Shall I monetize my simple avatar generator? My girlfriend wants me to do it, I’m not sure if I want to put more effort to it

Nah forget I’m not gonna do it

It's fun but I can't imagine paying for it, and I can't imagine a person who would, but if you can find a market go for it. I worry it may take more work to make it monetizable than to make an entirely different product.

People tend to overestimate everyone's - including their own - willingness to spend money on software when free to use software from data miners like Google is effortlessly available and free open source software is also an option with a little bit of knowhow and tinkering.

You can flood it with ads, that is definitely an option.

@lorentz at least for me the reason there’s this project in the first place, is because there’s no such good package out there. They are either over complicated and requires user to tweak for the one they want or too simple.

But you are right, I can’t imagine someone would want to pay for it unless they want to also design a user system. But even in that case, they can just set like 12 default pictures.

I didn’t really put the code on GitHub though, so at least I still have some advantage, but people can just scrape it easily.

@K-ASS it's worth the try, but you have to make it more customizable : variety of custom eyes, noses etc. 4 users to choose from. saw 1 of the designers I worked with that he offers to make custom personal avatar 2 anyone who gives him $50... though not sure how many he made from that endeavor. All I know is that some people r ready to give real money for a simple digital assets ( not 1 of them )

@K-ASS and if you keep the prices low and it got popular it might become profitable ;)

Make a generative art plugin for Blender or something, then we'll be talking.

It looks cool - could be part of a greater monetize-able product 🤷‍♂️

Gonna level with you, bro. Absolutely fucking not.

I'm not trying to be mean about your program. I love it, its very charming and cool. But when you get money involved......... frankly, it's not worth a god damn penny. I can make the same thing in Microsoft paint in 30 seconds.

You could get away with adding some ads but I have some pretty extreme doubts you'd make enough to pay for a coffee each month - and then you need to deal with the moral toll of having ads on your charming little site.

But fuck what I think, get on that grind

also u can research the avatars market and then decide if it's really worthed making any improvements & where will you advertize it to put yourself in that market

also:

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@K-ASS I think it could be sold as eg. an API for cutesy procedural avatars to be used in eg. social media sites. But the problem is that you'd probably need to add options to accommodate more than the 4 buyers in a lifetime whose general design lines up with that of the tool, and as you said the market for featureful configurable avatar generators is already pretty saturated. Yours would be a strong contender but it would still have to compete and that means a lot of work.

I wouldn't monetize it for general public. That makes no sense. As people said. we can all do the same thing in Paint or Krita in about 15 seconds and generally speaking, I could get a better avatar from stable diffusion in couple of seconds too...

If you really want to monetize this, your market really would be network owners. Someone who needs tons of these on demand. The API, (maybe an extreme api-limit that can be removed with some cash) Or as a plugin, perhaps for wordpress just as a convenience.

There's no money to be made from single users, but a company that is building a new service and needs cute random avatars could maybe work. You'd need to do market research first though. See if anyone else is doing this and what is their price and pricing strategy. It can't be so expensive that an alternative or home-brew solution is better. The price needs to be right so that it's not worth the effort to search any further.

Ads are meh, especially since you miss the API users