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>Reduce decision fatigue for customers. I am a huge evangelist of this piece of advice. I'm the founder of a startup that offers ONE price --- and free trial c
by siftrics 6y ago
>Reduce decision fatigue for customers.
I am a huge evangelist of this piece of advice. I'm the founder of a startup that offers ONE price --- and free trial credits, of course --- for each product. I think it has helped us tremendously.
The amount of startups I see that use the 3-column pricing plans (or worse!) is mind-boggling. Perhaps there is empirical evidence supporting complicated pricing. But I've never seen it. I specifically went with one price per product because I think complicated pricing plans negatively affect sales and sign-up rates, not to mention operational complexity!
If you're interested, here's our pricing page: https://siftrics.com/pricing.html https://siftrics.com/pricing.html
- PaulHoule 6y agoMuch of the time I know I need to do 10,000 API calls and do them in the next week. I don't want to get "X API calls a month". I love the simplicity of AWS pricing where you pay for what you use -- except for the "free use" part which leads people to spend $5000 worth of time to save $5. (I would be richer than Jeff Bezos if I had a penny for every time somebody did something stupid or wasteful to stay within the free use tier.)
- siftrics 6y ago> if I had a penny for every time somebody did something stupid or wasteful to stay within the free use tier. You make a good point. I suppose it doesn't apply in quite the same way here, since we offer lifetime free credits --- they don't refresh each month. 1,000 free pages, then you have to pay.
- PaulHoule 6y agoLifetime? Really? I'll still be able to use this service in 2075? Do you expect anyone to believe that?
- cercatrova 6y agoLifetime of the company, presumably, not lifetime of the user necessarily.
- PaulHoule 6y agoThus it's meaningless. Put "lifetime" or "unlimited" into a pricing plan and the one thing I know is that neither I nor the vendor can think rationally and honestly about it at all. Thus it is a reason to look for another vendor who shows signs of realistic planning. If I can pay $50 for something that costs them $25 and it is obvious that it is roughly like that, I know I am partnering with a 'sustainable' business.
- IanCal 6y agoSeems like pretty realistic and sustainable planning to me, they give you at most 50 cents of credit to see if it works for you without a forced time limit.
- cercatrova 6y agoThat's why it's just better to have time-based pricing, like a monthly subscription. As long as you keep paying, you'll be able to access it.
- sokoloff 6y agoYou might have a point with general lifetime pricing plans, but in this case, I think the usage above of "lifetime free credits" was perfectly clear to most (and is in fact, limited).
- userbinator 6y agoIf you look into the fine print, "lifetime" or "unlimited" really means "until we change our minds".
- ClikeX 6y agoI assume the free credits are for trialing and testing.
- michaelt 6y agoThis is the first time I've seen someone call AWS pricing simple :)
- PaulHoule 6y agoIt is compared to the "pick one of three plans none of which make any sense". I know investors like recurring revenue, I sure do. For many things I have no idea how much I am going to use them in six months if at all, but it seems they feel compelled to price something at "$X a month" even if I just could spend $Y on it this week, solve my problem, and maybe buy some more later. I am thinking in terms of $Y. There are just so many monthly bills out there that the only service anyone needs now is one that cancels all the services you don't use.
- ClikeX 6y agoAs much as I enjoy the thought of a Netflix where I'd pay for how much I actually watched (like how cloud hosting is billed). I think it also opens the possibility that they'll be creating content that abuses that notion. Like, longer content for pay per minute. Or longer seasons for pay per episode. But the idea sounds great to me.
- PaulHoule 6y agoFrankly Netflix scares me and I am scared more by the proliferation of the Netflix model to video games. What I saw happen with television is that it went from a ratings based model (they had to make stuff people wanted to watch) to a model where the "cable bundle" was determined by cigar-chompers in a dark room somewhere. I can say I want this group of 20 channels, but I can't say I want CNBC but not CNN, Fox and MSNBC. They get paid anyway so now there is no connection between "what I want as a consumer" and "what I get". So of course you get slow decline like we've seen with the cable industry -- the only meaningful conversation you can have through the market is "exit". Netflix has only "exit" and "not-exit", it doesn't have market signals that say you can do 1% better and make 1% profits. So ultimately it gets a dull edge. So many firms are falling over each other to offer you all the Madden NFL and Assassin's Creed you could possibly play and I am frustrated that people don't perceive that this has happened to MTV and most of the other cable channels since the 1980s: when I was a teen we watched music videos, but a 70-year old man bought the network and decided that he didn't want us to watch music videos. Once Youtube let people chose what to watch we found that people still love watching music videos: does anyone watch MTV? I'm sure there is somebody long past youth in Hollywood who thinks they can stay in touch with "youth culture" by watching MTV. I suspect there is a TV set in a Nielsen home that blasts away 24 hours a day with nobody watching. Other than that I don't know.
- turkeywelder 6y agoWe did the same, it's I think one of our best moves because everyone just gets the same price, nobody feels like they're missing out and it's super easy to administrate so we can concentrate on the product, not the pricing.
