I fucking hate advertising on websites. I would much rather pay a subscription.
And this is why they need to see how they can pay for the infrastructure, and make a profit. The other issue(s) with ad revenue are:
I agree. The advertising space is incredibly problematic, privacy-invasive by nature, and and a dark side to go down - one I don’t see Vivokey ever doing.
I understand your hesitation. The Vivokey Identity service w̶i̶l̶l̶ should always remain free, public, and accessible to tie in whatever service people can make work. What the PoC is offering is an already pre-configured, ready to be used version of what that might look like. The costs for the PoC are associated with the cost of spinning up, licensing, and managing a service (like an MSP). There will be documentation provided for users who wish to run the same set up Vivokey is using, so you can run the managed part yourself and pay the costs out of pocket.
If Vivokey offers hosted solutions that are integrated with the public identity platform, there will always be a cost associated with running the servers, managing the storage, administrating users, etc. that is not a part of the Vivokey Identity service. If you are hesitant using a managed platform provided by Vivokey, then I would wait until the Apex becomes available. It will allow you to do things like password/OTP management on the implant, rather than using an external service run by Vivokey. The Apex will also be backwards compatible with the functionality of the Spark.
There is a Catch 22 I see likely throwing a wrench in development from 3rd parties (I could be misreading the market though).
Developing for a device is difficult to justify if the device is not widely used. Installing a chip that doesn’t have a lot of uses is also tougher to justify. In addition, there are folks who are not mentally ready for an implant.
Would a non-implant Spark 2 (or 3) in the form of a wearable possibly expand the number of users, thereby making the services more attractive to develop for?
Counter to my own point - What if you lose your wearable? Is the security risk too much? Could wearables require a pin, but implants not? Would a pin defeat the purpose?
Unrelated: Would love to use my Spark 2 in place of other 2fa systems used in the corporate world. I would pay for that!
There are many nuances to explore here but I’ll make my best attempt at laying out things as I see them, and hopefully we can come to an understanding somewhere in the middle. What I’ve described above in terms of services, features, and the price point involved are all for the proof of concept only, and should not be extrapolated to any eventual VivoKey Service Platform. The concept of anchoring is very strong, so please don’t consider returning your Spark until you see the actual offering. If you are still unimpressed, I’ll gladly refund your Spark.
I don’t have a fundamental problem with ads themselves - that is the idea of showing advertising to a user. Yes it is annoying to many people, but this in an of itself is not problematic in my opinion… it is not “evil” to show advertising that people can simply ignore or whatever. The problems I have with advertising supported services include the following;
I am genuinely curious why that might be? Of course, hate is a feeling and often feelings have no easily conveyed logical reasoning behind them, but I’m wondering if you could consider breaking down your aversion to subscriptions?
My view of subscriptions, or at least non-predatory subscription models, is that it’s kind of like buying a car. A car is expensive, but to run it you need to subscribe to gasoline… you pay for your use and the car goes. Depending on the model car you buy, if will have this feature or that feature, but none of those features work unless you power the car, and that requires gasoline. Without running the car on gasoline, eventually the battery dies and the radio doesn’t work and the power windows won’t go up and down… the car becomes fairly useless without the subscription to gasoline you are forced to pay to keep using the car.
The problem I have with some subscription models is that they are wielded by the companies that create situations where the whole offering is conceived of as a trap. Our customer will continue to be our membership base, and our focus will always be on providing the best features and services for a price that makes sense. The whole purpose of the subscription model we are considering can be broken down into the following drivers;
To be clear, our primary goal is to provide various services as bundled in a “base subscription service”. These are services which we can deploy ourselves and have a marginal cost for hosting and maintenance. Personally, I pay $7/mo for a calendaring service to help coordinate my meeting, I pay a $5/mo for a password manager, and I pay another $15/mo for about 3 other services ($5/mo each). The goal for me personally is to be able to consolidate these kinds of offerings into a single affordable monthly fee. I would love a VivoKey calendaring service and a VivoKey public file sharing service and a VivoKey federated matrix chat service, and etc. etc. etc. all secured with my chip implant. I don’t see the point of making each of these services cost a few bucks each… just bundle them all into an affordable base subscription package and call it good.
The a la carte aspect comes into play when someone wants to activate an externally licensed service which have hard per-user costs associated. For example, if you want to be able to use your chip to log in to thousands and thousands of websites directly by way of the “log in with google” feature so many websites now support, you will need to activate a Google account. That carries a very firm hard cost for VivoKey on a per-user basis, so we cannot bundle this external service into the base subscription. If you do not want to pay that extra fee, then don’t activate that feature.
To be clear, this has not been decided on. I don’t see any conceivable reason why we would not do this, but it’s not been made official so please be careful making definitive statements at this stage.
Many things to discuss here… but better to do it in another thread 
@Pilgrimsmaster magic time?
Sorry for the delay, I was Just on my skateboard, now about to go for a run…
Just thinking the best was to do this…
OK got it…wait one
Here’s the link to the new thread
feel free to edit the title
On the ad revenue vs subscription vs implant is the access.
A: I hate ad’s would happily pay a small amount each month to use a service without ads
B: buying the implant is an investment in a piece of hardware like a yubi key, if you want to access something with it great you use it and login. If the service your accessing costs money then it costs money.
I dont expect my access to things to be free because I’ve bought am implant however I do expect vivokey to make the implant worth while having I.e. getting partnerships or whatever to allow us to login to other services using it like using my Google account.
I am genuinely curious why that might be? Of course, hate is a feeling and often feelings have no easily conveyed logical reasoning behind them, but I’m wondering if you could consider breaking down your aversion to advertisements?
