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I don't get what the issue here is. Guess at which plan you'd need and go about your business. I'm sure they're reasonable about upgrading and/or paying for add

by pw 9y ago

I don't get what the issue here is. Guess at which plan you'd need and go about your business. I'm sure they're reasonable about upgrading and/or paying for additional usage if you go over the limits. Even if they weren't, what's the risk here? That you'd end up owing a couple hundred extra dollars? If you're worried about that, you're probably not a customer they want. This sound like standard developer cheapness.

gingerlime 9y ago
> I'm sure they're reasonable about upgrading and/or paying for additional usage if you go over the limits. I certainly hope so, but we've been bitten by surcharges before when we had a mini-DoS on our system... Besides that, there's a big element of trust here. I'm going to trust these guys with my most important secrets. I expect a trustworthy, transparent and simple solution that doesn't surprise me. Pricing is an element of that. > This sound like standard developer cheapness. I'm sorry, but this is just mean. I'm happy to pay, but I want to predict my costs. I understand usage-based pricing, but for a secret management system, I really don't see how this applies. Sure, there might be outliers who might spin 1 billion micro-processes each connecting to their system, but I think it's the wrong approach to base your pricing on those. At least not until you're the scale of Amazon. Or even Digital Ocean. I think I'm exactly the customer they want, but my 2 cents advice is to simplify pricing. Charge more. Fine. Just make it simple and clear.
- danenania 9y ago
  Thanks for laying out your concerns. Is your feeling that any sort of usage-based tiers that go beyond per-user pricing are too complex? Or is there some way to limit usage in a reasonable way that wouldn't rub you the wrong way?
  - gingerlime 9y ago
    Just to clarify, I truly believe it's in your interest to make pricing simpler. It just helps building trust, and conveys the same product simplicity. This is key (no pun intended) with this kind of service. Specifically, I think per-developer pricing should correlate well with value. Sharing secrets increases in complexity when more people are involved. One other thing I can think of perhaps is environments. Maybe bigger customers would have more environments that need to be kept separately? (production, staging, test, dev come to mind, but potentially a more granular split in larger orgs. Billing environment, Marketing etc). Maybe you could offer totally separate accounts that are independent of each other, but billed together. Keeping things separate also has security value. Servers: it gets much more messy much quicker in my opinion. Docker-based setups, auto-scaling groups etc make this difficult. So this reduces pricing predictability for us, and I imagine others. Config requests: I don't even have a clue what this means before I start. But seeing this deters me. You explain it on the FAQ section, but I still have to do some homework to figure out roughly my usage, before I even try your product... This is the worse pricing element in my humble opinion. In any case, I'm just one data point. If you have enough traffic, then you should A/B test this. Otherwise, talk to your customers (although then there's selection bias at play), or copy from someone else with a similar service? At your early stage, I think building momentum and traction is more important than worrying about outliers. You have many more years to refine pricing and figure out how not to lose money and attract the right customers. But now you should probably get as many customers as possible to see that it's a viable business and build a reputation. Just my 2 cents.
    - danenania 9y ago
      Thanks for your thoughts. I've decided to take out the config request/server limits and wait until this is actually a problem to deal with it. We'll probably need to put some sort of sanity check rate limits in place eventually, but I really don't want people be confused or have to worry about this stuff while using EnvKey. Pricing is hard :-/ Thanks again!
      - gingerlime 9y ago
        It is indeed. Keeping things simple, at least in the beginning is the best approach in my opinion. You can always add things later as you grow! But now you should focus mostly on growing :)
      - techdragon 9y ago
        As a huge fan, who has already introduced it to some other companies who have become customers, I can understand the change in pricing, however I find the abrupt removal of an “individual user level” a little frustrating. I have been ardently telling all who would listen they should try it, even on a tiny personal project, however for these solo developers, the price to continue using the product for their personal projects has now quadrupled! I’d sincerely recommend you reintroduce a ‘1 user’ tier, perhaps at 5 dollars.
        danenania 9y ago
        Thanks, I think having an indie tier for a single developer is a good idea. Will get this implemented soon.

by pw 9y ago

gingerlime 9y ago

> I'm sure they're reasonable about upgrading and/or paying for additional usage if you go over the limits. I certainly hope so, but we've been bitten by surcharges before when we had a mini-DoS on our system... Besides that, there's a big element of trust here. I'm going to trust these guys with my most important secrets. I expect a trustworthy, transparent and simple solution that doesn't surprise me. Pricing is an element of that. > This sound like standard developer cheapness. I'm sorry, but this is just mean. I'm happy to pay, but I want to predict my costs. I understand usage-based pricing, but for a secret management system, I really don't see how this applies. Sure, there might be outliers who might spin 1 billion micro-processes each connecting to their system, but I think it's the wrong approach to base your pricing on those. At least not until you're the scale of Amazon. Or even Digital Ocean. I think I'm exactly the customer they want, but my 2 cents advice is to simplify pricing. Charge more. Fine. Just make it simple and clear.

danenania 9y ago
Thanks for laying out your concerns. Is your feeling that any sort of usage-based tiers that go beyond per-user pricing are too complex? Or is there some way to limit usage in a reasonable way that wouldn't rub you the wrong way?
- gingerlime 9y ago
  Just to clarify, I truly believe it's in your interest to make pricing simpler. It just helps building trust, and conveys the same product simplicity. This is key (no pun intended) with this kind of service. Specifically, I think per-developer pricing should correlate well with value. Sharing secrets increases in complexity when more people are involved. One other thing I can think of perhaps is environments. Maybe bigger customers would have more environments that need to be kept separately? (production, staging, test, dev come to mind, but potentially a more granular split in larger orgs. Billing environment, Marketing etc). Maybe you could offer totally separate accounts that are independent of each other, but billed together. Keeping things separate also has security value. Servers: it gets much more messy much quicker in my opinion. Docker-based setups, auto-scaling groups etc make this difficult. So this reduces pricing predictability for us, and I imagine others. Config requests: I don't even have a clue what this means before I start. But seeing this deters me. You explain it on the FAQ section, but I still have to do some homework to figure out roughly my usage, before I even try your product... This is the worse pricing element in my humble opinion. In any case, I'm just one data point. If you have enough traffic, then you should A/B test this. Otherwise, talk to your customers (although then there's selection bias at play), or copy from someone else with a similar service? At your early stage, I think building momentum and traction is more important than worrying about outliers. You have many more years to refine pricing and figure out how not to lose money and attract the right customers. But now you should probably get as many customers as possible to see that it's a viable business and build a reputation. Just my 2 cents.
  - danenania 9y ago
    Thanks for your thoughts. I've decided to take out the config request/server limits and wait until this is actually a problem to deal with it. We'll probably need to put some sort of sanity check rate limits in place eventually, but I really don't want people be confused or have to worry about this stuff while using EnvKey. Pricing is hard :-/ Thanks again!
    - gingerlime 9y ago
      It is indeed. Keeping things simple, at least in the beginning is the best approach in my opinion. You can always add things later as you grow! But now you should focus mostly on growing :)
    - techdragon 9y ago
      As a huge fan, who has already introduced it to some other companies who have become customers, I can understand the change in pricing, however I find the abrupt removal of an “individual user level” a little frustrating. I have been ardently telling all who would listen they should try it, even on a tiny personal project, however for these solo developers, the price to continue using the product for their personal projects has now quadrupled! I’d sincerely recommend you reintroduce a ‘1 user’ tier, perhaps at 5 dollars.
      - danenania 9y ago
        Thanks, I think having an indie tier for a single developer is a good idea. Will get this implemented soon.