- siftrics 6y agoI have to say — nice product. It’s very clean. I can see how people are convinced to try it. I want to sign up just to experience more of the buttery-smooth UI.
- teraku 6y agoHaha I've built a very rudimental version of this for my personal documents. No grouping or categorizing of text areas, just PDF->OCR->Database. I do scan for letterheads, though, and save them in a separate table. A question, if I may: How big is your userbase?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mbesto 6y ago3 column is used for anchoring you to get to the desired pricing (the middle one). https://www.nickkolenda.com/conversion-optimization-psychology/#cro-tactic17 https://www.nickkolenda.com/conversion-optimization-psycholo...
- m12k 6y agoAlso, if you can change the framing so the decision becomes 'which option should I go for?' instead of 'do I want to buy this at all?' then that's a valuable bit of sleight of hand. But it comes with the risk of decision fatigue
- teraku 6y agoWhile this might be true from a sales perspective, I'm actually annoyed when there is a product I want to buy and then I see these tiers.
- pc86 6y agoBut how many times have you said "I was going to give you money, but now that you're giving me options on how much money to give you, I'm not going to give you any."
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y agoWouldn't it be more like "I was considering giving you money, but if you're going to make me work for it then I'll reconsider"?
- Thorentis 6y agoThis is a valid point. I've gone to sign up for a SaaS before, read through the features list and thought it was great, and then realised they've split all the features up among plans and I'll need to pay more than I was expecting to. Obviously this just means that the highest tier plan is what they think all the features together are worth, but I often find that for smaller SaaSes, the desire to have 3 plans shapes how they do their pricing, so the highest "all inclusive" plan is more expensive than it otherwise would be if there was a single plan.
- tiffanyh 6y agoThanks for sharing your company, https://siftrics.com https://siftrics.com I'd never heard of your company but this service looks GREAT. I wish you financial success. Question: your price points are sooooo low (which is great for the consumer) but I get concerned it's too low for your company to stay viable. Is that a concern? Please don't take this an me knocking your company. I really love what I've seen on your site.
- dubcanada 6y agoWhat exactly is "soooooo low" about $0.50 for a 1000 pages?
- dternyak 6y agoIf your customer is someone who previously had a team doing manual data entry, this pricing certainly leaves a lot on the table. I would imagine most customers being happy to tolerate a 10x increase in price without breaking a sweat, assuming there's no one else in the space offering a cheaper solution.
- TylerE 6y agoSaid 10x increase would put them at ~ the same price as the amzn and goog services the homepage mentions, so...
- sokoloff 6y agoI can't imagine a use case where I'd be willing to go the hassle of paying $0.50 for 1000 pages but wouldn't pay $2.50 or more for those same 1000 pages. It would take me probably an hour or more to scan 1000 pages. Given that, I don't see a significant difference between spending "an hour plus two quarters" and "an hour plus ten quarters".
- siftrics 6y agoFirst of all, thank you! The point of the pure text recognition service is to draw business; not to make a profit. Without the "Advanced Features", the service operates at a slight loss. However, the profit margins and total volume we do on "Advanced Features" covers the loss and turns a profit. On the Hydra (Documents-to-Database) side of things, I think we charge enough. Margins are very high.
- didip 6y agowow, your product offering is great! I could see it being very useful to small businesses that work with paper a lot.
- CodesInChaos 6y agoI don't see much difference between your "products" and "plans with different feature sets", except yours is priced per use instead of as a subscription.
- OJFord 6y agoAlso, 'First 1,000 pages free, then'. GP - I can put this into columnar format for you, if you want...
- jfk13 6y agoA minor nit, perhaps, but you have a jarring typo on the home page: "software devleoper".
- pkaye 6y agoWhat would be the difference between Siftrics vs standalone OCR software? Does it handle complex documents better or something?
- siftrics 6y ago>Does it handle complex documents better or something? Exactly. It can handle tables of information with a variable number of rows from document to document. It can also handle arbitrary rotation, skew, offset and cropping. To see an example of some extreme cases: https://siftrics.com/hydra.html https://siftrics.com/hydra.html >What would be the difference between Siftrics vs standalone OCR software? The reason I started Siftrics is this: Lots and lots of businesses need to put data from their documents into a database. Standalone text recognition gets you 75% there. I thought, at the end of the day, companies still have to hire engineers to write programs --- which _do_ leverage standalone OCR/text recognition --- that are specially tailored to their documents. I want to eliminate those specially-tailored programs. Now Hydra isn't perfect, but in many cases (people are willing to pay for it), Hydra reduces those specially-tailored programs to a single function call... client.recognize('avionics-invoice', ['invoice_1.pdf', 'invoice_2.pdf']) ...followed by your database insert. :)
- The_rationalist 6y agoIs siftrics using or considering to use the current state of the art?https://paperswithcode.com/sota/optical-character-recognition-on-fsns-test https://paperswithcode.com/sota/optical-character-recognitio... https://paperswithcode.com/task/scene-text-detection https://paperswithcode.com/task/scene-text-detection
- siftrics 6y agoYes! We handle human handwriting and more than 100 languages. I encourage you try it yourself. After all, you get 1,000 pages for free :)