Great reply Dev.
I would add my opinion, very briefly, I see the subscription model Vivokey are proposing as a Consolidation of subscriptions.
If I only have to pay one “provider” then my life just got a little easier…
anyway 
The reasons for me are simple if I’m using a service I want to use that service I haye having things forced upon me. I pay for a youtube subscription because the pre role and midrole ads annoyed me so much. Popups and side bar ads all fighting for your attention. It’s all visual noise that I could do without.
I find it very hard to use any service with ads but also understand there purpose that is why I pay for subscriptions ect rather than just running an ad blocker on them.
The other side of it is that if I search on Google for a review / suggestions for a coffee machine obviously all the ads I will see for weeks will be coffee machines this annoys me because I’ve looked for this info I wanted read some things and make a decision In my own time. I dont want or need to know what coffee machine is top rated on amazon or that if I click this one I get £5 off if I buy today.
Hope that all makes sense.
In theoretical future land presuming the test is a success and this becomes a full feature eventually, would someone be able to add this login to Google with vivokey feature to an existing Google account or 2 (personal and school perhaps), or would it still need to be a new account under the user’s vivokey email?
I think this adequately explains things - it degrades the quality of the experience and value of the service itself.
Without confirming anything at this stage, it would be possible to do this using the VivoKey SSO/SAML endpoint, but only if the following things are true;
These are requirements / limitations on the Google side of the equation.
100%
I think there is a difference between consumables and subscriptions.
If I buy a car and don’t put any gas in it, I still own it, and the asset value does not change whether it has gas in it or not. At any time I can put gas in it and use it, or I can sell it. The biggest factor is that gas has been standardized for decades and will always be available (which can be argued these days) should I want to put gas in it. As long as I take care of my car and put gas in it, it will work as transportation for as long as I own it regardless of the technology available in new cars.
If I buy an implant that requires a subscription, and don’t pay for the subscription, I can’t sell it so the asset value turns to zero without the subscription. The biggest factor to me, and why I completely agree with @Aravae is that the value of the investment is completely tied to the abilities of the service - Abilities that can change as technology changes…for better or worse… changing the value of the asset.
I can’t tell you how many gadgets I have that are doorstops now because the service they relied on to operate is gone.
Subscriptions are just a way of life nowadays. Despite me hating them I do pay for services, particularly ones that remove ads (Hulu, netflix) and tools like Lucidchart and Roam Research. But the fees need to be reasonable, and “reasonable” is different for everyone.
For me I would not want to pay a fourth party to be a third party service. (vivokey → Google → site → me). I’d want to manage it directly with google. If there was some small subscription fee for the service between the implant and my own google accounts, I would consider it. For others, not having to mess with it might be worth a bigger subscription.
As the person who originally said I hate ads (actually as a rhetorical counterpoint to @Aravae) I don’t really hate ads. I don’t like them. I can ignore some ads, but some pages are so full of intrusive ads that I will stop reading them. This has the opposite effect from the content creators intent (maximise ad payments from their content, increase profit).
I pay Reddit for the ability to read it without ads and this comes down to your point, if I am not the customer then I am the product. Some places do run ads in a less intrusive way and it is the only real way of paying the creator. There I live with the ads.
Not really though… not when it comes to the end result. Stop paying for consumables and printers don’t print, cars don’t drive, and subscription services don’t work. Resume paying and they work again. There is a slight difference in terms of a consumable possibly being considered an asset, but in the case of gas or inkjet printer ink… those consumables do go bad after a time so they are perishable, and in that sense not much different from a subscription.
But again I think this is the same thing really. You can sell your implant just as you could your car. A new car loses value once you drive it off the lot, and a used implant will be far less interesting and valuable for anyone buying it, but people do buy 2nd hand (pun!) implants even here on the forum.
Furthermore, I would actually argue that a Spark implant without any paid subscription services retains more value than a car without gas in that a Spark will continue to be an ISO14443A transponder and work just fine for access control and similar use cases.
I do understand this frustration. Home automation is rife with gadgets that have fallen into complete and utter uselessness because support for them has been cut, and they truly offer no other actual utility to the end user without those supporting services.
Sure this could be done if you set up your own domain with Google Workspace, the configured it to point to the VivoKey SSO/SAML endpoint (to be developed as part of VSP), then paid VivoKey and Google separately. That would work.
Perhaps gas is an imperfect analogy.
How about licence fees (road tax, licence plate tags, whatever)? Without paying those you can’t use your car on the road (well, you can but you might be fined or have it impounded).
You can still use your car on private property so nobody has taken that ability away from you but if you want to use it on public roads you need to pay.
I personally don’t like ads. You’ve already mentioned it, but I also feel it removes value from the service. Subscriptions also keep companies more accountable and force quality and development, not that you need it. Ads just lower quality which in return create competitors. Depending on service/product could be easier to evaluate things using Subscriptions. Long term Subscriptions. Imo. Loyalty/Rewards in conjunction with Subscriptions give people incentive to stay Subscribed whilst not needing/using specific services, but that’s another topic.
I dislike subscriptions, for most of the stated reasons above
But I can live with them sometimes
I think the principal is the idea of paying a subscription for something that is part of your body
Imagine paying a new liver subscription,
Granted the medical bills are sort of that, but it’s a different framing and changes the perception dramatically
I don’t think I’ll ever partake of a subscription for something subdermal, be it 10 dollars or 10 cents a month
I did make an exception for pure wrist, but that was only because I felt it was a temporary measure and it wasn’t going to stay In my body long term