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Is this mattermost's hosted offering ? https://about.mattermost.com/pricing/ https://about.mattermost.com/pricing/ they need to fix their feature set for prici

Is this mattermost's hosted offering ? https://about.mattermost.com/pricing/ https://about.mattermost.com/pricing/ they need to fix their feature set for pricing. For example, Google Apps Signon is pretty basic - but it is only available at the "Enterprise E20" level... where you have to actually call for pricing.

gizmo 10y ago
It's really arrogant to claim that a pricing model must be broken just because you don't approve of the way the features are segmented.
- mac01021 10y ago
  I'm not going to claim that it's broken, but it does seem a little odd in that the cost to customers is not aligned with cost to the hosting provider. Slack's free tier only allows you to keep a history of something like 500 messages, which makes sense because storage and indexing of the message history are what cost money for the provider. This product let's you store all you want for free (seems like a bad idea to me), while things with essentially no cost per user once they have been developed (like google auth) are the things they make you pay for.
  - FooBarWidget 10y ago
    You are on Hacker News, yet you think that that's odd? It's a common wisdom among entrepreneurs that you price your product according to what people find valuable, not according to what it costs you. For example https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/09/youre-pricing-it-wrong-software-pricing-demystified/ https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/09/youre-pricing-it-wr...
  - troydavis 10y ago
    Summary: for many services, the things that seem like they're expensive ("storage and indexing") don't cost much. The things that seem like they should be free (features) are expensive, even if there's no variable cost. Details: Regarding "storage and indexing of the message history are what cost money for the provider," this is often not the case. Although at extreme scale (like any AWS product), it's absolutely true, for a typical Web app, the difference between, say, 5 and 50 MB of chat history is not what costs money. 2 things do: 1. Paying developers (that is, adding features). As you note, they have no cost per user, but they have a huge onetime upfront cost. Just because a feature doesn't have a variable cost doesn't mean that the cost isn't real and isn't distributed among n users[1]. Ideally, that cost should be covered by those receiving value from it. 2. Support and operations. Depending on scale, quality, and so forth, assume 10-30% of your payments go towards answering emails and keeping the service operating. Offering a feature like Google Auth does have a variable cost when, say, 30% of those who use it are going to ask a question, and answering that question well is going to cost $25 in time. Sure, a service could say "We don't offer support for free plans," but some services rightly don't want anyone to get stuck, even if they aren't paying. It's also harder to do thoughtfully than it might seem, since many customers who will eventually pay ask questions before they're receiving enough value to upgrade. [1]: Again, a few services operate at such large volume that the implementation and support cost is a minuscule percentage of revenue. That's relatively few Internet services, though, mostly very high volume hosting. For other products, even all but the largest PaaS/IaaS offerings, the items above are substantial costs. Some services which would otherwise be lower-volume use this as a differentiator ("Everyone gets all features"), and that's great, but there's no reason to expect it universally.
  - eropple 10y ago
    Slack lets you keep a history of 10,000 messages, and they're retained even if you're on the free tier. You just can't see them. S3 is a cent a gigabyte at scale, three cents when you're starting. sc1 drives on EBS are two and a half cents. Storage is a cheap, solved problem. You make people pay for what's important to them.
    - jjeaff 10y ago
      Same reason a 32GB iphone costs hundreds more for the next level of storage. And why 64gb is pretty much the largest offering. 64gb isn't enough? Pay for more icloud storage. Yet you can buy a 128gb sd card for $30.
