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I checked it out by creating an account. It detected my country as India, and showed the price to jump the waitlist (currently at 60k) as $12.99 a month or $100

by wtmt 7y ago

I checked it out by creating an account. It detected my country as India, and showed the price to jump the waitlist (currently at 60k) as $12.99 a month or $100 a year. Contrast this to (using current conversion rates from INR to USD): * Netflix here starts at $2.8 for the cheapest (mobile only, single screen) plan and has its highest plan (4K, four screens) at $11.2 a month. Netflix is considered so expensive that account sharing among a few people is quite common. * Amazon Prime (with two day shipping plus Prime Video and Prime Music) costs about $14 a year. * A print newspaper subscription of any major national newspaper would cost about $2.8 or even a lot lesser per month. * An Audible subscription (one free credit a month) costs $2.8 a month, with lower prices on audiobooks and discounts on them. * Some premium news publications cost about $30-$45 a year. I'm not saying that this is similar to Netflix or Amazon or a national newspaper, but it's more about how the more popular as well as niche/premium services have priced themselves and how people perceive value. Comparatively, this $12.99/month or $100/year social network focused on news seems like it's meant for some sections of first world inhabitants. It could've probably done better with a currency adjusted or purchasing power parity specific rate. For example, Cloudflare WARP+ costs about $0.97 a month (compared to $4.99 a month in the US). Having talked about the pricing, the UI doesn't look great either. I saw a list of groups to choose from and the page looked like it was built more than a decade ago. It ought to look like a modern website (with more bells and whistles) if it wants to command more than premium rates. Even Facebook's site, which I think looks outdated, cluttered and ugly, looks better in comparison.

