this is cool but .. is it really worth a big announcement? who is paying for kagi and not using it for an entire month?
Fair Pricing
391–400 of 512 posts
Re: Fair Pricing
#392I 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…
As someone who often doesn't subscribe because I don't want to get NYTed into having to pick up the phone to cancel, no this approach to pricing wouldn't change things for me.
What does work for me is when the service's docs have a very clear page on how to cancel the service without having to talk to someone.
Re: Fair Pricing
#393It’s great to see more companies adopting fair pricing models.
The first time I encountered this was with Slack—they only charge for active users.
We follow a similar approach with our products : 1) PodcastAPI.com - If no API requests are made within a month, the user pays $0. 2) website Premium Membership- rather than forcing users to pay a monthly fee, we allow them to buy a 2-day pass with one time payment (default option) - listennotes.com/premium
Caveat: customers will demand more. soon, they’ll request for hourly fair pricing - don’t charge me for those hours that i don’t use your service!
Re: Fair Pricing
#394Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I am not sure what to think about this topic in a whole, but that argument isn’t much different than why we teach responsibility for kids. There might be some truth in it. Teaching as a whole actions (or inaction) has consequences, is different from trying to interact fairly with the world. In the above case, the punishment is so far divorced from the mistake (forgetting to cancel a subscription), that cost has nea…
> But, even if you think that anxiety and paranoia is a healthy way to go about things... This still wouldn't teach the correct behavior. Punishing people for mistakes does not teach them how to manage finances correctly, it teaches them fear about recurring subscriptions. Unfortunately, consequences often are the only guiding factor. I am assuming that we are talking about normal system here where the user has full…
> Russia will do [bad thing], unless they're stopped
> Companies will do [bad thing], unless they're stopped
> People at the park will do [bad thing], unless they're stopped
> People in cars will do [bad thing], unless they're stopped
I don't disagree with any of these. We as a society, should punish bad behavior! (Note that the as a society is a critical component of my agreement here)
Is forgetting to cancel a recurring subscription a bad thing, that should be punished? Does it hurt society, or exclusively that individual?
If not, why make this argument?
Re: Fair Pricing
#395Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've had places offer to just not bill for a few months while still allowing full access or offer some steep discounts in the workflow for cancelling in attempt to reduce churn.
If you ever dealt with the business side of SaaS you know how important churn is. Growth = New Customers Acquisition - Churn. New customers are expensive for many businesses to get, they have marketing, sales, and promotion related expenses. It makes sense to spend money to reduce churn too, because it’s a cheaper way to boost your growth rate. If you offer deals to reduce churn, you need to focus on if those deals a…
Yes but it’s also a chance to convince the customer that you’re worth keeping around. Depending on your product, you might also have customers that dip in and out. Keeping them from churning, while sacrificing a little cash today, helps keep that customer from shopping around for alternatives, too.
Re: Fair Pricing
#396Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the streaming services did this, I would probably have a lot more of them.
I make the streaming services work like this already. I have neither the time nor the interest in watching anything on streaming most months. I have all my subscriptions cancelled all the time. When I want to watch something badly enough on service x, I sign in, re-activate, get charged for one month, then immediately cancel the subscription. Then watch the thing. Then not get charged again until I want to watch some…
I do this when we have visiting relatives who would spend all day watching a particular cable news channel that gets them all riled up. Before they arrive, I subscribe to a different streaming service with a package that doesn’t include that channel and put its icon front and center on our TV. I then immediately cancel it so it doesn’t renew.
Totally worth the $20 or whatever.
Re: Fair Pricing
#397Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Hopes that netflix or any other provider will implement this are small though. Because it's free money when someone pays for service and does not use it. Right. This is the sort of pro-consumer practice that is obviously morally right, but will not be widely adopted without consumer protection laws. Outside of small, niche businesses like Kagi, there is no pressure to treat customers with respect.
See the sibling comment which states Netflix does do this, and without consumer protection laws.
Netflix cancels after billing you for two years. Kagi doesn’t bill you if you don’t use the product that month. Do you understand those are not the same?
Re: Fair Pricing
#398Earlier quoted context omitted.
My experience is completely different - I get much better results from Kagi. And one of the things I really like is the ability to entirely block domains, so for example I never get any Pinterest links cluttering up the results the now. I also love the fact that you can enter a ? at the end of a query and it'll give you an AI-generated summary at the top of the results. That's a great shortcut.
> And one of the things I really like is the ability to entirely block domains, so for example I never get any Pinterest links cluttering up the results the now Note you can do this on Google using the uBlacklist extension [1]. You can select domains but also use patterns to match specific URLs, like `somedomain.com/someprefix/*`. [1]: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmia...
I prefer configuring that in the service itself so that it works the same on every device where I use it.
Re: Fair Pricing
#399Kagi is awesome, but the thought of having a limit led me to use it less and less and I eventually unsubscribed.
I noticed if I need something hard to find I have to do a dozen+ different queries (and sometimes not find anything because it doesn't exist). Both with Kagi and Google the result is the same but with Kagi I also rack up a bunch per one attempt to find something. And if I need something easy to find but lazy both Google and Kagi reliably show the first correct result. So it's either unlimited or nothing. But since I…
> Plus, you're anonymous with Google but you're not anonymous with Kagi since you pay them.
The idea that you're anonymous with Google is laughable. The amount of data they aggregate is well known. Their entire business model is to know who you are.
Re: Fair Pricing
#400Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you ever dealt with the business side of SaaS you know how important churn is. Growth = New Customers Acquisition - Churn. New customers are expensive for many businesses to get, they have marketing, sales, and promotion related expenses. It makes sense to spend money to reduce churn too, because it’s a cheaper way to boost your growth rate. If you offer deals to reduce churn, you need to focus on if those deals a…
Yes but it’s also a chance to convince the customer that you’re worth keeping around. Depending on your product, you might also have customers that dip in and out. Keeping them from churning, while sacrificing a little cash today, helps keep that customer from shopping around for alternatives, too.
Also, in my experiences most of those services which offered free time or heavily discounted alternatives to cancelling tend to be things which have a pretty low cost per subscriber (e.g., news sites, simple applications, not much per-user storage).