I thought the regret would be diabetes and heart disease.
The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret
141–150 of 317 posts
Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret
#142Is there anybody alive that holds this grudge? Even with the article from 2012, I don't know Was this grudge instilled in children?
Until reading the backstory a few years back, I had this grudge. I picked it up from my late father, who was a Lieutenant in the Marines in the late 50's. He'd picked it up, with the admonition that "the Marines never forget" from one of his grizzled old Sergeants, who had been charged for coffee by the Red Cross after the war and never forgave them.
Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I am quite curious why business plans themselves are not generally subject to a/b testing....
Well, it would be like splitting a company into two parts competing with each other. And wouldn't necessarily determine which plan is better - maybe plan A is better on its own but was undercut by competition from plan B?
Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is what the Brave browser is attempting to do, with mixed success
There's also scroll.com, which is more netflix-y: you pay a fixed amount per month and it gets paid out to particpating sites you visit.
Too few partners. Doesn't include the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, for instance.
I favour the nickel-and-dime approach. I'm sure I'd only need to pay pennies per day to outpay advertisers. (I'm assuming that would be enough to keep these outlets afloat, which might not be the case.)
Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret
#145Troops and cops are the most aggrieved people in the world.
Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I don't know about that. I suspect, generally speaking, per-user billing does not work for the vast majority of SaaS. It can really only work well in communication tools, where (1) most organizations receive a lot of value, (2) there's a network effect in play, and (3) expenses incurred by the provider generally correlate with the number of users. Slack. Jira. Notion. Etc. For an APM tool like Apollo, only one of the…
The retool pricing is so annoying! Not only is the price per-user, but we found a weird SSO bug (well, I call it a bug) where if there is a company account and a new person logs in using google, they get added to the company account. Meaning your price can go up without you explicitly inviting users.
We have ended up telling everyone to use Retool with their personal email, then if they want to add an app they made to our company account (so they can used more advanced features eg. embed mode) they should chat to one of the small number of people with access to that account. It's mega annoying and I'm sure heaps of people don't bother.
I hope the team at retool reads hacker news.
Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret
#147I didn't know about the Red Cross and its donuts. The example I've always used for this is helping a friend move. If the friend asks "hey, will you help me move? I'm buying pizza and beer afterwards!" I will more than likely say yes, even though I can buy my own pizza and beer. If they instead say "hey, will you help me move? I'll pay you $21.58 for your time," I'd probably bristle. Even though that might be the equi…
You got weird friends, no one's ever had to ask or bribe me, I would just offer to help. In turn I'd also be uncomfortable asking others to do manual labor for me, if they didn't offer when I said I was moving I wouldn't ask. Buying them supper after would be a given, no bribe required.
Weird friends are great. Everyone secretly appreciates special handling. Little bribes make the world go round. It's quite an art getting someone to help without them eventually feeling a tiny hint of being taken advantage of, and vice versa.
Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know about that. I suspect, generally speaking, per-user billing does not work for the vast majority of SaaS. It can really only work well in communication tools, where (1) most organizations receive a lot of value, (2) there's a network effect in play, and (3) expenses incurred by the provider generally correlate with the number of users. Slack. Jira. Notion. Etc. For an APM tool like Apollo, only one of the…
The retool pricing is so annoying! Not only is the price per-user, but we found a weird SSO bug (well, I call it a bug) where if there is a company account and a new person logs in using google, they get added to the company account. Meaning your price can go up without you explicitly inviting users. We have ended up telling everyone to use Retool with their personal email, then if they want to add an app they made t…
Hi, I'm the founder of Retool. (I do indeed read a bit too much HN, hah.)
Thank you for the feedback — that does sound infuriating. We were optimizing for sharing of applications, but it sounds like the workflow you've adopted is really quite annoying. I'll have a think about what we could do here that might help (e.g. perhaps disabling "auto-adding" to accounts). If you have any suggestions please let me know (my email is in profile)! (I will send you an email by end of day otherwise with some thoughts...)
Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I don't know about that. I suspect, generally speaking, per-user billing does not work for the vast majority of SaaS. It can really only work well in communication tools, where (1) most organizations receive a lot of value, (2) there's a network effect in play, and (3) expenses incurred by the provider generally correlate with the number of users. Slack. Jira. Notion. Etc. For an APM tool like Apollo, only one of the…
Hi, thank you for the kind words! (I'm the founder of Retool.)
Per-user pricing is indeed tricky for us, since people oftentimes think about the value as per-app, not per-user. But ultimately, we want to encourage, not discourage the building of apps on Retool, and our best customers view Retool as a platform for building all their internal apps. (The best customers typically build 100+ apps on Retool.) That's why we don't price per-app.
But it's possible per-user pricing also isn't optimal. If you're open to it, I'd love to bounce some ideas off of you. Do you mind sending me an email? (I can't see the one in your profile.) Thanks!
Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret
#150It 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…
Even public restrooms are free in the States - not sure how that hasn’t caught on more