rolltiide 7y ago
> seems like it's meant for some sections of first world inhabitants Perfect great! Imagine it’s intentional and a pretty effective way of doing business Now lets just critique why it isn’t a luxury brand
- windthrown 7y ago
  Expensive luxury prices are fine for certain products but can be detrimental to social and communication tools. I can easily afford this product myself but I don’t want to pay for a social network if a portion of my friends/contacts are priced out.
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    Yes, I can understand that. But Facebook's model, for instance, also prices people out. I am entirely unwilling to use Facebook because I consider it far too expensive. True, I'm paying with data rather than cash, but it's still paying. From my point of view, $12.99/mo is actually cheaper (assuming that paying that means I'm not going to be datamined).
    - windthrown 7y ago
      Being “priced out” because you personally value your data more than others is a valid viewpoint, but that’s not the same thing as being priced out because you don’t have money.
      - JohnFen 7y ago
        That seems like a difference in viewpoint. I can understand your stance, but I don't share it. To me, being "priced out" means that something costs more than you are willing and able to pay.
        windthrown 7y ago
        Fair enough. I was just trying say that being unwilling to pay is very different than being unable to pay. Charging a high price for a luxury brand is a fine business model but I wouldn’t consider a product accessible to only some socioeconomic groups to a be a Facebook competitor (as indicated in the article).
- wtmt 7y ago
  My general observation (anecdotal) is that people are more willing to pay a whole lot more for physical goods than for services (including apps, content and Internet connectivity).
  - CamperBob2 7y ago
    Depends on the signaling value of the apps and content. Remember that one of the first iPhone apps was one that cost $500 and did nothing but print "I am rich" to the screen.
wolco 7y ago
This is why the ad model works better. Local advertisers can bid on his data to show 5 cent ads where someone in northamerica may be worth 5 dollars. Trying to price this as a monthly service removes the ability to offer different prices per region without getting into fairness or causing people to get around the rules by signing up in different regions but watching from another.
- tachyonbeam 7y ago
  They just pointed out that Netflix has different prices per region. Many service providers do.
  - wolco 7y ago
    Netflix has many problems with this model and is currently trying to find a solution. There are services setup to fool netflix into providing content outside of geograpical areas that they are liceased for.
  - username90 7y ago
    An ad based model is 100% progressive though unlike any normal scheme. For example a homeless guy pay basically nothing for browsing Facebook on his phone even if he lives in USA since his attention is not worth anything.
    - speedplane 7y ago
      > An ad based model is 100% progressive though unlike any normal scheme. For example a homeless guy pay basically nothing for browsing Facebook ... A system in which a poor person making $30k/year and spends $500/year on products or content advertised via Facebook versus a rich person who makes $1M/year and spends $10k on products/content via facebook is not exactly progressive. The poor person ends up paying 1.6% of their income, while the rich person spends 0.1%. The poor person spends 16X of their takehome earnings than the rich person, not exactly progressive.
- wtmt 7y ago
basch 7y ago
Part of Prime is getting you to give them $120 membership fee so you feel youre getting some kind of bonus buying from them ("free shipping") which reduces comparison shopping. I'm probably not going to buy $100/year memberships to costco, walmart, amazon, and target, even though im half way there and really tempted to pull the trigger on another. The membership fees almost pay for themselves just in preventing me from going into the store and impulse buying something on a shelf once a month. As far as Amazon Prime, I have to believe the price of shipping is built into the products, and the membership is for other psychological and behavior control reasons. Is part of this social network price the same thing. A cost to make it exclusive, acts as a bit of a spam filter. Then after having sunk money into it, you feel the need to make it worthwhile. I never think "ive been watching too much prime I better get my value out of netflix this month" but a communication tool might be different.
- wtmt 7y ago
  I agree with you on the Amazon Prime membership triggering impulse purchases, stickiness with the one day or two day deliveries and of course, shipping built into the products' prices. But Amazon Prime video here (in India) has a lot of local content and gets many new movies quickly onto it. My assessment is that Prime Video is probably a bigger attraction for people here (perhaps with Prime Music) than two day shipping alone (which is not very widely available on many products).
  - basch 7y ago
    The one nice thing about Prime vs Prime video, is they advertise both prices separately, so we can at least get a peak at what percent of the prime cost amazon thinks video is worth. We know they arent selling Video by itself at a loss, it wouldnt make sense to give away video as a loss leader, if you arent snagging people elsewhere.
- billfruit 7y ago
  100$s? Amazon prime membership is 1000rs per year, which is less than 14$ a year.
threwawasy1228 7y ago
I don't see why this should be expected of any company honestly. If I want to price for the country that I'm trying to sell to, why should I be forced to care about or focus on a market segment that doesn't matter much to me?
zozbot234 7y ago
> showed the price to jump the waitlist ... as $12.99 a month or $100 a year. Yeah, not a big fan of this. You could buy very nice cloud hosting for $12.99 a month, and run your own instance of a federated social network like Mastodon.
- booleandilemma 7y ago
  Yeah, my parents are totally going to do that.
  - djsumdog 7y ago
    You could stand one up and your parents join it? Yes, not everyone can stand up their own self hosted stuff. In fact few of us can. There's a huge missing gap between your phone/desktop applications and just installing and running hosted applications, but I digress. I stood up a Mastodon instance and invited a bunch of my friends. Only like 3 of us use it, but it's up and connected to the greater Fediverse.
  - hombre_fatal 7y ago
    No need to go that far. Maybe one HNer even does that or even wants to do it.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- scarmig 7y ago
  Or join an existing social network with a billion plus users. Google+, now's your time to shine!
throwaway35784 7y ago
Why is there even a wait list at all? This feels sketchy from first use. And to not be up front about the cost before getting my personal information is, I feel, dishonest. How can he expect to create a platform of honest people if he is dishonest from the point of account creation? This is not the way to do it.
- Digit-Al 7y ago
  Why on earth does it feel sketchy to you. As far as I can tell this service will be devoid of adverts and tracking, which means that it will be entirely funded by subscribers. You can't really expect him to buy all the servers and bandwidth and provide it all to you for nothing out of his own pocket. That's just stupid. It seems to me the idea is that early access subscribers pay for the initial equipment. They then release an initial block of free accounts. As they get more paying subscribers they can invest in more infrastructure and release more free accounts. If they were just to give accounts out free immediately they would be inundated and the servers might not be able to cope. This allows them to grow the service organically with paying subscribers supporting the "freeloaders". Hope that clears it up.
  - throwaway35784 7y ago
    Just say that up front. Before i put in an email address. Current wait list: 60,000 people (estimated hold time 30 days) but you can jump the queue for $12.99/mo or $100/yr. Done. Honest. Transparent. The site's current account flow is infected with dark patterns and turns off those familiar with them, like me.
    - mirimir 7y ago
      Yeah. I knew (from TFA) that there was a charge to jump the queue. But there's no mention of that on the signup page. And no mention that they don't accept ~anonymous payments.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
fgnkj 7y ago
Just imagine Facebook without Indians.
hammock 7y ago
>showed the price to jump the waitlist (currently at 60k) as $12.99 a month That's the cost to jump the waitlist, not the ongoing price for what will be (he hopes) the majority of users. Back when Facebook was Ivy-league only, there were TONS of students I knew who would have paid to get access. As it gets less exclusive the price will come down or become free
burtonator 7y ago
I'm dealing with this now with my app Polar. We're a cognitive platform for managing knowledge, education, and reading. You MUST have localized pricing for these types of apps. We're going to cut our pricing for India, and basically all developing nations. Students too... if you have a university email we'll give you a discount on top of your normal region-specific discounts. It's a fools errand otherwise. These users will just NOT convert.
torgoguys 7y ago
My screen was showing that they $100/yr lets you and 200 of your friends jump the waitlist. If you max that out, 50 cents per person isn't so bad. EDIT: I logged out and back in and it looks like it let me in without paying...
mempko 7y ago
The price is not $12.99/month, it's free. The $12.99/month are for those that want to support the service financially, it's donationware similar to wikipedia. Jimmy Wales said the idea is that a small minority will pay for the service for everyone.
Marsymars 7y ago
> For example, Cloudflare WARP+ costs about $0.97 a month (compared to $4.99 a month in the US). That's fairly country-dependant - I actually sent some feedback to Cloudflare expressing my disappointment with their pricing - it's currently 5.30 USD in my country with 20% lower purchasing power than the USA.
- wtmt 7y ago
  I recall Cloudflare mentioning something about the priced being proportionate to whatever a Big Mac costs. [1] Perhaps Cloudflare got it wrong with your country or a Big Mac costs a lot more than in the US (that sounds weird)? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index
  - Marsymars 7y ago
    Canada - Big Mac here is about the same absolute cost as the US before accounting for 20% PPP difference, and then Cloudflare rounded the American price down (from $5.51 to $5) and the Canadian price up (from $6.65 to $7) - so it's only a couple dollars, but it doesn't feel like good value. (Particularly compared to other consumer services, e.g. Apple Arcade, Dropbox, Netflix are only +1 CAD over their USD price starting from a higher base price, Spotify and Apple Music are priced with CAD at par, etc.)
rladd 7y ago
My guess is that they'd get much more (more than 10x) uptake at $1.99 than they will at $12.99. And they need volume to make it work. So this pricing seems like a big mistake to me.
OrgNet 7y ago
it probably cost less than $1/month to host the average user... this is just craziness

