I'd recommend using paid ads to get to get inital users. It provides the easiest and fastest feedback loop. They don't need to be profitable think of it as paying for real beta testers.
Depending on your niche organic tiktok can be good. SEO can be good longterm if you have a landing page/website that explains your app, you can also make demo pages and tool pages that relate to your apps niche.
Submit your app to any directories that it fits into.
Organic social media is always good just try and make sure the content/app provides real value to the users dont just spam post boring ads else they will get no views.
I don't know if its still like this but around 1 year ago I set a spending limit for an OpenAI api key but it turns out its not a true limit. I spent 80$ on a 20$ limited key in the matter of minutes due to some bad code I wrote causing a looped loop.
I still had to pay it or else I wouldn't have been able to use my account.
OpenAI also does a really fun thing where prepaid credits just straight up expire after a year, which is straight up completely illegal in most (all?) of the EU.
In fact, OpenAI's "billing", "usage tracking" and "billing/spending alerts" UX all have terrible UX. They look like completely independent features.
For example, you can set alert on how much you've spent in a month, but not on how much you have left in your credit bank. So you never really know how much you can still spend unless you go check their slow and confusing UI. You can set it to auto-refill your credits and to limit that to some amount per month (I think?), but again the alerts for this are absolutely atrocious or entirely missing.
Another insane thing I've seen with OpenAI is that, for some reason, your account can be thousands in the red, and some prompts, with some models, or some feature set, still go through. I haven't been able to figure out what heuristic or rule they are using to determine when they let your request through and overbill you, or when they just deny it altogether. Maybe they let all text requests through? Or perhaps it just lets websearch requests through and denies anything else? Maybe it profiles your your most common request and lets those go through? Maybe it had something to do with specific endpoints and APIs? Who knows.
We've moved entire projects off of them in part due to these issues. We got tired of constantly being in the red without a proper notification system (actually: with an insufficient, deceitful system), or of having seemingly random drops in requests only to find out suddenly that combination of parameters got blocked. Please, just completely block me and make me pay. Or give me a better alerts system. We have the money. What we haven't got is the patience to deal with such an obtuse system
Yes but we should be reminded that this also allows people to be protected from government overreach.
If you say something the Chinese government does not agree with they can choose to take all your money and control of your company instantly. Not just oligarchs although those are the bigger targets due to the high value.
Even a small business owner could THEORETICALLY have their assets and equity seized for saying something which goes against the current ruling party, and this is not specific to China it could happen in any modern country.
Crypto allow someone to distribute their wealth in a way where they can be free to speak their mind and still protected even if the country which their business is based out of decides to take action against them.
> Crypto allow someone to distribute their wealth in a way where they can be free to speak their mind and still protected even if the country which their business is based out of decides to take action against them.
Transferring money between people internationally has been around for centuries:
How is diversification unique to crypto? They could have bought us dollars or gold or a lot of other things even before Bitcoin. And the day that Trump decides to make Bitcoin illegal, its worldwide value still plummets. Besides which, crypto is not keeping anyone out of physical jail. China does not stop at seizing your bank accounts.
Exchanges are not anonymous at all though. They are directly linked to your identity as required by US law, but physical btc can be traded anonymously as its technically just a string of letters and numbers. You could transact with it through just telling someone this string if you trust them enough.
Every US company/citizen is not allowed to do trade with Iran due to the ITSR laws except under highly specific situations.
It gets more complex if a company is multinational though.
A citizen can travel to Iran but even if they buy something there on holiday if they bring it back to the US they need to go through complex customs procedures to make sure its legally brought back in.
> Every US company/citizen [...] if they bring it back to the US
Is that relevant here?
> Binance Holdings Ltd., branded Binance, [...] was founded in 2017 by Changpeng Zhao. Binance was initially based in China, then moved to Japan, subsequently left Japan for Malta, and currently has no official company headquarters.
The founder seems to have been born in China and is Canadian.
I still also don't understand if Iran is supposed to be banned on Binance or not.
Yeah basically, but weaponised globally through the dollar system. Basically, if you interact with sanctioned entities you get cut off from banks with dollar assets (basically all of them).
So going back to the original question, "Is Iran supposed supposed to be banned on Binance?" still doesn't have a clear answer?
It might be that Binance are OK with being cut off from banks or what not, and since there is no thing like "global sanctions", and Binance doesn't seem related to the US either legally or by the individuals running the company, they probably don't need to have Iran banned?
> So going back to the original question, "Is Iran supposed supposed to be banned on Binance?" still doesn't have a clear answer?
I mean, theoretically not, but practically yes. Basically every bank has dollar reserves and as such get caught up in the sanctions screening process. Again, sanctions are most problematic for entities when used by the US, but the EU and other governments also do this, and if you want to transact in a governments currency, then you need to follow the sanctions laws (severe violations can lead to license revokation which basically kills your business).
