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In Austria (and maybe some other parts of Europe, not sure), not only that free refills are unheard of, you even get charged for ketchup sauce at McDonalds. (The minimal allowed food quality is higher, though, so there might be economic reasons on top of, I believe, primarily societal reasons.)
It is charged somewhere around 40 to 50 Eurocent per 25ml.
As an aside, I am really, really surprised and happy to see a plain-text website available, if you decline cookies. That's a neat approach.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ive been saying for years that airlines should do this. Add the price of an alcoholic beverage to everyone's ticket and then give those who want one a "free" drink. I never understood why they opted to go with ruthless cuts and declining customer experience.
I've heard about people paying for booze on planes. But for some reason in all the dozens of times I've flown. Never paid to get drunk on a plane? Think the last flight I took was 3 years ago, so don't know what has changed. I do only fly on the west coast though.
Interestingly enough I used to work at a company where the one any only benefit was occasional doughnuts on Friday (we did not get health insurance/dental/vision/retirement). And honestly we would all be pissed on the days when Doughnut Friday was cancelled.
It's true - charging for something that was once free can be risky, but it isn't always bad as some might believe. I have great respect for businesses that charge for a service that provides real value - even if it was once free. Often times (especially in the startup world), companies start out offering a free product (operating at a loss) to gain market share. It's not often the best strategy, but in some markets i…
There's a common theme on HN that it's all the fault of consumers for wanting free stuff. The truth is, budgets are limited, and if you start charging for stuff you will soon find out how much consumers actually value it - with respect with other stuff they can buy. I'm not talking about the average HN user making six figures in a cushy software job - of course you'd pay for a product like Gmail. But think about most…
I've seen it first-hand: startups intentionally forgoing revenue so they can be measured by the stick of imaginary future profits correlated with their free product's success. Then when investors finally do start asking to see real returns, it's a scramble to find something that doesn't involve charging their current user base (because of course no one wants to pay for something that has been free previously). That's when the "creative" money-making ideas start getting real consideration.
In effect, those actions end up communicating to the public that software is free when it really isn't. It gives the impression that there isn't a cost associated with developing and maintaining software, when really it might just be funded temporarily by investors with deep pockets and high expectations, or supported by other revenue sources that the end user would not agree to in full transparency.
As an aside, I am really, really surprised and happy to see a plain-text website available, if you decline cookies. That's a neat approach.
As someone who has turned nearly all cookies off, I appreciate (and use) the plaintext site as well, but there's really no actual reason why they couldn't serve the regular site without cookies all the same.
Well, handling it may be difficult on the frontend, depending on implementation. May very well be easier to just serve it as plaintext.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ive been saying for years that airlines should do this. Add the price of an alcoholic beverage to everyone's ticket and then give those who want one a "free" drink. I never understood why they opted to go with ruthless cuts and declining customer experience.
Because most people search fares online and book the cheapest ticket.
Currently air travel is a completely homogeneous service. There is basically no difference from one company to the other, so it makes no sense not to go with the cheapest (even then, the flight schedule matters). That is not reason for a company to not differentiate itself.
(But I am very skeptical that a free drink would be enough of a difference.)
I can call out one example of a poorly executed price raise: Apollo Engine ( https://www.apollographql.com/pricing ) There was a time when they charged for data points/performance traces ingested into the system. At our scale, we were paying around $100/month. We were prepared to scale that to their, I think it was, $550/month plan when our usage got that high. They relatively recently changed their structure to char…
In general for SaaS, does it make sense to let customers choose between two (or more) pricing models, depending on their needs? Does this cause too much complication for the business? Curious why I haven't noticed schemes like this, other than at "enterprise" tiers where the customer is paying a lot for something closer to a custom solution and prices are negotiated.
For an APM tool like Apollo, only one of these requirements is true. It does provide a lot of value. But, there's no network effect, and their expenses do not correlate with users on the platform. That last point is the craziest one; being long-time users of Meteor and Apollo, I've always questioned the technical and executive leadership behind the Meteor Development Group (now Apollo), and they've done nothing in recent history to give faith that its a well-ran organization.
Retool (https://retool.com/) is another weird one. Amazing, amazing product. Truly transformative; what they're building there is unreal. There's a very light network effect in play, and usage may correlate better with users-in-app than it would with Apollo Engine, but charging per-user still feels weird. For them, I feel some form of bucket'ed plans, which allot X users, Y "applications", plus gated feature sets like SAML and Audit Logging, would make more sense. But, what do I know.
It is interesting to me how much free givaways people get in America. In Austria (and maybe some other parts of Europe, not sure), not only that free refills are unheard of, you even get charged for ketchup sauce at McDonalds. (The minimal allowed food quality is higher, though, so there might be economic reasons on top of, I believe, primarily societal reasons.) It is charged somewhere around 40 to 50 Eurocent per 2…
A customer shot employees at a McDonald's because the customer wasn't allowed to dine in the restaurant: https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-05-07/police...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because most people search fares online and book the cheapest ticket.
That actually does not disprove the GP's point. People do this when the price difference is too high, or when they don't know of any difference of value on both options. Currently air travel is a completely homogeneous service. There is basically no difference from one company to the other, so it makes no sense not to go with the cheapest (even then, the flight schedule matters). That is not reason for a company to n…
Where are you getting this? Tons of airlines provide varying levels of service/amenities. Only thing that is homogeneous is that you get from A to B.
I think you are onto something there, but you should have phrased it another way.
E.g. I think airlines were caught in a devils agreement with air travel search engines.
They gave them access to their flights, and the search engines had to find the simplest qualities to compare fares on. That usually meant price.
So you have tons of airlines with no clear value proposition differences in a search result, and it leads to the equilibrium being a devastating fight for lowest price.