by wtmt 7y ago

rolltiide 7y ago

> seems like it's meant for some sections of first world inhabitants Perfect great! Imagine it’s intentional and a pretty effective way of doing business Now lets just critique why it isn’t a luxury brand

windthrown 7y ago
Expensive luxury prices are fine for certain products but can be detrimental to social and communication tools. I can easily afford this product myself but I don’t want to pay for a social network if a portion of my friends/contacts are priced out.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  Yes, I can understand that. But Facebook's model, for instance, also prices people out. I am entirely unwilling to use Facebook because I consider it far too expensive. True, I'm paying with data rather than cash, but it's still paying. From my point of view, $12.99/mo is actually cheaper (assuming that paying that means I'm not going to be datamined).
  - windthrown 7y ago
    Being “priced out” because you personally value your data more than others is a valid viewpoint, but that’s not the same thing as being priced out because you don’t have money.
    - JohnFen 7y ago
      That seems like a difference in viewpoint. I can understand your stance, but I don't share it. To me, being "priced out" means that something costs more than you are willing and able to pay.
      - windthrown 7y ago
        Fair enough. I was just trying say that being unwilling to pay is very different than being unable to pay. Charging a high price for a luxury brand is a fine business model but I wouldn’t consider a product accessible to only some socioeconomic groups to a be a Facebook competitor (as indicated in the article).
wtmt 7y ago
My general observation (anecdotal) is that people are more willing to pay a whole lot more for physical goods than for services (including apps, content and Internet connectivity).
- CamperBob2 7y ago
  Depends on the signaling value of the apps and content. Remember that one of the first iPhone apps was one that cost $500 and did nothing but print "I am rich" to the screen.

