5 ms·

To be honest the main problem for me is I gladly pay 10$ for Spotify or Netflix but I just can't bring myself to pay 8$ for a todo app or 10$ for Dropbox when m

by cecja 8y ago

To be honest the main problem for me is I gladly pay 10$ for Spotify or Netflix but I just can't bring myself to pay 8$ for a todo app or 10$ for Dropbox when my hosting with 500GB and the ability to run my own cloud costs 4.99$. Most of the time it's just to much for just the convince. Besides I despise apps like Dropbox or Evernote that nag people I share stuff with to sign up for their service.

taneq 8y ago
Or even spend the $8 on a thumb drive which goes on your keyring and will store 32GB or whatever that you'll have with you literally everywhere for the foreseeable future.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  That’s not really comparible to a cloud service that provides 1TB of storage and allows me to access my files from anywhere, or delegate access to others.
pavlov 8y ago
For this reason I feel that SaaS services that fall in the $10-$30 bracket are problematic. The price is too much for consumers who compare it to Netflix, whereas for businesses it's often ridiculously small and effectively leaves money on the table. I like Discourse's pricing model: https://www.discourse.org https://www.discourse.org Their plans start at $100 / month, which is not a problem for real businesses. For everyone else, the software is full open source and it's reasonably easy to install on that $5/month cloud server instance. The "free or $100+" model conveniently eliminates the support hassle of $10 / month users who typically are the most clueless and demanding.
- osrec 8y ago
  Interesting. Do you think they miss out on a fair amount of customers at that price point?
  - nunez 8y ago
    They probably get customers that they actually want: businesses who are fine with paying >$100/month for their service and individuals who will likely be very, very supportive of their service since they value it enough to pay that much per month for it over other alternatives
    - prklmn 8y ago
      I watched the NCAA basketball final game and Dropbox ran what had to have amounted to several million dollars worth of ads. There comes a point when in order to drive revenue growth you need not only the businesses who are willing to pay top dollar and the individuals who are easily convinced, but a much larger swath of businesses and individuals. They want any customer with a wallet, and they may want bigger businesses more, but they’ll sell to anyone who will pay.
    - naravara 8y ago
      I wonder if the free tier that appeals largely to enthusiasts and nerds also helps as a lead generation process. People use it and like it, they get jobs where they have a say in procurement decisions, and they advocate for platforms they like when they do. It’s also a good “eat your own dogfood” way to make sure your platform is up to commercial standards for UI/UX and feature sets. A lot of enterprise software is garbage specifically because the people doing the procurement aren’t the people using the tools.
      - Silhouette 8y ago
        I wonder if the free tier that appeals largely to enthusiasts and nerds also helps as a lead generation process. That seems like a reasonable business strategy. Software companies have long offered heavily discounted products to home and educational users, or simply turned a blind eye to piracy within those demographics. Then everyone leaves school and equates "word processor" and "spreadsheet" with Microsoft Office, "graphics program" with Adobe Creative Suite, etc. These days a lot of those big players seem to be trying to pull in more direct revenue from those markets with lower-priced versions of their subscription offerings instead, but that doesn't mean their previous business model wasn't good for them.
- amygdyl 8y ago
  The consumer pricing structures, when you start getting services like Dropbox used extensively in professional settings, such as graphic design for advertising, is a problem. When we've got to go back to the original files with a press deadline that'smissed at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars, where do we expect to find the customer service, if we're impacted by a degraded node in Dropbox's cloud? I accept the problem is with the community of freelance designers, and equally the disinterest if agencies and other line of business data consumers to provide adequate alternatives (we do, with real enterprise grade systems and support contracts) but even Draconian measures to enforce control only back up a community who have been backed up and disenfranchised plenty enough by the large agencies pushing work off the payroll for the length of my career (decades...) and it just happens to be a hard sell to make any extra work for a highly talented community who are now treated as least cost providers.
- Twisell 8y ago
  It’s also flawed for business when applying price to the wrong "user role". Especially in saas business intelligence where some companies want to charge service per users. This seems nice on paper and might work for big Corp with too much money. But for smaller business paying 50 licences while in reality there is 2 publishers and 48 readers is really messed up. Anyone even slightly computer literate known that it’s a simple as fk login system that won’t cost more for 2 than for 50 users. So how exactly I’m supposed to suggest your product to my boss? He will just laugh. You must provide free "reader only" accounts or at least propose a bundle offer for small business. Unless it’s not your target, but really why go with per/user plan in the first place then? The only worst business model for BI is bandwidth based payement for anything that involve open-data. Because I would then fear that my dataviz make some buzz on Twitter an that I blow my budget.
walterbell 8y ago
For Mac, there’s a $15/mo app subscription bundle: https://setapp.com/apps https://setapp.com/apps
- codingdave 8y ago
  That feels like an odd service to me - my use cases for my Mac don't change often, so minimizing the churn of my toolkit is important to my productivity. Why would I pay $15/month to be invited to churn on a system that isn't broken?
enitihas 8y ago
Just curious, how do you get 500 GB and your own cloud for 4.99$. I use Dropbox and always felt their price is fair.
- cecja 8y ago
  It is a vserver from server4you.de with a special christmas offer for returning users but you usually get the 500gb two times a year.