Unless you have no connection to the fiat ecosystem, then you are gonna end up subject to these laws. And if you have no connection to the fiat ecosystem, you won't be a particularly useful service to most people or businesses.
Ok, but isn't that then up to Binance to decide themselves, if to allow that to happen or not? Lots of people here seem to assume because US embargoes say this or that, means Binance should obviously make one particular choice, but shouldn't that be up to Binance and/or whatever jurisdiction they're in, in actuality?
It's totally up to binance, but being absolutely unable to transact in dollars is a pretty harsh penalty. Normally prison sentences are involved for whoever the head of the US entity is.
This is incorrect, bitcoin is slower and more expensive, but bitcoin should not be used as cash, coins like stablecoins which direclty track US dollars or altcoins with lower fees should be used, the lightning network also is useful for transactions.
Bitcoin CAN be used as a store of wealth and the slowness actually makes it better as the slowness is part of the same process that makes it safer, harder to hack/takeover, and gives it value.
Although it was originally intended to be cash it actually now is used as a "store of wealth" It allows people to build up wealth and be able to preserve it from government intervention and inflation. If you have stocks the ownerhsip and registration is controlled by a government and can be taken at any time from you.
Look at china where if you have a large company and take a stand against the government all your equity will be wiped out and you will be either imprisoned or banished to another country.
Cash in a government bank account is the same way, you can wake up one day and all your assets will be seized, your credit cards will stop working.
Bitcoin works because you can technically have your wealth memorized. You can memorize a string of charcters that allow you to bring money with you no matter where you go. NO government or other human can steal it from you (except through torture) but you can also easily not memorize it and instead distribute the keys throughout the world in opposing countries meaning even if you are attacked by one country you still have some wealth kept in another.
A store of wealth is what bitcion allows. True freedom from governments stealing your money because you have ideas which they do not agree with.
This in my mind is the main usage of bitcoin.
Other coins like stablecoins, or the btc lightning network have high value because they make transactions much cheaper as traditional banking systems are complex, error prone, and costly.
> Although it was originally intended to be cash it actually now is used as a "store of wealth"
It's also terrible at that. Bitcoin is down by something like half off its peak. The odds of me losing money to "government intervention" if I'm not actively criming, are quite low. Certainly well under 50%.
> Bitcoin works because you can technically have your wealth memorized.
If you are having to reach for increasingly absurd fantasy scenarios to justify something that was supposed to have thoroughly quotidian users, maybe you should take that as a sign?
> because you have ideas which they do not agree with
Oh, that's who's using bitcoin the most? Philosophers and the like? I had no idea.
This is not a common man's dream, but one of privilege and wealthy background. The oppressed masses don't need Bitcoin, they have no wealth to "memorize" and jetset around the world.
It's precisely the opposite actually; If you're wealthy you can switch citizenships, hide your assets in tax havens, and afford property and other assets to store your wealth. For the debanked, or those living in unstable or authoritarian countries it gives them a more stable way to store and transact, especially with massive inflation.
Pretty much everyone I know who talks shit about bitcoin is wealthy and privileged.
Look back in history and there have been many cases of poor people being pushed out of their homes, stripped of their valuable goods and forced to relocate, in that case it would apply to those who were not wealthy.
> Although it was originally intended to be cash it actually now is used as a "store of wealth"
For some definition of "actually", given how much it has dropped recently. When he was still a just a candidate, the current Opposition leader in Canada was very excited about Bitcoin:
> As Poilievre campaigned for the Tory leadership on the way to a landslide victory, he spoke positively about decentralized finance and cryptocurrency. At one point, he argued that crypto would allow Canadians to "opt-out" of inflation, which was soaring at the time. And he famously used Bitcoin to purchase a shawarma at a London, Ont., restaurant in March 2022.
> In 2022, when Pierre Poilievre was a Conservative leadership candidate, he said he’d make Canada the crypto capital of the world. According to him, the Bank of Canada was “ruining” the Canadian dollar, printing money and ramping up inflation to fund COVID-19 relief. His solution? Give Canadians crypto as an alternative currency.
Given the noise that was made about inflation at the time and the (alleged) devaluation of the CAD, I'm curious to know what the inflation rate equivalent would be now (Feb 2026) if Bitcoin is used as the monetary base.
Has the lack of crypto ever stopped this from happening? Look up cases of gold bars being found in senators houses, those are actually MUCH less tracable.
Shitcoins and Shitstocks(some SPACs) do allow of a legal way to "give" others money through the transfer of value in a way that is technically legal. This again is not crypto specific though.
So the best part about being bribed with crypto is if one flees to another country to escape the law, one still has the aforementioned bribes. That plus some measure of anonymity.