wolco 7y ago

This is why the ad model works better. Local advertisers can bid on his data to show 5 cent ads where someone in northamerica may be worth 5 dollars. Trying to price this as a monthly service removes the ability to offer different prices per region without getting into fairness or causing people to get around the rules by signing up in different regions but watching from another.

tachyonbeam 7y ago
They just pointed out that Netflix has different prices per region. Many service providers do.
- wolco 7y ago
  Netflix has many problems with this model and is currently trying to find a solution. There are services setup to fool netflix into providing content outside of geograpical areas that they are liceased for.
- username90 7y ago
  An ad based model is 100% progressive though unlike any normal scheme. For example a homeless guy pay basically nothing for browsing Facebook on his phone even if he lives in USA since his attention is not worth anything.
  - speedplane 7y ago
    > An ad based model is 100% progressive though unlike any normal scheme. For example a homeless guy pay basically nothing for browsing Facebook ... A system in which a poor person making $30k/year and spends $500/year on products or content advertised via Facebook versus a rich person who makes $1M/year and spends $10k on products/content via facebook is not exactly progressive. The poor person ends up paying 1.6% of their income, while the rich person spends 0.1%. The poor person spends 16X of their takehome earnings than the rich person, not exactly progressive.
wtmt 7y ago

basch 7y ago

Part of Prime is getting you to give them $120 membership fee so you feel youre getting some kind of bonus buying from them ("free shipping") which reduces comparison shopping. I'm probably not going to buy $100/year memberships to costco, walmart, amazon, and target, even though im half way there and really tempted to pull the trigger on another. The membership fees almost pay for themselves just in preventing me from going into the store and impulse buying something on a shelf once a month. As far as Amazon Prime, I have to believe the price of shipping is built into the products, and the membership is for other psychological and behavior control reasons. Is part of this social network price the same thing. A cost to make it exclusive, acts as a bit of a spam filter. Then after having sunk money into it, you feel the need to make it worthwhile. I never think "ive been watching too much prime I better get my value out of netflix this month" but a communication tool might be different.

wtmt 7y ago
I agree with you on the Amazon Prime membership triggering impulse purchases, stickiness with the one day or two day deliveries and of course, shipping built into the products' prices. But Amazon Prime video here (in India) has a lot of local content and gets many new movies quickly onto it. My assessment is that Prime Video is probably a bigger attraction for people here (perhaps with Prime Music) than two day shipping alone (which is not very widely available on many products).
- basch 7y ago
  The one nice thing about Prime vs Prime video, is they advertise both prices separately, so we can at least get a peak at what percent of the prime cost amazon thinks video is worth. We know they arent selling Video by itself at a loss, it wouldnt make sense to give away video as a loss leader, if you arent snagging people elsewhere.
billfruit 7y ago
100$s? Amazon prime membership is 1000rs per year, which is less than 14$ a year.

threwawasy1228 7y ago

I don't see why this should be expected of any company honestly. If I want to price for the country that I'm trying to sell to, why should I be forced to care about or focus on a market segment that doesn't matter much to me?

zozbot234 7y ago

> showed the price to jump the waitlist ... as $12.99 a month or $100 a year. Yeah, not a big fan of this. You could buy very nice cloud hosting for $12.99 a month, and run your own instance of a federated social network like Mastodon.

booleandilemma 7y ago
Yeah, my parents are totally going to do that.
- djsumdog 7y ago
  You could stand one up and your parents join it? Yes, not everyone can stand up their own self hosted stuff. In fact few of us can. There's a huge missing gap between your phone/desktop applications and just installing and running hosted applications, but I digress. I stood up a Mastodon instance and invited a bunch of my friends. Only like 3 of us use it, but it's up and connected to the greater Fediverse.
- hombre_fatal 7y ago
  No need to go that far. Maybe one HNer even does that or even wants to do it.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
scarmig 7y ago
Or join an existing social network with a billion plus users. Google+, now's your time to shine!

throwaway35784 7y ago

Why is there even a wait list at all? This feels sketchy from first use. And to not be up front about the cost before getting my personal information is, I feel, dishonest. How can he expect to create a platform of honest people if he is dishonest from the point of account creation? This is not the way to do it.

