Ask HN: how to get revenue from my site

8 points

13 years ago

I'm the guy behind pentesterlab.com. This site offers free exercises to learn web security (an ISO with a vulnerable web application and a PDF with the course). I'd like to get revenue out of it to pay for all the time I spend building each exercise and maybe be able to spend more time on it. I enjoy doing it a lot and building each exercise can be super challenging but having some reward will help stay motivated.

I started as something similar to Peepcode in December 2011 and was charging around $12 per exercise but I made it free after 8 months during which I sold around 6 exercises (to 3 people). However, I don't want to go back to this after making it free. Being free makes it available to a lot of people and it's something I won't change now (I actually wish I had start with free exercises).

I offer commercial license to use the exercises to run training with not much success so far (even if it's pretty cheap $990). I have around 130 visitors/day on average and up to 4000 when an exercise is released (the average value is 2500). I tweeted about sponsoring but I didn't get any reply so far.

And now I'd like to see if HN has a better idea or what I'm doing wrong... or maybe it's just not something that can be done and I should just accept to do it for the fun of it.

7 comments