The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret • Hacker News Board

Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret

#261

Post by nl » Fri, May 08, 2020, 6:56 AM UTC

monadic2 wrote: post #101

tomjakubowski wrote: post #68

Earlier 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....

Users talk to each other and hate it.

Plus complex A/B test (eg per user vs per app billing) are complex to build and hard to get statistically significant results. You might have a perfectly reasonable SAAS business with 100 customers.

Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret

#262

Post by unnouinceput » Fri, May 08, 2020, 7:08 AM UTC

bobbylarrybobby wrote: post #232

unnouinceput wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a similar story. Year is 2014 and client was using a very specific payment processor because the client was part of UK government and credit card processing was to be done using only that processor - you know, politics and stuff when dealing with government. So the payment processor, after absorbing a good chunk of this organization became a behemoth, with a lot of political power and overnight they decided to…

It's a rare client who pays more than the agreed-upon price.

You're wrong. I have plenty of clients that seeing my efforts in putting that extra-mile for their project paid a bonus as well. But that's because I have good communication with them and plenty of times when they need it something fast I simply code it in front of their eyes instead of "let me see these requests and I get back to you". That's the difference between a senior developer and a junior one.

Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret

#263

Post by dvdhsu » Fri, May 08, 2020, 7:30 AM UTC

erichocean wrote: post #244

dvdhsu wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 em…

We view Retool as an option for building ultra lightweight apps when our normal app development flow (which is already very lightweight) is too heavy (read: costs too much in terms of developer time). But Retool is too expensive for us, because we have many situations where we might use an app 100 times max for the life of the app, spread over a dozen or more users. Your pricing didn't work, even though your product…

Hi, thanks for this message. I really appreciate it, since we generally don’t hear about “I didn’t buy because of the price” from the customers that already paid us, haha.

One thing we don’t advertise — we only bill for active users every month. So if 10 people login during a month, but 50 don’t, we only bill you for the 10. Do you think that’d help you guys?

(I’ll send you an email in the morning to get more feedback and see what kind of pricing would work for you. Thanks again for the feedback and for trying Retool!)

Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret

#264

Post by WalterBright » Fri, May 08, 2020, 7:38 AM UTC

listenallyall wrote: post #259

WalterBright wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Beyond economy class economy+ class business class first class > Ever book 2+ seats at the same time? Ok, ya got me there. Ever book 2 seats not at the same time? > often lead to sub-optimal revenue totals Airlines are not stupid with their operations management, and expend a great deal of effort optimizing revenue.

Are you telling me you've surveyed every person on the plane to know for absolute sure nobody paid the same price? Do you think they create a unique fare code for every passenger? Of course they don't. I never said airlines are stupid, I stated an opinion they are not "masters of a/b testing". You've not provided any evidence to convince me otherwise.

> Are you telling me you've surveyed every person on the plane to know for absolute sure nobody paid the same price?

I read it some years ago in an article about airline operations management and how they optimized their fares, which varied constantly through the day and the days of the week. Then there are all the various discounts people can get, frequent flyer prices, rebooking fees, etc. It's all based on heavy use of statistics, which is a more complex version of A/B testing.

> I never said airlines are stupid

You suggested they often make bad forecasts, implying they didn't know what they were doing.

But you may believe whatever you like.

Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret

#265

Post by mikekchar » Fri, May 08, 2020, 7:45 AM UTC

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #185

I tend to make all my stuff open-source and free. I have no intentions of ever charging for it. I do this for a couple of reasons: 1) "Brand-building." I'm developing a "personal brand," and I do it for a similar reason as companies give away free T-shirts with their logo. 2) Lead by Example. I have a beef with the quality of most software, these days. I have decided not to whine about it. Instead, I just write my ow…

Free and open source licenses are really useful. Works licensed like that are worth significantly more to me that works that aren't licensed like that. Of course, charge whatever you want for your code, but I don't think you should avoid charging for code that has an MIT license. Quite the contrary!

Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret

#266

Post by onetimemanytime » Fri, May 08, 2020, 7:47 AM UTC

bobbylarrybobby wrote: post #232

unnouinceput wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a similar story. Year is 2014 and client was using a very specific payment processor because the client was part of UK government and credit card processing was to be done using only that processor - you know, politics and stuff when dealing with government. So the payment processor, after absorbing a good chunk of this organization became a behemoth, with a lot of political power and overnight they decided to…

It's a rare client who pays more than the agreed-upon price.

I suppose it depends on business size, other than being appreciative, they might also want to keep the provider happy. They want the business to keep going without a hitch and finding replacements is not always a smooth process

Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret

#267

Post by nitwit005 » Fri, May 08, 2020, 8:09 AM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #247

ja27 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We went through this. When 2008 hit the company stopped providing free sodas and bottled water for our office of only about 30 people. I was damn close to just buying them myself but it was crazy how upset a few people making moderately insane amounts of money would get over not getting a $1/day benefit.

I completely relate to both of these. My experience is that you get a mix of people saying "just give me the money, I'll decide if I want to spend it on snacks" and people who say "I really like that snacks are available, please keep them." From a financial perspective its pretty hard "move the needle" on an engineers salary with free snacks and drinks. Median engineering salary in the Bay Area is more than $100K. So…

> That they couldn't manage the people who filled up their back packs with food and drinks for their family before they went home each night was telling on a number of levels.

Oh that one is easy. The management all want to take home stuff too. My last company had some IT items that you could get from vending machines. The moment I said I was leaving a manager asked if I could use my badge to grab something for her, saying she'd already maxed out for the month. I realized I'd become a source of untracked purchasing, and assumed she probably wanted to take an item home.

Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret

#268

Post by tonyedgecombe » Fri, May 08, 2020, 8:16 AM UTC

marktangotango wrote: post #199

WalterBright wrote: post #55

Pricing things can be strange. Back in the old Zortech days, we included full library source for free with the compiler. Library source wasn't even available for other compilers. Nobody particularly cared that we did that, and it was never mentioned in compiler reviews in the press. One day, Borland decided to package partial (not including floating point) library source for their compiler as a separate product. The…

A looong time ago I worked at a comic book store and the owner had a table of freebies at the front of the store. The distributors were always sending marketing material with cool artwork, so instead of throwing it in the trash when it piled up, he figured why not give it away? No one touched it. Then he started packaging it into $5 “grab bags”. That crap was gone in a week. The lesson? “You can’t give shit away, but…

People do value things by what they pay. I saw this when I was consulting, pushing up my prices resulted in more respect and better treatment.

Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret

#269

Post by tonyedgecombe » Fri, May 08, 2020, 8:30 AM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #58

ProAm wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately, a lot of tech companies have (perhaps unintentionally) conditioned consumers to expect software to be free I think Apple started this movement with the App Store and the .99 cent app. I think it coincided with the shift from on-prem software to cloud, but that really shifted what people can charge for software. We've seen a bit of a shift back the last ~5 years maybe? But I still think it the App sto…

It was the internet that made software free, starting with the browser, and continuing with the adoption of Linux with its free tools.

Yes, it's been a long term trend. Prices tend to decline towards their marginal cost. In the case of software this is close to zero.

Hence companies like MicroSoft are shifting towards services.

Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret

#270

Post by tonyedgecombe » Fri, May 08, 2020, 8:32 AM UTC

One of the most demotivating experiences I had as an employee was when my employer put me on a commission scheme then did everything they could to wriggle out of paying the commission. They would have been better off not offering it in the first place.