. I think a combination of community rating and moderation will be the long term solution.

Thanks Tim for the review! I'm the founder of Sprixi - would love to hear what you guys think.