- sandGorgon 10y ago
  I didn't say it was broken. But if we are addressing the startup set on HN.. Then I'm in the market to buy their service. I'm not a competitor, nor do I have a vested interest. I get Hipchat for free because I'm a bitbucket customer ($1per month) and I get Google Auth as built in. Most startups are using Google Apps.. But very few would use LDAP (which is indeed available in the 20$ tier) So yes - I believe for the demographic I represent, their pricing needs to be fixed.
  - gizmo 10y ago
    So their pricing isn't broken yet you repeat your claim that it "needs to be fixed"? How is this not pedantry? Look, I understand your desire to pay less for a service, but insisting that pricing needs to be fixed simply so that you pay less is still absurd.
  - enraged_camel 10y ago
    >>I didn't say it was broken. You said "they need to fix their feature set for pricing." Not "improve." "Fix." That's the word you used. And it directly implies that the subject it is referring to (the pricing) is broken.
    - sandGorgon 10y ago
      feature set - not pricing. Am I making a mistake with my english ? I'm willing to pay their 20$ thing - but the features they include in that price is weird for the segment on HN. And for the features people like me would really pay for... there is no pricing (so I dont know whether its broken or not). I dont want them to lower the pricing - I want them to rearrange it... or atleast talk about it. I dont know how much to pay to get the Google Apps feature.
      - gizmo 10y ago
        You want to pay the 20$ thing but you want additional features from the more expensive call-us tier. That is fundamentally a complaint about their pricing. The raison d'etre of pricing tiers is to charge a different price to different customers. Having to pay extra to get extra features is the point, not a bug that needs fixing.
it33 10y ago
Hi @sandGorgon, hi @gizmo Mattermost team here. Thanks for your feedback, While pricing is set that way for a purpose, we are always looking for ways to improve and we're keenly interested in what everyone has to say. Our focus for Enterprise has been large organizations with sophisticated needs and it's important for us to have conversations and demonstrations with the people doing the evaluation so they fully understand what we're offering. That said, there are people who use our free Team Edition or have read through our docs that just want a "buy" button for E20. I'll bring this up and see what we can do. PS: Regarding the word "fix", my personal view is that it's okay for a commercial product, because people are buying it as a customer. Enterprise Edition is a commercial product. That said, many open source communities are adopting a principle of "kindness" and having feedback phrased positively where possible. People work hard to make open source software and give it away, and if conversations started on a positive note... well, why not?
- WhitneyLand 10y ago
  Which communities don't approve of the word "fix" in describing suggestions? I'm all for criticism being constructive and polite, but in my experience fix is a neutral and common word in design and development discussions.
  - moron4hire 10y ago
    Yeah, that comment about "fix" being negative was really rather passive aggressive.
- sandGorgon 10y ago
  hi, thanks for replying. So at no point am I implying that you should release it for free. But I do believe there are some features that should ideally be in the 20$ tier rather than the "call-us" tier. Now this may completely be how your demographic falls, but generally speaking a small company buying 2-10 licenses would usually not have LDAP... but most likely will have Google Apps. And that's pretty much the gist of my comment. I'm not very sure why people have caught on to the word "fix" - but IMHO i used it in the way that most people talk on these forums ("your website font needs to be fixed", "the copy needs to be fixed"). So I'm not sure if the word was offensive, but it was not intended to be. Also wanted to mention that I was looking at your offering as a customer with a genuine interest to buy. We use Hipchat and their mobile app needs to be "fixed".. so I was in the market for alternatives. P.S. also didnt realize you were YC. That usually doesnt happen.