by cecja 8y ago

taneq 8y ago

Or even spend the $8 on a thumb drive which goes on your keyring and will store 32GB or whatever that you'll have with you literally everywhere for the foreseeable future.

toomuchtodo 8y ago
That’s not really comparible to a cloud service that provides 1TB of storage and allows me to access my files from anywhere, or delegate access to others.

pavlov 8y ago

For this reason I feel that SaaS services that fall in the $10-$30 bracket are problematic. The price is too much for consumers who compare it to Netflix, whereas for businesses it's often ridiculously small and effectively leaves money on the table. I like Discourse's pricing model: https://www.discourse.org https://www.discourse.org Their plans start at $100 / month, which is not a problem for real businesses. For everyone else, the software is full open source and it's reasonably easy to install on that $5/month cloud server instance. The "free or $100+" model conveniently eliminates the support hassle of $10 / month users who typically are the most clueless and demanding.

osrec 8y ago
Interesting. Do you think they miss out on a fair amount of customers at that price point?
- nunez 8y ago
  They probably get customers that they actually want: businesses who are fine with paying >$100/month for their service and individuals who will likely be very, very supportive of their service since they value it enough to pay that much per month for it over other alternatives
  - prklmn 8y ago
    I watched the NCAA basketball final game and Dropbox ran what had to have amounted to several million dollars worth of ads. There comes a point when in order to drive revenue growth you need not only the businesses who are willing to pay top dollar and the individuals who are easily convinced, but a much larger swath of businesses and individuals. They want any customer with a wallet, and they may want bigger businesses more, but they’ll sell to anyone who will pay.
  - naravara 8y ago
    I wonder if the free tier that appeals largely to enthusiasts and nerds also helps as a lead generation process. People use it and like it, they get jobs where they have a say in procurement decisions, and they advocate for platforms they like when they do. It’s also a good “eat your own dogfood” way to make sure your platform is up to commercial standards for UI/UX and feature sets. A lot of enterprise software is garbage specifically because the people doing the procurement aren’t the people using the tools.
    - Silhouette 8y ago
      I wonder if the free tier that appeals largely to enthusiasts and nerds also helps as a lead generation process. That seems like a reasonable business strategy. Software companies have long offered heavily discounted products to home and educational users, or simply turned a blind eye to piracy within those demographics. Then everyone leaves school and equates "word processor" and "spreadsheet" with Microsoft Office, "graphics program" with Adobe Creative Suite, etc. These days a lot of those big players seem to be trying to pull in more direct revenue from those markets with lower-priced versions of their subscription offerings instead, but that doesn't mean their previous business model wasn't good for them.
amygdyl 8y ago
The consumer pricing structures, when you start getting services like Dropbox used extensively in professional settings, such as graphic design for advertising, is a problem. When we've got to go back to the original files with a press deadline that'smissed at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars, where do we expect to find the customer service, if we're impacted by a degraded node in Dropbox's cloud? I accept the problem is with the community of freelance designers, and equally the disinterest if agencies and other line of business data consumers to provide adequate alternatives (we do, with real enterprise grade systems and support contracts) but even Draconian measures to enforce control only back up a community who have been backed up and disenfranchised plenty enough by the large agencies pushing work off the payroll for the length of my career (decades...) and it just happens to be a hard sell to make any extra work for a highly talented community who are now treated as least cost providers.
Twisell 8y ago
It’s also flawed for business when applying price to the wrong "user role". Especially in saas business intelligence where some companies want to charge service per users. This seems nice on paper and might work for big Corp with too much money. But for smaller business paying 50 licences while in reality there is 2 publishers and 48 readers is really messed up. Anyone even slightly computer literate known that it’s a simple as fk login system that won’t cost more for 2 than for 50 users. So how exactly I’m supposed to suggest your product to my boss? He will just laugh. You must provide free "reader only" accounts or at least propose a bundle offer for small business. Unless it’s not your target, but really why go with per/user plan in the first place then? The only worst business model for BI is bandwidth based payement for anything that involve open-data. Because I would then fear that my dataviz make some buzz on Twitter an that I blow my budget.

walterbell 8y ago

For Mac, there’s a $15/mo app subscription bundle: https://setapp.com/apps https://setapp.com/apps

codingdave 8y ago
That feels like an odd service to me - my use cases for my Mac don't change often, so minimizing the churn of my toolkit is important to my productivity. Why would I pay $15/month to be invited to churn on a system that isn't broken?

enitihas 8y ago

Just curious, how do you get 500 GB and your own cloud for 4.99$. I use Dropbox and always felt their price is fair.

cecja 8y ago
It is a vserver from server4you.de with a special christmas offer for returning users but you usually get the 500gb two times a year.