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Show HN: Stop asking your clients "What browser are you on?"

browser-details.com

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Re: Show HN: Stop asking your clients "What browser are you on?"

#62
post #24
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how do you handle SSL with CNAMEs? I'd like to offer CNAMEs for my customers as well, but the lack of SSL support means I don't for security. Suggestions?

Tricky one. I don't think there's any way to solve that, other than creating certificates for every CNAME - which is too expensive and complicated for your clients. I've run into this with Campaign Monitor and they simply don't do SSL for CNAMEs. Since they do everything else perfectly, I'm assuming there's no way to solve this problem.

Correct, it's really not a solvable problem. It boils down to two problems: 1) SSL hostname has to match the hostname on the cert and 2) you can (realistically) only have one cert per IP address.

For 1), you would have to upload the ssl cert and key into the third party's service. They would then have to configure their web server to use the correct ssl cert for your CNAME. On top of that they would need to add support for whatever intermediate and CA certs that have to be included. Some CAs require multiple intermediate certs. If you simply upload the main cert and key then older browsers, android, and IE will all freak out. I have missed an intermediate cert before and it's not fun to track down the root cause. There are no errors in apache; you just get reports of your site being compromised or the cert expired.

Not to mention the problem of SSL accelerators/load balances and costs associated with adding new SSL certs and keys to them.

Even if they figured out a way to automate the cert/key/PEM/intermediate upload and server config steps then the one IP per ssl cert problem kicks in. Basically, the SSL handshake goes something like this: 1) browser looks up IP address for host. 2) browser connects to IP and establishes a ssl connection. 3) server reads the request and serves up content based on hostname. The problem is that the server does not get the hostname during step 2 so it can only serve up one cert for the IP.

Now, there is a process called SNI that attempts to solve it. Unfortunately it's not well supported enough to use. Mostly because it does not work on IE on XP at all (regardless of version).

And that's why third parties generally don't offer SSL CNAMEs.

Re: Show HN: Stop asking your clients "What browser are you on?"

#63
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've got to be kidding me. $10 a year may as well be nothing. I wouldn't do anything for anybody for $10/year. I probably couldn't even be bothered invoicing you. You're right that it's a very simple product, though. $5 a month with a 20% discount for $50/yr sounds fair to me. I like it though. Your textbook well executed MVP. The price might need some tweaks but hey, it's a product. Well done Jonas.

"You've got to be kidding me. $10 a year may as well be nothing. I wouldn't do anything for anybody for $10/year." That makes no sense in the context of selling 0's and 1's where the marginal cost is close to zero. What you should ask yourself is this: would you rather sell one hundred subscription at $120 per year or ten thousands subscription at $10 per year? I'm not saying these are the numbers that GP would have…

You seem to have missed the fact that this is a service. It's a SAAS targeted at businesses. The economics have little to do with iphone apps and desktop software. And complexity of software has no relation whatsoever to its utility.

Running a service is expensive. First you have customer acquisition, which is not magical and free as you seem to believe, then you have servers to run, email services to pay, security updates, new features, server admin, customer support .. unless you are running at an amazing scale you just cannot do that for $10/year.

> would you rather sell one hundred subscription at $120 per year or ten thousands subscription at $10 per year

Where on earth are you getting these numbers from? You don't automatically get 100x the sales if you drop the price. This is just pure fantasy IMO. More likely he is going to get 100 sales either way, because he might manage to get his product in front of 100 people for whom the problem solving value exceeds the cost, and who has a $10/yr problem?

Fact is this a product targeted at businesses. The type of people who are actually interested in paying money for someone to solve their problem do not care about the difference between $10 and $100. Do you save them $101 worth of time? Then sold! If anything I would be suspicious of a low price like $10/yr because I know it's not viable.

Re: Show HN: Stop asking your clients "What browser are you on?"

#64
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Build, deploy, host and maintain for an hour per year? I think that might be a bit optimistic. Certainly for an agency to do this will cost them more than an hour of developer time. $120 per year is a steal, OP should add different pricing brackets to capture more value from bigger agencies.

what sort of "agency" are you talking about? a web development agency? I 100% agree this would take more than an hour to develop with a nice UI, and there's some ongoing maintenance, but it's still pretty low numbers. And there's still arguments for a DIY approach - for instance, Aa DIY approach means you can improve/iterate/integrate at your own pace.