gizmo 10y ago

It's really arrogant to claim that a pricing model must be broken just because you don't approve of the way the features are segmented.

mac01021 10y ago
I'm not going to claim that it's broken, but it does seem a little odd in that the cost to customers is not aligned with cost to the hosting provider. Slack's free tier only allows you to keep a history of something like 500 messages, which makes sense because storage and indexing of the message history are what cost money for the provider. This product let's you store all you want for free (seems like a bad idea to me), while things with essentially no cost per user once they have been developed (like google auth) are the things they make you pay for.
- FooBarWidget 10y ago
  You are on Hacker News, yet you think that that's odd? It's a common wisdom among entrepreneurs that you price your product according to what people find valuable, not according to what it costs you. For example https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/09/youre-pricing-it-wrong-software-pricing-demystified/ https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/09/youre-pricing-it-wr...
- troydavis 10y ago
  Summary: for many services, the things that seem like they're expensive ("storage and indexing") don't cost much. The things that seem like they should be free (features) are expensive, even if there's no variable cost. Details: Regarding "storage and indexing of the message history are what cost money for the provider," this is often not the case. Although at extreme scale (like any AWS product), it's absolutely true, for a typical Web app, the difference between, say, 5 and 50 MB of chat history is not what costs money. 2 things do: 1. Paying developers (that is, adding features). As you note, they have no cost per user, but they have a huge onetime upfront cost. Just because a feature doesn't have a variable cost doesn't mean that the cost isn't real and isn't distributed among n users[1]. Ideally, that cost should be covered by those receiving value from it. 2. Support and operations. Depending on scale, quality, and so forth, assume 10-30% of your payments go towards answering emails and keeping the service operating. Offering a feature like Google Auth does have a variable cost when, say, 30% of those who use it are going to ask a question, and answering that question well is going to cost $25 in time. Sure, a service could say "We don't offer support for free plans," but some services rightly don't want anyone to get stuck, even if they aren't paying. It's also harder to do thoughtfully than it might seem, since many customers who will eventually pay ask questions before they're receiving enough value to upgrade. [1]: Again, a few services operate at such large volume that the implementation and support cost is a minuscule percentage of revenue. That's relatively few Internet services, though, mostly very high volume hosting. For other products, even all but the largest PaaS/IaaS offerings, the items above are substantial costs. Some services which would otherwise be lower-volume use this as a differentiator ("Everyone gets all features"), and that's great, but there's no reason to expect it universally.
- eropple 10y ago
  Slack lets you keep a history of 10,000 messages, and they're retained even if you're on the free tier. You just can't see them. S3 is a cent a gigabyte at scale, three cents when you're starting. sc1 drives on EBS are two and a half cents. Storage is a cheap, solved problem. You make people pay for what's important to them.
  - jjeaff 10y ago
    Same reason a 32GB iphone costs hundreds more for the next level of storage. And why 64gb is pretty much the largest offering. 64gb isn't enough? Pay for more icloud storage. Yet you can buy a 128gb sd card for $30.
sandGorgon 10y ago
I didn't say it was broken. But if we are addressing the startup set on HN.. Then I'm in the market to buy their service. I'm not a competitor, nor do I have a vested interest. I get Hipchat for free because I'm a bitbucket customer ($1per month) and I get Google Auth as built in. Most startups are using Google Apps.. But very few would use LDAP (which is indeed available in the 20$ tier) So yes - I believe for the demographic I represent, their pricing needs to be fixed.
- gizmo 10y ago
  So their pricing isn't broken yet you repeat your claim that it "needs to be fixed"? How is this not pedantry? Look, I understand your desire to pay less for a service, but insisting that pricing needs to be fixed simply so that you pay less is still absurd.
- enraged_camel 10y ago
  >>I didn't say it was broken. You said "they need to fix their feature set for pricing." Not "improve." "Fix." That's the word you used. And it directly implies that the subject it is referring to (the pricing) is broken.
  - sandGorgon 10y ago
    feature set - not pricing. Am I making a mistake with my english ? I'm willing to pay their 20$ thing - but the features they include in that price is weird for the segment on HN. And for the features people like me would really pay for... there is no pricing (so I dont know whether its broken or not). I dont want them to lower the pricing - I want them to rearrange it... or atleast talk about it. I dont know how much to pay to get the Google Apps feature.
    - gizmo 10y ago
      You want to pay the 20$ thing but you want additional features from the more expensive call-us tier. That is fundamentally a complaint about their pricing. The raison d'etre of pricing tiers is to charge a different price to different customers. Having to pay extra to get extra features is the point, not a bug that needs fixing.

it33 10y ago

Hi @sandGorgon, hi @gizmo Mattermost team here. Thanks for your feedback, While pricing is set that way for a purpose, we are always looking for ways to improve and we're keenly interested in what everyone has to say. Our focus for Enterprise has been large organizations with sophisticated needs and it's important for us to have conversations and demonstrations with the people doing the evaluation so they fully understand what we're offering. That said, there are people who use our free Team Edition or have read through our docs that just want a "buy" button for E20. I'll bring this up and see what we can do. PS: Regarding the word "fix", my personal view is that it's okay for a commercial product, because people are buying it as a customer. Enterprise Edition is a commercial product. That said, many open source communities are adopting a principle of "kindness" and having feedback phrased positively where possible. People work hard to make open source software and give it away, and if conversations started on a positive note... well, why not?

WhitneyLand 10y ago
Which communities don't approve of the word "fix" in describing suggestions? I'm all for criticism being constructive and polite, but in my experience fix is a neutral and common word in design and development discussions.
- moron4hire 10y ago
  Yeah, that comment about "fix" being negative was really rather passive aggressive.
sandGorgon 10y ago
hi, thanks for replying. So at no point am I implying that you should release it for free. But I do believe there are some features that should ideally be in the 20$ tier rather than the "call-us" tier. Now this may completely be how your demographic falls, but generally speaking a small company buying 2-10 licenses would usually not have LDAP... but most likely will have Google Apps. And that's pretty much the gist of my comment. I'm not very sure why people have caught on to the word "fix" - but IMHO i used it in the way that most people talk on these forums ("your website font needs to be fixed", "the copy needs to be fixed"). So I'm not sure if the word was offensive, but it was not intended to be. Also wanted to mention that I was looking at your offering as a customer with a genuine interest to buy. We use Hipchat and their mobile app needs to be "fixed".. so I was in the market for alternatives. P.S. also didnt realize you were YC. That usually doesnt happen.