Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Billing Engines Don't Solve Pricing Problems

tier.run

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 66 posts

Re: Billing Engines Don't Solve Pricing Problems

#21

Post by doctorpangloss »

danenania wrote: post #20
icapybara wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of that changes the fact that this is marketing for their product. Many similar posts have made the front page of HN recently and it’s getting a bit formulaic. It’s great that you like some of them, but are you ok with HN just being a bunch of covert marketing copy?

Most content is marketing in some form. Would you complain about a developer who blogs about open source so they can get consulting projects or a job? If the content is good and I can learn something useful from it, it seems like a win-win.

Social media users who have impracticably many dead authors’ books to read and choose not to are always going to complain about the impacts of cultural materialism, one comment at a time.

Re: Billing Engines Don't Solve Pricing Problems

#22

Post by swyx »

jmacd wrote: post #11
icapybara wrote: post #4

Concerned about the number of lightweight marketing blog posts making it to the front page of HN. It’s like it’s part of the “marketing to devs” playbook at this point.

fwiw this post was written entirely by Isaac. It's not ghost written or edited for marketing purposes. The title might be a bit catchy/glib.

there's way more shameless titles that make it on HN. i dont see a problem with this one at all - clear thesis statement, invitation to read more.

Re: Billing Engines Don't Solve Pricing Problems

#24

Post by IsaacSchlueter »

jmacd wrote: post #11
icapybara wrote: post #4

Concerned about the number of lightweight marketing blog posts making it to the front page of HN. It’s like it’s part of the “marketing to devs” playbook at this point.

fwiw this post was written entirely by Isaac. It's not ghost written or edited for marketing purposes. The title might be a bit catchy/glib.

> written entierly by Isaac

I see what you did there ;)

Re: Billing Engines Don't Solve Pricing Problems

#25

Post by IsaacSchlueter »

presidentender wrote: post #8

My company is building in the same space as Tier - in fact our offering looks close to identical. The problem we've faced so far is catching buyers who want to solve this problem, the deeper, underlying issue, rather than the problem that's in front of their face. For technical contributors, they're usually tasked to throw up a paywall, and you can do that quickly and easily using your billing engine and some lightwe…

100%. The main reason we created https://priceops.org is that there's a real mind-shift that has to happen for someone to realize that there's even a "there" there. Most people who've been through it understand all too well, but even there, it's tempting to think "Oh, if only we'd just committed ignorantly to a better pricing model..." not realizing that you'll always get it wrong and the context will always be changing, so it's critical to have an implementation that can respond to new information.

> 5. Pray that no one ever has to touch it again. (Or failing that, hope you've got a new job somewhere else before that happens.)

So many otherwise smart people make this foolish bet. It is an exceptionally long shot.

> Of course I don't wish them too much success, since I'd like to have some customers too.

Feeling is mutual, I'm sure <3 I think it's potentially a very big space with a lot of work to be done, so there's room for plenty of players in it.

Re: Billing Engines Don't Solve Pricing Problems

#27

Post by Dwolb »

presidentender wrote: post #8

My company is building in the same space as Tier - in fact our offering looks close to identical. The problem we've faced so far is catching buyers who want to solve this problem, the deeper, underlying issue, rather than the problem that's in front of their face. For technical contributors, they're usually tasked to throw up a paywall, and you can do that quickly and easily using your billing engine and some lightwe…

The problem most teams have with pricing is they think it’s a sales problem.

It’s not.

It’s a cross-functional problem that mostly has to do with product (how it’s bundled, which features are on which tiers, and how customers move between tiers) and customer segmentation (how different customers value the features).

Re: Billing Engines Don't Solve Pricing Problems

#29

Post by pvg »

icapybara wrote: post #18
danenania wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really “lightweight”? Have you ever run a business and been responsible for pricing strategy? I have, and I thought the post made a good point—if pricing is tightly coupled to billing implementation, it discourages experimentation since pricing changes are technically non-trivial. If you don’t relate to that, maybe the post just isn’t for you? HN is a forum for engineers and entrepreneurs—it’s run by a startup…

None of that changes the fact that this is marketing for their product. Many similar posts have made the front page of HN recently and it’s getting a bit formulaic. It’s great that you like some of them, but are you ok with HN just being a bunch of covert marketing copy?

If you find bad posts you can flag them or write the mods to convince them to fix it. Posting meta about them mostly makes it worse.

Re: Billing Engines Don't Solve Pricing Problems

#30

Post by votick »

Oh neat, I'm coincidentally trying to setup tier rn.

Bit stuck in progress following Vercel template here https://vercel.com/templates/next.js/tier

But I've already built out my own stripe usage-based billing app b4, and it sucks way more to debug that, so I get what you're trying to do here.

Post reply on HN