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Show HN: BlurPage – A browser extension to hide sensitive information on webpage

blur.page

11–20 of 34 posts

Re: Show HN: BlurPage – A browser extension to hide sensitive information on webpage

#11
post #9
post #2

$20 for a browser extension that blurs text on a page! Yikes! This strikes me as the sort of generic productivity tool that might be worth a buck or two, but for $20, it had better blur text AND file my taxes for me. I would be really surprised if there were not free extensions that did effectively the same thing. And if there are not, someone could probably whip it up in a day or two, and there goes your business.

Pricing is incredibly hard to get right. It's very, very likely that the market for a tool like this is small, so charging $2 would actually net the author far less than charging fewer people $20. In that regard it's correctly priced at $20. The apparent simplicity of some code has absolutely no impact whatsoever on the amount you should charge for it. What you charge for your product should be based on the value tha…

> What you charge for your product should be based on the value that the customer gets from it and not the amount work that you've put in to it.

Go one level deeper. How much effort would a competitor have to put into building a competing product and undercutting you?

If the answer is "one afternoon," then you either need to figure out a way to make competition less likely or set a more realistic price.

Re: Show HN: BlurPage – A browser extension to hide sensitive information on webpage

#12
post #9
post #2

$20 for a browser extension that blurs text on a page! Yikes! This strikes me as the sort of generic productivity tool that might be worth a buck or two, but for $20, it had better blur text AND file my taxes for me. I would be really surprised if there were not free extensions that did effectively the same thing. And if there are not, someone could probably whip it up in a day or two, and there goes your business.

Pricing is incredibly hard to get right. It's very, very likely that the market for a tool like this is small, so charging $2 would actually net the author far less than charging fewer people $20. In that regard it's correctly priced at $20. The apparent simplicity of some code has absolutely no impact whatsoever on the amount you should charge for it. What you charge for your product should be based on the value tha…

> The apparent simplicity of some code has absolutely no impact whatsoever on the amount you should charge for it.

Yes it should. If I know someone w/my same talents can come along and knock the same functionality out in a few hours it's going to make me push the price-barrier down so someone does't just come along and eat my lunch.

As an engineer my value is VERY tied to my time, and when I'm doing dev on my own business/products I am fully cognizant of this.

Anecdotal I know - but the word "undercut" is popular in pricing conversations for a reason... aaand I've been undercut by another engineer copying my product for a cheaper price before.

Re: Show HN: BlurPage – A browser extension to hide sensitive information on webpage

#13
I personally don't think this utility is worth the asking price for my use case but as a developer struggling to monetize my own projects, I respect that this developer is bold enough to ask for money at all.

What I don't like...actually what drives me totally crazy, is this:

> Buy once, upgrade for free forever!

This is not sustainable. In some ways it's even worse than free. I really wish people would stop proposing this pricing model for software. Software is never done, and a pay-once model is totally inappropriate.

Most insidiously, it gives consumers the wrong impression of software maintenance and makes it exponentially harder for other developers to implement more appropriate pricing models.

Re: Show HN: BlurPage – A browser extension to hide sensitive information on webpage

#14
post #11
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pricing is incredibly hard to get right. It's very, very likely that the market for a tool like this is small, so charging $2 would actually net the author far less than charging fewer people $20. In that regard it's correctly priced at $20. The apparent simplicity of some code has absolutely no impact whatsoever on the amount you should charge for it. What you charge for your product should be based on the value tha…

> What you charge for your product should be based on the value that the customer gets from it and not the amount work that you've put in to it. Go one level deeper. How much effort would a competitor have to put into building a competing product and undercutting you? If the answer is "one afternoon," then you either need to figure out a way to make competition less likely or set a more realistic price.

Maximising revenue while the isn't a competing product is a good idea though. Why would you reduce your price before there's any competition? That would just be giving money away.

Also, people often trust a product they pay for more than something that's free. A plugin that's free could be doing all manner of nefarious things under the hood. A paid product comes with a level of implicit trust (wrongly, in my opinion, but still).

Re: Show HN: BlurPage – A browser extension to hide sensitive information on webpage

#15
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$15 if you read the copy atop, I don't think that's so steep.

Most extension devs can knock something like this out in a weekend. It's steep.

If you price your weekend at $20, it is. Many devs would say $20 is 20 minutes billed time.

Re: Show HN: BlurPage – A browser extension to hide sensitive information on webpage

#16
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pricing is incredibly hard to get right. It's very, very likely that the market for a tool like this is small, so charging $2 would actually net the author far less than charging fewer people $20. In that regard it's correctly priced at $20. The apparent simplicity of some code has absolutely no impact whatsoever on the amount you should charge for it. What you charge for your product should be based on the value tha…

> The apparent simplicity of some code has absolutely no impact whatsoever on the amount you should charge for it. Yes it should. If I know someone w/my same talents can come along and knock the same functionality out in a few hours it's going to make me push the price-barrier down so someone does't just come along and eat my lunch. As an engineer my value is VERY tied to my time, and when I'm doing dev on my own bus…

As an engineer my value is VERY tied to my time, and when I'm doing dev on my own business/products I am fully cognizant of this.

If you believe your time is worth $250/hour then you're going to leave a lot of money on the table when a customer comes along who values the solution you can implement at $500/hour.

Re: Show HN: BlurPage – A browser extension to hide sensitive information on webpage

#17
For what it's worth, a lot of free tools already offer this type of thing in them, for free. Droplr [1], for example, has blurring ability built into their screenshot grabber. Not to mention, they use a more advanced technique of blurring by obfuscating what you select.

[1] https://droplr.com

Re: Show HN: BlurPage – A browser extension to hide sensitive information on webpage

#18
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The apparent simplicity of some code has absolutely no impact whatsoever on the amount you should charge for it. Yes it should. If I know someone w/my same talents can come along and knock the same functionality out in a few hours it's going to make me push the price-barrier down so someone does't just come along and eat my lunch. As an engineer my value is VERY tied to my time, and when I'm doing dev on my own bus…

As an engineer my value is VERY tied to my time, and when I'm doing dev on my own business/products I am fully cognizant of this. If you believe your time is worth $250/hour then you're going to leave a lot of money on the table when a customer comes along who values the solution you can implement at $500/hour.

Consulting isn't product dev and pricing!

Re: Show HN: BlurPage – A browser extension to hide sensitive information on webpage

#19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most extension devs can knock something like this out in a weekend. It's steep.

If you price your weekend at $20, it is. Many devs would say $20 is 20 minutes billed time.

Well - frankly I price this at "free-fiddy" because I hammered this out in 5m (just drop it into your console):

https://kopy.io/sAgzt

Yes it's jQuery (and I know everyone on HN hates jQuery!) - a vanilla JS version would be just as trivial! Wrapping it in a Chrome manifest w/a simple "enable/disable" browser button-type interface would be about 20 minutes I guess.

Re: Show HN: BlurPage – A browser extension to hide sensitive information on webpage

#20
You can do something like this in a few lines of JS.

https://kopy.io/sAgzt

Yes I know it's jQuery - hate all ya want. Vanilla JS would be just as trivial. Drop it into a console and ctrl click to hide stuff. VERY easy to pull this off!

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