Maybe I should have said naturally rather than well. It's true that if privacy is your focus you can implement a Blockchain that achieves it, but at it's core Blockchain is a ledger of transactions that anyone can audit- privacy is not a natural outcome of that technology.
Which IMHO is a positive - no private transactions means corruption gets much harder, and that's always been a core selling point of the technology to me.
> Has the lack of crypto ever stopped this from happening?
Undeniably yes, given the number of fraud and money laundering convictions achieved over the years.
> cases of gold bars [...] are actually MUCH less tracable.
Laughably false, given the difficulty of liquidating such things without detection. If you have to store your ill-gotten gains in your own home you've lost the opsec battle already.
I think you're just saying gold bars aren't digital information so don't a priori show up in a query somewhere. But the question that actually needs to be asked is "Did Menendez get caught with gold bars in his home?"
Yeah, he did. Ergo, they aren't very "untraceable" in practice.
Unblockable yes, untrackable no. Also portable is the main ability of crypto.
The reason that this could be found out is because every transaction is recorded so it can be linked back through the chain once it hits another exchange that is KYC'd.
If I have a gold watch and I wear it through the airport go to turkey melt it down and give it to an iranian, then buy a fake watch and return home noone will every know that this transaction took place.
This would be 100% impossible to track in any reasonable manner. If I went to an exchange transfered bitcoin to a person then they spent this bitcoin in a way that linked it to their identity this would provide a full audit trail that would link me to that person. Also this audit trail could NEVER be removed or altered.
There are ways to use bitcoin in an untracable manner just like gold, you can have a cold wallet and transfer the keys to someone else. The cold wallet password could be only memorized and thus have no physical trace and no transaction record could take place whatsoever, but this is the OPPOSITE of what an exchange does.
Also cash and bank systems are not as resistant, they can fail, be hacked, be altered, people can use shell companies and fake identities.
Some cryptos like monero try and hide the transaction path but even this crypto has some vulnerabilities making linking it to people possible in some cases.
It's not unfair its how every business works. When your product is new or not yet good enough and you want people to try it you give them discounts, or if you want to drive traffic to your service you also do the same.
Even traditional businesses do this with coupons. Is it unfair that Costco sells chickens for under cost because it drives usage to them?
Companies like Uber did use massive funding and price subsidization to try and kill competition and then take a monopoly, but it is hard to assert that this is what google is doing now. And given that other competitors in the space, Anthropic are doing the exact same thing again its not as though they are alone.
Also they could be subsidizing it because they want that usage type as it helps them train models better.
Chatgpt and gpt4 were all ran at a loss and subsidized people just didn't know that. Almost all of the llm companies have been selling 1 dollar of llm compute for 50 cents as they valued the usage, training data, and users more than making profit now.
This next generation of MOE and other newly trained models. Like opus 4.6, Cursor Composer 1.5, gpt 5.3 codex, and many of the others have been the first models where these companies are actually profitably serving the tokens at the api cost.
This year has been the switch where ai companies are actually thinking of becoming profitable instead of just focusing on research and development.
Hmm, you might be right. I'm reading the forum thread linked in the OP.
> ”Thank you for your continued patience as we have thoroughly investigated your account access issue. Please be assured that we conducted a comprehensive investigation, exploring every possible avenue to restore your access.
> Our product engineering team has confirmed that your account was suspended from using our Antigravity service. This suspension affects your access to the Gemini CLI and any other service that uses the Cloud Code Private API.
> Our investigation specifically confirmed that the use of your credentials within the third-party tool “open claw” for testing purposes constitutes a violation of the Google Terms of Service [1]. This is due to the use of Antigravity servers to power a non-Antigravity product.
> I must be transparent and inform you that, in accordance with Google’s policy, this situation falls under a zero tolerance policy, and we are unable to reverse the suspension. I am truly sorry to share this difficult news with you.”
I totally read that (and the other posts in that forum) as a complete suspension of their whole Google Account (another person mentions their GCP access suspended).
But I could be reading it wrong and it's just their AI account (and any service that uses that... I'm not clear on where those boundaries are?)
Still not going to risk signing up for this, because I cannot risk my Google account getting suspended or banned for something I wasn't aware of in the ToS. No warnings is still drastic, even if it's just part of the account.
This is a really weird response man. No need to get so judgy and personal.
Besides, as far as I can tell what they said is true. The users are losing access to Antigravity, not to their entire Google accounts. So you’re getting mad at this guy just for stating facts.
Depending on your niche organic tiktok can be good. SEO can be good longterm if you have a landing page/website that explains your app, you can also make demo pages and tool pages that relate to your apps niche.
Submit your app to any directories that it fits into.
Organic social media is always good just try and make sure the content/app provides real value to the users dont just spam post boring ads else they will get no views.