Yes, a web development agency, though really any profitable business that could use this.

Each hour you spend improving/interating/integrating your DIY app is an hour of developer time that you can't bill for.

You'd easily spend over an hour per year on a DIY app. Agencies charge at least $120 per hour so the choice between building yourself or paying someone else to do it is a no-brainer.

At the enterprise level $500 is the amount employees can generally spend themselves without getting approval, so there should really be a plan at that level of pricing too.

Re: Show HN: Stop asking your clients "What browser are you on?"

#65
post #62
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tricky one. I don't think there's any way to solve that, other than creating certificates for every CNAME - which is too expensive and complicated for your clients. I've run into this with Campaign Monitor and they simply don't do SSL for CNAMEs. Since they do everything else perfectly, I'm assuming there's no way to solve this problem.

Correct, it's really not a solvable problem. It boils down to two problems: 1) SSL hostname has to match the hostname on the cert and 2) you can (realistically) only have one cert per IP address. For 1), you would have to upload the ssl cert and key into the third party's service. They would then have to configure their web server to use the correct ssl cert for your CNAME. On top of that they would need to add suppo…

The one-ip to one-ssl-host thing was solved quite some time ago with Server Name Indication[1].

You still need one cert per host, but that is a cost that could be transferred to the customer (not the user getting logged but the one wanting the log :). You can get incredibly cheap certs that would probably be appropriate for this case.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication

Re: Show HN: Stop asking your clients "What browser are you on?"

#66

One of these gets posted on HN every month. I'm sorry, but I don't get the big deal. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4499435 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3526446 and more.

And this product was already posted in one of those threads:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4499937

Re: Show HN: Stop asking your clients "What browser are you on?"

#67
post #4

I think it's a GREAT idea. Now, this might just be me, and I don't want to sound negative, or take anything away from the effort you've obviously put into making this really good, but ... For $120 / year I think, hmm I could probably build something that does this (just for me) in an hour, and it'd be fun! However at $10 per YEAR, I would think it's a steal and jump at it. Not suggesting you should drop your pants on…

Selling it for $10 a year would be the same as saying, "This is a worthless toy. It isn't really worth your time to look at, much less to think about integrating."

My advice for would-be owners, never price your item based on how quickly a developer could build it. Price it based on how much pain you can solve your customer.

In this case, I would push the "so easy to integrate before you need to spend five times the cost on the first problem and still have to build or integrate it". Of course, I wouldn't make it sound that awkward. ;)

Re: Show HN: Stop asking your clients "What browser are you on?"

#68

Google Chrome on a Mac reports the following... PDF: No - wrong Chrome has a built in PDF reader JAVA: No - wrong I do have java OGG-VIDEO: Probably supported - lol? probably H.264-VIDEO: Probably supported - ^ WEBM-VIDEO: Probably supported - ^ And not to be a party pooper but why do I need to signup? Why can't I just click "Get Browser Details" get a unique hyperlink that I could then send to someone. What if I hav…

Actually Java is right. You can no longer run Java applets in Chrome on Mac as Java 7 isn't compatible with it. http://support.google.com/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ans...

Hrm java applets load for me... Maybe I need to investigate more lol.

Re: Show HN: Stop asking your clients "What browser are you on?"

#69
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's assuming it's a single client on the phone at a single time. Which is wrong. There could be multiple clients on the phone or multiple phone calls with multiple clients.

Right, that's when the "multiple recipients" come into play. You alone probably won't be on the phone with multiple clients.

That's confusing? Okay billy you send your results to cindy and bob sends his to chad and ashley sends hers to alex and anyone else send theirs to the next person on the list?

lol?

What's wrong with

domain.browserdetails.com/somerandomidhere

It allows you to reference it without going into an email. Allows anyone to view it (rather then forwarding the email to 15 different people) and makes it easy to transfer.

I fail to see the reason why email would be better in any sense. It doesn't allow for the same control as one would require for such a service. You also can't organize it as it doesn't come from "client" so if you are looking for it down the road you generally search "Client Name" and it would never turn on.

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