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Fair Pricing

kagi.com

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Re: Fair Pricing

#211

Post by jorams »

gaazoh wrote: post #127

Kagi has popped up a couple of times here recently and looks interesting, but there are a few things keeping me from actually trying it out * I don't trust the product's claims. Sure, privacy and user-centered results sound cool, but literally every company on the internet claims to cater to the user and value their privacy. Kagi can apparently afford to be more specific than usual, but how binding is that? I don't k…

> I'm not going to figure out the US tax system just to know how much I actually to shell out

You pay the amount of VAT based on where you live. I agree it would be better to display that on the pricing page though.

As for the privacy claims they have a fairly easy to read privacy policy that goes into details about what they do and particularly don't do with your data. There is no vague wording to hide behind.

Re: Fair Pricing

#212

Post by jaza »

stavros wrote: post #186
hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The immediate second order effect of such a law would be to raise subscription prices on everyone to account for this automatic churn. I would wager that most people who aren't watching their bills closely enough to notice they haven't actually used their Netflix account in a year aren't very price sensitive. They have money they are, by revealed preferences, willing to throw into the pot, which lowers the service co…

I'm not sure "it's fine to rip off people if they're rich" is a convincing argument.

Robin Hood and his Merry Men would beg to differ.

Re: Fair Pricing

#213

Post by mihaaly »

vincnetas wrote: post #25

Just recently i was actually thinking about this pricing approach for netflix, apple arcade or whatever else. Basically i use it so rarely that i could just subscribe when i want to watch anything, and unsubscribe immediately. This will enable subscription till end of billing period (one month). Then when i want o watch anything again then i will repeat again. And now kagi has implemented exactly this but automated f…

We canceled Netflix some time ago. Being too busy, spending our precious free time on something better than browsing through the not that brilliant quality collection, trying to find something we would not regret wasting time on. Probably 5% or less is for us in there? For the 'staring out of our head being exchausted for any meaningful thing including sleeping' times there is Amazon Prime, which we have for deliveries anyway. Once in every 2 months or so? (our pure TV is neglected, being a black rectange decoration mostly)

Kagi in the other hand is useful.

Probably that's why Netflix has to play hardball with their customers, chasing their money hard and strong, pushing them around, not Kagi? : )

Re: Fair Pricing

#214

Post by jaza »

aimazon wrote: post #68
beAbU wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just free money. I'm pretty sure the lions' share of any streaming service's income is from users that are subscribed but don't consume everything for that month. Their business model relies on this.

I think this is a vast overestimation. The majority of people notice every payment they make every month, a Netflix subscription is a choice that they would not continue to make if they were not using Netflix. Those of us who can afford to pay Netflix whether we watch it or not are the minority of wealthy people. I think you would be surprised to learn how many normal people juggle different subscriptions by cancelli…

I have personally met people who, like me, really don't have cash to splash; but who, unlike me, and to my surprise, have literally told me "I pay for all the streaming services every month, whether I use them or not, there's no way I could be bothered to cancel/re-subscribe". So, from my limited anecdotal experience at least, no, it's not a vast overestimation, and in fact it's probably often not about how wealthy people are either - it's about how many people out there are willing to pay for the privilege of set and forget, rather than having to think about one more thing on a regular basis.

Re: Fair Pricing

#215

Post by bearjaws »

vincnetas wrote: post #36
denkmoon wrote: post #7

That's great, but I can't even imagine "forgetting" to use Kagi. Completely indispensable.

Could you share what you find in kagi indispensable? Just subscribed, and looking around.

Remember how 10 years ago you would Google something and it would just give you the result you needed in the first 3 results? Yeah, kagi does that.

Re: Fair Pricing

#216

Post by layer8 »

BossingAround wrote: post #119
tedsanders wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5 years ago, Netflix started proactively cancelling inactive accounts. They lose ~$10M/yr from this, but it's the ethical thing to do. (That said, I'd like them to use an even shorter window than 1 year of no activity.) https://entertainment.ie/on-demand/on-demand-news/netflix-ac...

To be honest, it's insane to me that there's no law about this. If you're a subscription business and you see 0 activity on a paying customer for 60 days, you should be required to ask them whether they want to continue using your service (and no answer should result in service cancellation).

I disagree, because this would force all services to store the time of your last activity, even if they don’t want to track any such data for privacy protection. In addition, it would be prone to accidental cancellations losing you an important account, or the service could just claim you didn’t click the renewal button if for example they want to get rid of unprofitable customers (if you don’t use a service you also don’t generate ad impressions, or similar), which is difficult to disprove after the fact.

How hard is it to check your monthly bank statement and see if there’s anything unexpected? One normally should do that anyway.

Re: Fair Pricing

#217

Post by percevalve »

I haven’t seen this mentioned in the conversation yet, so I’ll bring it up here.

A research paper from a few years ago introduced the concept of “customer inertia.” It found that users tend to overestimate their difficulty in unsubscribing from a service. In other words, when a subscription includes auto-renewal (or a similar feature), a significant portion of potential users will choose not to subscribe because they fear they won’t be able to cancel if they stop using the service.

According to the study, this affected about 30% of users. So, could offering something like fair pricing reduce this barrier and increase new subscriptions by 30%? https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/finding/sophisticated-consu...

Re: Fair Pricing

#218

Post by Lutger »

dirkc wrote: post #75

This makes sense, if someone isn't using your service for a month, chances are good that they are going to cancel soon. Maybe they'll keep on paying for another few months, but if they're not using it, they're not getting any value from it. So rather than getting them to cancel, pause their subscription. You don't have to deal with cancellations, and if/when the user does return, you are one step further than you wou…

There are lots of benefits for sure, but you have to weigh them against the users who can't be arsed to cancel their subscription and keep on paying. You'll miss out on those.

Re: Fair Pricing

#219

Post by OskarS »

fnord123 wrote: post #82
dirkc wrote: post #75

This makes sense, if someone isn't using your service for a month, chances are good that they are going to cancel soon. Maybe they'll keep on paying for another few months, but if they're not using it, they're not getting any value from it. So rather than getting them to cancel, pause their subscription. You don't have to deal with cancellations, and if/when the user does return, you are one step further than you wou…

More importantly you can tell investors you have even more accounts than you do and your churn rate is very low.

A huge benefit to companies with subscription services is that people forget they have them and keep paying for Ancestry.com or whatever for months (what? no, of course that never happened to me...) after they've stopped using it. Kagi is voluntarily giving up that benefit. This just seems like a consumer-friendly move to me, not sinister at all.

Re: Fair Pricing

#220

Post by comprev »

eviks wrote: post #97
fnord123 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More importantly you can tell investors you have even more accounts than you do and your churn rate is very low.

not unless said investors demand better metrics like active user count...

I've seen the opposite of this at a startup once in the streaming music industry. We _knew_ our "free trial for a month" was being abused by 500k+ users because the sign-up flow neither required a valid payment on file or email validation. In fact there was an entire industry built around generating false throw-away accounts.

The company used stats including non-paying users to demonstrate demand for our service was high, even though we knew they would highly likely never spend a cent with us.

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