Digit-Al 7y ago
Why on earth does it feel sketchy to you. As far as I can tell this service will be devoid of adverts and tracking, which means that it will be entirely funded by subscribers. You can't really expect him to buy all the servers and bandwidth and provide it all to you for nothing out of his own pocket. That's just stupid. It seems to me the idea is that early access subscribers pay for the initial equipment. They then release an initial block of free accounts. As they get more paying subscribers they can invest in more infrastructure and release more free accounts. If they were just to give accounts out free immediately they would be inundated and the servers might not be able to cope. This allows them to grow the service organically with paying subscribers supporting the "freeloaders". Hope that clears it up.
- throwaway35784 7y ago
  Just say that up front. Before i put in an email address. Current wait list: 60,000 people (estimated hold time 30 days) but you can jump the queue for $12.99/mo or $100/yr. Done. Honest. Transparent. The site's current account flow is infected with dark patterns and turns off those familiar with them, like me.
  - mirimir 7y ago
    Yeah. I knew (from TFA) that there was a charge to jump the queue. But there's no mention of that on the signup page. And no mention that they don't accept ~anonymous payments.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

fgnkj 7y ago

Just imagine Facebook without Indians.

hammock 7y ago

>showed the price to jump the waitlist (currently at 60k) as $12.99 a month That's the cost to jump the waitlist, not the ongoing price for what will be (he hopes) the majority of users. Back when Facebook was Ivy-league only, there were TONS of students I knew who would have paid to get access. As it gets less exclusive the price will come down or become free

burtonator 7y ago

I'm dealing with this now with my app Polar. We're a cognitive platform for managing knowledge, education, and reading. You MUST have localized pricing for these types of apps. We're going to cut our pricing for India, and basically all developing nations. Students too... if you have a university email we'll give you a discount on top of your normal region-specific discounts. It's a fools errand otherwise. These users will just NOT convert.

torgoguys 7y ago

My screen was showing that they $100/yr lets you and 200 of your friends jump the waitlist. If you max that out, 50 cents per person isn't so bad. EDIT: I logged out and back in and it looks like it let me in without paying...

mempko 7y ago

The price is not $12.99/month, it's free. The $12.99/month are for those that want to support the service financially, it's donationware similar to wikipedia. Jimmy Wales said the idea is that a small minority will pay for the service for everyone.

Marsymars 7y ago

> For example, Cloudflare WARP+ costs about $0.97 a month (compared to $4.99 a month in the US). That's fairly country-dependant - I actually sent some feedback to Cloudflare expressing my disappointment with their pricing - it's currently 5.30 USD in my country with 20% lower purchasing power than the USA.

wtmt 7y ago
I recall Cloudflare mentioning something about the priced being proportionate to whatever a Big Mac costs. [1] Perhaps Cloudflare got it wrong with your country or a Big Mac costs a lot more than in the US (that sounds weird)? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index
- Marsymars 7y ago
  Canada - Big Mac here is about the same absolute cost as the US before accounting for 20% PPP difference, and then Cloudflare rounded the American price down (from $5.51 to $5) and the Canadian price up (from $6.65 to $7) - so it's only a couple dollars, but it doesn't feel like good value. (Particularly compared to other consumer services, e.g. Apple Arcade, Dropbox, Netflix are only +1 CAD over their USD price starting from a higher base price, Spotify and Apple Music are priced with CAD at par, etc.)

rladd 7y ago

My guess is that they'd get much more (more than 10x) uptake at $1.99 than they will at $12.99. And they need volume to make it work. So this pricing seems like a big mistake to me.

OrgNet 7y ago

it probably cost less than $1/month to host the average user... this is just craziness