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> A big price bump with a few months notice is painful (and I'm glad it's bringing competition), but it tells me they're thinking seriously about how to sustain
by da_chicken 8y ago
> A big price bump with a few months notice is painful (and I'm glad it's bringing competition), but it tells me they're thinking seriously about how to sustain/develop the product and lets both them and me explore the real value of the service.
It tells me they're trying to minimize the number of users (which reduces their costs) by raising the price while still making it profitable. They raise prices rapidly to see how many people jump ship, and when your revenue begins to decline you've gone a bit too far.
Of course, they've done it very quickly, so they've likely not allowed enough time for the competition to step in or all their customers to abandon your now-expensive product.
- dmurray 8y ago> It tells me they're trying to minimize the number of users (which reduces their costs) by raising the price while still making it profitable. Is the marginal cost of serving extra users really a big part of Google's costs? Bandwidth is cheap; I would have expected that building and updating the map data was the expensive part.
- twistedpair 8y agoAfter all, they've long done away with the tile servers of the past and the giant render farms to make the millions of tiles at 20 different zoom levels to cover the earth. Now it's in browser rendered vector graphics. Unless the vector information is getting much more expensive (shouldn't be, they own Waze and GMaps mobile products to make their own maps from user data), the cost of running GMaps should be going down on a per user bases, not up.
- g-b-r 8y agoMaybe they expect a big increase in the cost of imagery acquisition (from what I was able to glean they had a deal for a certain fixed price for a certain period, which might be coming to an end - https://spacenews.com/planet-confirms-google-stake-as-terra-bella-deal-closes/ https://spacenews.com/planet-confirms-google-stake-as-terra-...).
- quirkot 8y agoCost doesn't set price. Value sets price
- da_chicken 8y agoI'm not concerned about bandwidth costs. I'm concerned about support costs. People who use an API have an annoying habit of calling and submitting support tickets for that API.