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Canva Hikes Pices by 300pc as It Readies for IPO

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Re: Canva Hikes Pices by 300pc as It Readies for IPO

#71
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't noticed tech execs say that (the first bit). Is that an Elon Musk thing? (Genuine question)

Complaining that loose monetary policy is responsible for inflation is a pretty common theme from Musk/Trump fanboy type CEOs. They’re also starting to question universal suffrage in public now. Good times.

To quantify “loose monetary policy,” between 2021 and 2022 the US Fed increased the money supply by 4x. Put another way 80% of all US dollars that have ever existed were created between Jan 2021 and November 2022.[1]

Prior to this event, inflation was tame. After this event inflation exploded. Coincidence? I think not.

Notably, the government then blamed COVID, supply chain issues, and the Ukraine war as the reasons for inflation, but neglected to mention money printing.

[1] https://techstartups.com/2021/12/18/80-us-dollars-existence-...

Re: Canva Hikes Pices by 300pc as It Readies for IPO

#72
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A loose monetary policy does contribute to inflation. It's not the sole contributor, but when a lot of money is injected into the system, and the # of goods & services stay the same, inflation occurs. Increasing production takes time. There's not a magical machine that can double it's production overnight: New machines & factories & supply chains need to be built out, and those can take months at best.

Terms like loose are relative so it’s often associated with unhealthy extremes. But in a growing economy you need to increase the money supply to avoid long term deflation. Further, the economy naturally expands and contracts over time so timing things correctly and a loose money supply doesn’t necessarily mean short or long term inflation. Of course everyone is operating with in perfect information so it’s impossibl…

Per my sister comment, the Fed printed 80% of all the dollars that ever existed in 2021 and 2022. Did the economy expand 4x?

Re: Canva Hikes Pices by 300pc as It Readies for IPO

#73

Pet peeve of mine, but Canva doesn't hike its prices by 300%; it hikes them by 200%. I'm not a native English speaker, but I assume "to hike prices by x" means the new price = the old price + x, right? If not, ignore my comment. In the example used in the article (team of 3 users), the old price = 12 * $39.99 = $479.88, and the new price is $1458. Let's see what a price hike of 300% looks like: 300% of the old price…

Haha I’ve had this argument with friends, you have to start them out with 2x is “100% more” the way percentages are used far and wide, and then they get it.

Re: Canva Hikes Pices by 300pc as It Readies for IPO

#74
post #58
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inflation is when prices go up. CEOs (loosely speaking) set prices.

So why didnt price go up prior to covid, if the CEO can manage to set prices? Or is it that they have always set their price to the maximum that their customers will bear, and it's just that now, their customers were willing to bear a bit higher (due to some external cause)?

CEOs didn't realize they could set prices that high and still keep their customers.

Re: Canva Hikes Pices by 300pc as It Readies for IPO

#75
post #72
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Terms like loose are relative so it’s often associated with unhealthy extremes. But in a growing economy you need to increase the money supply to avoid long term deflation. Further, the economy naturally expands and contracts over time so timing things correctly and a loose money supply doesn’t necessarily mean short or long term inflation. Of course everyone is operating with in perfect information so it’s impossibl…

Per my sister comment, the Fed printed 80% of all the dollars that ever existed in 2021 and 2022. Did the economy expand 4x?

Think through your argument.

We didn’t get 300% inflation. So clearly the value of all dollars isn’t simply a direct percentage of the size of the US economy or all wealth in the US etc.

Re: Canva Hikes Pices by 300pc as It Readies for IPO

#76
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think the point of this price hike is to profit off of non-rational customers. I think it’s likelier that they expect and maybe even hope that they’ll lose customers. Let’s say a full 50% of Canva’s customers eventually churn because of this. They’re raising prices 3x, so they’d still make 1.5x their previous revenue. And they’d make even more profit, because their customer support costs have been cut roughly…

How much are you lowering the satisfaction of those users though? Sure you may end up with more cashflow, but a much smaller, less eager group of users to be promoters. The point of this is imho likely to boost the numbers as much as possible prior to IPO at the expense of the UX, brand, and by extension product

Sure, that’s part of the gamble. But for what it’s worth, I‘m pretty skeptical that raising the price like this will lower the satisfaction of existing users, especially if the remaining ones are mostly businesses.

Re: Canva Hikes Pices by 300pc as It Readies for IPO

#77
post #51
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt they're going to work on the Affinity suite much more, it was probably more of an acquihire, where they'll get the engineers to work on the main Canva product.

What makes you say that? Canva already stated Affinity won’t be going anywhere. https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/affinity-canva-pledge/

I interpret any statement by a company to be true only in the quartile that the statement is published.

Re: Canva Hikes Pices by 300pc as It Readies for IPO

#79
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What should they choose? Today's more user friendly products are just tomorrow's unreasonable price-hikers that haven't captured enough customers to start enshittifying yet. Meanwhile, even without network effects, migrating to a new product is usually a hassle; the frog has to be quite thoroughly boiled before it's worth it.

> What should they choose? Products which aren’t subscriptions to begin with, so the company can’t hike the price from under them with little notice and leave them in a position where they’re forced to pay and bleed money every day they fail to find an alternative.

I did that with Affinity software which was purchased by Canva. Currently they don't have a subscription but I give it a year or two and they'll either have subscriptions or it gets folded into the Canva subscription.

Re: Canva Hikes Pices by 300pc as It Readies for IPO

#80
post #2

Finally, a company that adds AI to their product and then IPOs - I can't wait to see what groundbreaking stickers the AI will come up with, so I can really level up my birthday cards.

To be fair, Canva's product is uniquely a good fit for Gen AI. Casuals who just want the end result without trying to learn all the complicated photo/video editing techniques.

The Gen AI company they just acquired seems to be making their own model that, amongst other things, can generate coherent and heavily stylized text. For a platform that makes logos, branding, marketing material etc that seems like a natural fit.

Creating elements like that even with Canva's existing tools would generally require a graphic designer or someone with that skillset, or even worse - an agency. All of those options can be prohibitively expensive relative to the benefit they provide.

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