281–290 of 317 posts
After a deserved backlash, they fortunately backtracked and allowed people to buy perpetual licenses. But it left a bad taste.
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Per-user billing works when the value is obvious and the price is low. If you have a B2B SaaS product your goal should be optimizing for getting the maximum users in an organization. The more people who use your product: - The harder it is to move off your product - If people like the product, when they leave, they'll evangelize your product to their next employer - It's less likely that different teams/business unit…
> The thing that's crazy is that the cost to the SaaS provider has nothing to do with the number of users. Surely their support costs scale with the number of users? This might explain some anti-growth behaviors, support is expensive and a lot of companies struggle to get it right.
It doesn't increase going from 100 to 500 to 2000 users, because none of these users can raise support requests to the vendor. It's only the person (or micro team) who did the product evaluation and drafted the contract who has contact to the vendor support and sales team.
NPR’s headline is misleading—the problem was not free doughnuts, it was charging (briefly) for doughnuts. In any case, fascinating; thanks for posting.
It's not misleading. Free doughnuts were part of the problem. The British soldiers were upset that they had to pay for their snacks while the American soldiers were receiving theirs for free, and it caused tensions. The free doughnuts helped to cause that imbalance and tension, which led to charging for the snacks.
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Per-user billing works when the value is obvious and the price is low. If you have a B2B SaaS product your goal should be optimizing for getting the maximum users in an organization. The more people who use your product: - The harder it is to move off your product - If people like the product, when they leave, they'll evangelize your product to their next employer - It's less likely that different teams/business unit…
In the financial systems/trading world high per-user pricing is considered normal. Most "investment information"-type products are 25K-50K/user/year. It's likely some people here will consider this low pricing, but it's a significantly different pricing model to the sell cheap, stack high $9 to $50/user/month type app.
That pricing model is not applied to most information, like pricing data and any sort of API, because these are not about physical users. (They do charge a ton but not per user).
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!
I know that makes me a bit of an "outlier" in the tech industry, but I guess I'm a bit of a "throwback."
I enjoy sharing, and I enjoy shipping apps. It's my dream to code for free; and I'm just about there.
Writing the code I want to write, without having people deliberately spike the development process, is kind of fun.
I mention my outlook here: https://medium.com/chrismarshallny/thats-not-what-ships-are-...
BTW: I've enjoyed reading a lot of your comments. You like to write.
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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…
Recently I was moving and had some furniture ("junk") to dispose of. Calling a company to come get it was really expensive considering the stuff was effectively worthless. Posting it on Craigslist for free was useless -- no one wants your crap fo free. Posting a Craigslist ad for $20 for an otherwise free couch? Gone the next day. It's bizarre that this works, but boy, does it work.
A decent half of listing were decent IMO, but oh boy, the other half were odd stuff and/or in such conditions that I can't imagine anybody taking them (even if paid to). The adage you get what you pay for holds true.
Funny enough, it's even worse the other way around, trying to give (good) items for free. People are atrocious. They book to pick up and don't show up. When they show up, they're often empty handed and act like unbelievable idiots. "Oh it's the fridge from 3 years ago, not the newer model, nevermind not interested." Can't believe this happening if I didn't hear it with my own ears. Anyway, they came without appropriate transportation, couldn't pick up a fridge/couch no matter what.
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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.
"wow it was that easy?? I am vastly overpaying" - heard several times
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A park in Indiana, Holiday World, did something sorta the opposite. They figured out how much the average guest paid for drinks, then raised the ticket prices that much but made all drinks free in the park. It was a huge success. People expect ticket prices to go up occasionally and they expect to be gouged for drinks. By getting "free" drinks, it felt like a huge value. (At least for me when I visited.) I bet it mad…
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 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…
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…
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A similar thing happens in the podcasting space. It's a pity it's still quite inconvenient to make micropayments. If I could make a single click to pay a penny for access to a single article, I imagine I'd do so frequently.
You would need to pay quite a bit more to make this viable for most publications. The ballpark formula is the issue price divided by the number of articles the average reader wants to read enough to pay anything . For example, a WSJ is $4, so if readers wanted to read ten articles, they should charge 40-50 cents for them. A more realistic price might be $1-2/article since the median reader won’t be that interested. P…
An online newspapers might make $3 per thousand views, plastering ads everywhere and maybe videos. That means they survive with way less than 1 penny per view. They have no excuse to try to charge orders of magnitude more.