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While I understand the sentiment behind a $10/mo offering, you will attract cheap customers. Which are the worst. They demand more support while knowing less an
by aantix 6y ago
While I understand the sentiment behind a $10/mo offering, you will attract cheap customers. Which are the worst. They demand more support while knowing less and pay less. The worst of all worlds.
Price is a signal. You’ve done a lot of great work. Don’t sell it short now.
- nine_k 6y agoI wonder if the $5 DO plan, or $10 Linode plan, or the free AWS tier did anything to popularity, and for the general awareness of their offerings. Either that, or you need a sales Dept to talk to corporations directly.
- bdcravens 6y agoI don't think comparing those scale of companies with a microstartup is apt.
- abiogenesis 6y agoIt is not the same thing. If you want more from DO or Linode they are happy to sell 2x the resources for 2x the price.
- brainless 6y agoThis is NOT the same. With infrastructure based companies you are seeing a lure to get into an hourly priced game that the house ALWAYS wins. You start with 10, because there are many others that are paying 10K. IaaS is a different game.
- 1hakr 6y agoThanks mate. I will rethink about pricing again.
- XCSme 6y agoSo your suggestion is to increase prices just to get rid of "poor" customers? I think this is a really good ethical discussion, and I personally beleive many products/services are way overpriced because of this, which really raises the bar for small businesses and developers. I am also building a high-quality, high-value product that I am making affordable even for really "poor" webmasters. I am thinking of raising the pricing, but at the same time I still receive messages from devs that are just starting saying that they like by product but it is too expensive for them, which is a bit sad to hear (you create something nice that some people can't afford). But in the end, maybe money really talks.
- cleong 6y agoLow prices attract customers that will demand more features and make more complaints to you then any other demographic. In SaaS higher priced customers are typically more accommodating and in addition you get more resources to meet their demands. Somehow there's something psychological that makes you appreciate a product less when you paid 10$ vs 1000$.
- nashadelic 6y agoDo you have a link to back that up? Sounds counter-intuitive to me. People who pay more would demand more?
- makeee 6y agoThis is my experience as well. One way to put it is that people that tend to demand more also demand lower prices.
- cleong 6y agoIt's kinda late but https://hn.algolia.com/?query=patio11%20%22pathological%20customers%22&type=comment&dateRange=all&prefix=false&page=0&sort=byDate https://hn.algolia.com/?query=patio11%20%22pathological%20cu...
- nashadelic 6y agoI think you want to build your business out first. Once you're there you can use higher paying customer to subsidize lower tier customers very similar to how business travel works. In the SaaS world, that's like Intercom or HubSpot giving their entire services or $50/m if you're a startup which is <$1M in rev, founded <2y ago etc. The other shortcut is venture subsidized growth where you sell for cheap to show growth with the hope you'll have net negative churn and the expanded revenue will make up for it. This is highly segment dependant. But as the founder of Intercom said: startups make a poor market, there's no recovery from death. So choose wisely.
- brauhaus 6y agoThis is not the case here, but my opinion is that if you still haven't reached product market fit and your value proposition is still changing, it makes sense to charge less, get more customers and, with that, more feedback. Besides, with more customers you can have the luxury of deciding which segment you actually want to serve and start refining the product for them (thus increasing the value proposition and allowing for a higher price point).