Flattr

» see flattr.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Flattr was a button at the bottom of a blog post. That is where nearly everyone met it, and it is where nearly everyone left it alone, including me. The idea behind the button was better than the button ever got credit for, and it was still wrong about one thing that turned out to be fatal.

Peter Sunde built it. The same Peter Sunde who co-founded The Pirate Bay, which is the detail every article about Flattr led with, because it reads as a conversion story. It is not really. Sunde's argument was consistent from one project to the other: the problem was never that people refuse to pay, the problem was that paying was made deliberately hard. Flattr was the version of that argument where he had to prove it.

He built it with Linus Olsson, out of Sweden, on invitation only from March 2010. It opened to everybody on 12 August 2010. You loaded a small monthly amount into your account, you clicked Flattr buttons on things you had read or listened to, and at the end of the month whatever you had put in got divided between everyone you clicked. Nobody got charged per click. Your budget was fixed before you started, so the button was free to press.

By October, two months in, forty six thousand people had signed up and 114,057 euros had passed through the system. By April 2011 the button sat under a hundred and seventy five thousand pieces of content and had been pressed close to half a million times. Those are the best numbers Flattr ever posted, and they arrived in year one.

~ the record ~

~ the pitch ~

The original rule was that you had to pay in before you could be paid out. That was the part people argued about and Flattr dropped it in 2011, but it came from an honest place. It made everybody in the system both a reader and a writer, which is what the web looked like to the people who built it in 2010.

Its most visible moment came in December 2010, when the card networks and PayPal cut off WikiLeaks within days of each other and Flattr kept taking donations. A tiny Swedish payment startup was briefly the only working door for one of the most watched organizations on earth. That is a good week for any company, and it also told you exactly which crowd Flattr was for.

~ what kept getting in the way ~

In May 2012 Apple started rejecting iOS apps that integrated Flattr, beginning with the podcast client Instacast. Money leaving an app by any route other than Apple's was the thing Apple was least willing to allow, and the workaround it demanded, kicking the user out to Safari to complete the payment, removed the only thing Flattr had going for it: pressing the button had to be effortless or it did not get pressed.

In April 2013 Twitter did the same from the other direction. Flattr had built an integration where favoriting a tweet paid its author. Twitter said its API terms forbid a third party from taking compensation for actions on tweets, and Flattr shut the feature down. Both platforms were correct about their own rules. Both of them were closing the only doors through which a payment button could reach a normal person.

~ the quiet end ~

Adblock Plus turned up in May 2016 with a plan called Flattr Plus, and on 5 April 2017 its parent company Eyeo bought Flattr outright. Sunde stayed on as an unpaid advisor and made a comment about his baby marrying someone who would take care of her. In October 2017 the rebuilt version launched, and it removed the clicking entirely: a browser extension watched where you spent your attention and divided a monthly subscription accordingly.

That was a reasonable answer to thirteen years of evidence that people would not click. It was also the end of the thing that made Flattr worth having, which was the deliberate act of deciding something was worth money. The rebuilt version ran for six more years without ever becoming the answer to how free things get paid for. In November 2023 Eyeo switched it off. Patreon had that job by then, and it took it by asking for a monthly commitment to one person rather than a monthly budget for the whole web.

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