The major distinction here is voice is much more personal and one on one than IRC. IRC can be intimidating for a novice, and let's be quite frank, many times people's IRC persona does not reflect who they are in real life. As someone who's been contributing to major networks such as EFnet for many years now - I've learned IRC can be a great tool for learning, but it can also be downright aggressive and humiliating, particularly to the majority of users who this service would be targeting.

A voice on the other hand is more personal, synchronous and on-demand. I think there's value there and that it's possible to charge for that additional value.

EFNet and Freenode are quite different, however.

I know it's a bit OT but if anyone really does want to charge for offering skills in this way, you should check out a startup called www.minutebox.com which offers pay-by-the-minute video calls which are intended to work like this.

Props to these guys for doing it for free! I hope it works out for you.

Looks to me like they plan to use this particular hotline as a demo of their service for providing other similar hotlines for businesses. Seems like a great plan.

One thought: you currently suggest that the experts who volunteer get paid for their support. As an alternative model, you might consider providing credits for priority support. In other words: experts answer the easier questions so support staff don't have to, and then those experts get priority access to ask trickier questions and/or bug reports. Developers really want to interact with those experts anyway, without opening themselves up to handholding-level support questions, so everybody wins.

We need to make that more clear on the site, we don't entend the volunteers to get paid, but rather rewarded with discounts, early access, and recognition from the communities they help.

Ah, I see. The last item on http://www.pockethotline.com/ has a big dollar sign and starts with "The expert earns rewards", so yeah, more clear would help. Re-reading it, now I see that you meant the dollar sign to attach to "and you save money on support", which makes sense.

As an aside, you may also want to make it more clear why your service works better than existing croudsourced support, such as community forums. I think you can tell a pretty compelling story there: less effort to maintain the community resources (since you do the work for them) and phone support rather than forums/lists/etc. The idea of talking to an expert on the phone often seems far more appealing than sending off a mail or a forum post, at least for certain types of questions.

Copy+Pasting your awesome response above...

Maybe replace the dollar sign with a giftwrapped box.