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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Show HN: BlurPage – A browser extension to hide sensitive information on webpage
31–34 of 34 posts
Re: Show HN: BlurPage – A browser extension to hide sensitive information on webpage
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
If it really takes the competition a whole afternoon to implement this, $20 is an incredible price. Even just an hour for any in-house SWE in America is going to cost the company at least $20.
Replace "competition" with "user" and you have a point.
But what I mean is that if it takes only an afternoon to replicate 95% of what this tool offers, then a competitor could knock it out and start charging $10, or $5, or $1, or heaven forbid, release it as a free tool.
If that happens, the only people who are going to pay $20 are those who have no idea that the other tools exist.
There are certainly companies who operate solely on marketing power and get people to pay for things they could otherwise get for free -- see ProPublica's TurboTax investigation -- but for a tool like this, I can't see how it could work out in the long term.
Re: Show HN: BlurPage – A browser extension to hide sensitive information on webpage
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
And by the time you’ve wrapped it up, tested it, made the UI nicer (blur selected text, put a box around what will be blurred, allow for unblurring, etc.), don’t you think there’s something else you could have done for your company that would provide more than $20 value to them?
I'm in a competitive place and my company pays me to keep my sword sharp. I do that with lots and lots of solid tooling... a ton of it being stuff I've developed myself over years =)
"Don't try the blood and guts routine, let technology do the work."
Myself, I wouldn't ever put this into an extension because I'm certain it already exists and if not, I can bang out the base functionality in a console within 5 minutes and throw a gist in my GitLab or do a URL-JS thingy. 5m is worth $20 to me! $20 is a case of beers yo!
Re: Show HN: BlurPage – A browser extension to hide sensitive information on webpage
#34Earlier 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.
One interesting piece of advice i heard some time ago is that you shouldn't worry about what your competitors are doing or might do since you have no control over them nor over how your customers perceive them, so any time spent dealing with competition is time wasted not working on your own product.
(note that this was in the context of smaller developers / indies / MicroISVs / etc, it might make sense to do the above if you are a big company with a dedicated marketing department)