About pay1tosee.com
This website is a simple, perhaps even silly, experiment. The idea is to see if people are willing to pay a small amount of money (1 Euro) just to see a number on a webpage increment by one. That's it. No product, no service, just a counter that goes up with each payment.
The Idea
The idea for pay1tosee.com came as a 'shower thought'—a quirky concept with no real business plan. It's a small project born out of curiosity to explore modern web technologies, especially serverless functions and payment integrations. It's a practical way to learn how to connect different services to create a functional, albeit unusual, web application.
The Technology
The project is built with a modern, lightweight tech stack:
- Astro: For building the fast, static frontend.
- Cloudflare Pages/Functions: For hosting the site and running the server-side logic that handles payment confirmations.
- Cloudflare KV: A simple key-value store used as a 'database' to track the total number of payments.
- Stripe: To handle payment processing securely.
This setup is incredibly cost-effective and scalable, perfect for a small experiment like this.
Why?
Because it's fun! This is not a business venture. It's a learning experience and a social experiment rolled into one. The main goal is to see if the simple satisfaction of contributing to a growing number is enough to motivate a small payment. It's all about curiosity.
Who is behind this?
My name is Andreas, and I'm a web developer/creator from Cologne, Germany. This is one of my side projects. If you're interested in my other work, you can visit my project website: gigageld.de.