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

The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 317 posts

Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret

#291

Post by mikekchar »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #285
mikekchar wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Fair 'nuff, but I'm not in this for the money. 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/chri…

Thank you. I do like to write. I'm also really happy when people read what I write. It looks like we have a lot in common based on what you've written there. If you'd ever feel like trying out pair programming (remotely), give me a shout!

Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret

#292

Post by user5994461 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #247
ja27 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We went through this. When 2008 hit the company stopped providing free sodas and bottled water for our office of only about 30 people. I was damn close to just buying them myself but it was crazy how upset a few people making moderately insane amounts of money would get over not getting a $1/day benefit.

I completely relate to both of these. My experience is that you get a mix of people saying "just give me the money, I'll decide if I want to spend it on snacks" and people who say "I really like that snacks are available, please keep them." From a financial perspective its pretty hard "move the needle" on an engineers salary with free snacks and drinks. Median engineering salary in the Bay Area is more than $100K. So…

>>> $20 of snacks per day

It's more than 50 cans of soda a day. Thank god they were taken away before the poor engineer would drink them all and liquefy.

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Coca-Cola-Soda-12-Fl-Oz-24-Count/...

Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret

#293

Post by ezoe »

WalterBright wrote: post #275
ezoe wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's hilarious. I wonder D's adoption and share was changed now if it was free back then. It might be used instead of Go or Rust today.

I do wish I'd come up with D in the 1980's.

Do you think you could implement the D compiler in 1980s computer?

Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret

#294

Post by cshenoy »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #49
dperfect wrote: post #26

It's true - charging for something that was once free can be risky, but it isn't always bad as some might believe. I have great respect for businesses that charge for a service that provides real value - even if it was once free. Often times (especially in the startup world), companies start out offering a free product (operating at a loss) to gain market share. It's not often the best strategy, but in some markets i…

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.

I'm pretty sure this is what Blendle[0] is doing - pay per article. I've been using it for a year and ended up subscribing to a few of the publications.

0. https://blendle.com

Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret

#295

Post by apatters »

user5994461 wrote: post #282
apatters wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Support costs has no relation to number of users. It's constant time O(10) in engineering speech. 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.

I'm not convinced. Even if only one person at the company has access to support, he's going to have more people asking him to submit tickets about their problems when there are 2,000 users vs 100.

Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret

#296

Post by nl »

user5994461 wrote: post #284
nl wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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's only for products addressed to traders, a very limited audience. For example the bloomberg terminal that sits on their desk. 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).

> That's only for products addressed to traders, a very limited audience. For example the bloomberg terminal that sits on their desk.

It's not, actually. There's a bunch of financial information products that aren't aimed at traders that are around this price point.

Pitchbook is a good example. $30k/year.

And the whole point is that it's a limited number of people. The price has to be high to make it worthwhile.

There's a bunch of markets like this where your pricing advice isn't correct and that needs to be noted.

Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret

#297

Post by oaw-bct-ar-bamf »

danielrhodes wrote: post #98
013a wrote: post #57

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…

This is an important point. A lot of companies do great revenue by selling seats, but that model is obviously not always applicable. In this case, you're pointing out that the marginal utility of a product like Apollo Engine is not driven by the number of users, but by the usage. In other products, say Box or Dropbox, the marginal utility is in how many people in an org you can get using the product, not in how much…

Different product at my dayjob came to mind.

The license costs ~18.000€ per year. Luckily it‘s a free floating license that can be reserved by the user. So it can be fully utilised and a wider pool of users sees the benefit and the great value add of the product.

Per user licensing with that pricetag would not have gotten managerial consent

Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret

#299

Post by klmadfejno »

RandallBrown wrote: post #105
klmadfejno wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By what metric was it a success? Drinks, even non alcoholic ones, have phenomenal margins, and if you're stuck in a theme park or sports stadium, for hours, you basically have to purchase one. I'm a bit surprised this makes financial sense unless they really went for it. For similar reasons, restaurants are hurting extra hard right now because people don't order drinks as often with delivery or takeout.

It greatly increased guest satisfaction and I would bet it helped their bottom line a little too. There will always be people that stick to free water or don't drink anything. By building the drink price into the ticket price, you're essentially getting everyone to pay for a drink.

> free water

This is often not a thing in closed environments like theme parks

Re: The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret

#300

Post by anthonypasq »

adrianmonk wrote: post #204
socketnaut wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because most people search fares online and book the cheapest ticket.

Do they? I certainly don't behave that way. Fares are definitely something I factor in heavily, but a $10 difference isn't something I consider significant. Long before that point, I start looking at other factors like departure and arrival times and whether I like the airline. For example, I just did a quick search, and for $25 more total round trip, I can get nonstop flights both ways. I didn't specify nonstop as a…

Most people dont fly often enough to have brand preferences about airlines.
Post reply on HN