Ask HN: Does PPP (Parity Pricing) work for one-time digital products? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Does PPP (Parity Pricing) work for one-time digital products?

#11

Post by cjbgkagh » Sun, Jan 18, 2026, 5:13 PM UTC

pingananth wrote: post #10

cjbgkagh wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have had numerous enquirers from India but no sales, it was such a waste of time that I geoblocked the whole region.

Oh, was it subscription and high ticket value?

Optionally perpetual or subscription, niche software, B2B, more expensive than mass market / commodity software. Nonstop lying / scamming behavior.

You get funny things that happen like when a rep from a company will call you and warn you not to do a deal with another rep from the same company, then 2 hours later we get a call from the other rep.

I’m eventually going to go subscription only, people from Asia tend to really hate that and refuse to pay for subscriptions but we make so little money from them that it’s not worth catering to them, we’re better off dropping that entire region.

Re: Ask HN: Does PPP (Parity Pricing) work for one-time digital products?

#12

Post by pingananth » Sun, Jan 18, 2026, 5:30 PM UTC

cjbgkagh wrote: post #11

pingananth wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, was it subscription and high ticket value?

Optionally perpetual or subscription, niche software, B2B, more expensive than mass market / commodity software. Nonstop lying / scamming behavior. You get funny things that happen like when a rep from a company will call you and warn you not to do a deal with another rep from the same company, then 2 hours later we get a call from the other rep. I’m eventually going to go subscription only, people from Asia tend to…

That sounds very draining.

Since I'm selling a low-ticket ($19) self-serve product with zero sales calls, I'm hoping i don't face this.

But I hear you loud and clear - if I ever move upmarket to enterprise contracts, I'll consider this!

Re: Ask HN: Does PPP (Parity Pricing) work for one-time digital products?

#13

Post by victorbjorklund » Sun, Jan 18, 2026, 6:01 PM UTC

Eridrus wrote: post #6

SaaS software is not generally zero marginal cost since you run the infra, have support, etc, but maybe in your situation is close to zero since its very simple. If you have no sales, but your costs are very low, you should try it. The main reason not to would be costs or cannibalizing your higher value customers (which you don't have).

Most SaaS products have close to zero marginal cost, since marginal cost is the additional cost of taking on one more customer. If you already have a thousand customers, what does customer number 1001 actually cost? In most cases, you do not need more infrastructure and you do not need more developers. Maybe you need a bit more support time to answer a few extra emails or take a few more calls, but that is usually it.

There are exceptions. Some SaaS products have infrastructure costs that scale linearly per customer, for example if you spin up a separate database for each tenant. Others are very hands-on, where a large part of the cost is human support or service work, so each new customer does add real cost.

But for the vast majority of self-serve SaaS products, the cost of adding one more customer is effectively near zero in the context of the overall business.

Re: Ask HN: Does PPP (Parity Pricing) work for one-time digital products?

#14

Post by Eridrus » Mon, Jan 26, 2026, 4:33 AM UTC

victorbjorklund wrote: post #13

Eridrus wrote: post #6

SaaS software is not generally zero marginal cost since you run the infra, have support, etc, but maybe in your situation is close to zero since its very simple. If you have no sales, but your costs are very low, you should try it. The main reason not to would be costs or cannibalizing your higher value customers (which you don't have).

Most SaaS products have close to zero marginal cost, since marginal cost is the additional cost of taking on one more customer. If you already have a thousand customers, what does customer number 1001 actually cost? In most cases, you do not need more infrastructure and you do not need more developers. Maybe you need a bit more support time to answer a few extra emails or take a few more calls, but that is usually it…

I don't really know what sorts of scale you've worked on, but software operating costs growing roughly linearly is pretty normal.

You need to process X% more requests, you need X% more machines.

You need to store X% more data, you need to buy that much more disk, etc.

Many things scale worse than linearly too.

If your SaaS product doesn't do very much, sure, the costs might be cheap, but plenty of SaaS products just do a lot, processing lots of data for customers.

Datadog it a canonical example of an excellent software business, but even still, they have real infra costs because there's just a lot of data to process.