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Billing Engines Don't Solve Pricing Problems

tier.run

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Re: Billing Engines Don't Solve Pricing Problems

#31

Post by jakefromstatecs »

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.

My main gripe with this article, is it mentions that their product was born as a result of a "painful expensive experience" of not creating a "Pricing Engine", but they don't at all elaborate on what that experience was.

I want to know what problems that they built this to solve specifically, so that I can foresee future problems that I may run into. But they don't elaborate at all, and instead just mention that their product solves those unmentioned problems.

Re: Billing Engines Don't Solve Pricing Problems

#32

Post by forty »

It's looks cool. As someone who have been maintaining (among other thing, we also have our actual product) a home made pricing engine, I appreciate the value of this kind of thing.

In our case, stripe support wouldn't be enough though (we also need playstore & apple IAP, PayPal, other CC billing engine), and the truth is even if support excited, migrating would probably so painful that it would probably not be worth it (even though I'd happily throw away all those lines of code)

Re: Billing Engines Don't Solve Pricing Problems

#33

Post by danenania »

jakefromstatecs wrote: post #31
danenania wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My main gripe with this article, is it mentions that their product was born as a result of a "painful expensive experience" of not creating a "Pricing Engine", but they don't at all elaborate on what that experience was. I want to know what problems that they built this to solve specifically, so that I can foresee future problems that I may run into. But they don't elaborate at all, and instead just mention that thei…

That’s fair. Having dealt with this myself, I’m very familiar with the pain involved, as I’d imagine most developers/entrepreneurs who have had to implement billing and then iterate on pricing are. It gets messy really fast.

Perhaps they’re more targeting people like me who have experienced this issue and don’t really need it explained, but I agree going into more detail on the specific challenges is probably a good idea to appeal to a wider audience.

Re: Billing Engines Don't Solve Pricing Problems

#35

Post by danenania »

callalex wrote: post #34

If pricing your product is so complicated that you need an entire separate product to manage it, you are probably indulging some MBAs in their own make-work projects too much. Non-transparent pricing is a huge red flag to potential customers.

The problem is not so much complicated pricing as grandfathering existing customers every time pricing changes (generally considered a best practice to avoid pissing off your customers). Then you end up with lots of gnarly conditional logic around anything that touches billing because you have to support a bunch of different pricing/billing versions, different upgrade/downgrade paths, etc. It gets even worse if your pricing model changes, like you go from tiers to per seat or usage-based.

You could just never change your pricing, but you’ll almost certainly be leaving significant money on the table as you’re highly unlikely to get it right on the first try. It could even kill your business, since the right product with the wrong pricing can be as much of a non-starter as the wrong product. Iterating on price can be as important as iterating on the product.

Re: Billing Engines Don't Solve Pricing Problems

#36

Post by haizhung »

callalex wrote: post #34

If pricing your product is so complicated that you need an entire separate product to manage it, you are probably indulging some MBAs in their own make-work projects too much. Non-transparent pricing is a huge red flag to potential customers.

Hmm, I don’t know, what about products that have very thin margins? I suppose you would like to mirror the market price of that product as closely as possible, and that seems like it’s better to automate it.

Re: Billing Engines Don't Solve Pricing Problems

#39

Post by jmacd »

haizhung wrote: post #36
callalex wrote: post #34

If pricing your product is so complicated that you need an entire separate product to manage it, you are probably indulging some MBAs in their own make-work projects too much. Non-transparent pricing is a huge red flag to potential customers.

Hmm, I don’t know, what about products that have very thin margins? I suppose you would like to mirror the market price of that product as closely as possible, and that seems like it’s better to automate it.

That definitely is top of mind for any startups heavly relying on OpenAI or other hosted LLMs.

Re: Billing Engines Don't Solve Pricing Problems

#40

Post by jmacd »

callalex wrote: post #34

If pricing your product is so complicated that you need an entire separate product to manage it, you are probably indulging some MBAs in their own make-work projects too much. Non-transparent pricing is a huge red flag to potential customers.

We don't advocate complex pricing models. KISS is often the best approach, although some complexity does have its place.

The real complexity comes from when you need to make changes to your pricing and have to manage grandparenting, upsells, etc.

Another vector of complexity comes from the need to make different pricing and packaging offers for different markets, geographies, etc.

You can have a very simple pricing model, but that doesn't mean that there isn't complexity that emerges pretty quickly.

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