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Welcome to the world of saavy SaaS businesses. Smart/enterprising SaaS founders and businesses these days all know to tie their billing to whatever metric/KPI t

Welcome to the world of saavy SaaS businesses. Smart/enterprising SaaS founders and businesses these days all know to tie their billing to whatever metric/KPI they are solving for customers -- per-seat billing, per-pageview, etc. Why make a little money (even if it's 2-10x your cost) when you can make much more by taking a small-seeming percentage of every single <whatever> that comes through your business. When your customer wins (and when they aren't winning you aren't a huge strain on their wallets) you win, and if the 0-5% eaten up by their bundle of SaaS products never matters to them, then you get wildly rich doing it and no one is angry about it, since the incentives are aligned. Then you plow that extra revenue (that you wouldn't have gotten from the simple 2x-10x your cost) into expanding your service offering so you deliver so much value (or perceived value) that moving away from your service just doesn't make sense. This is HN and just about everyone and their mother knows this at this point, and has been living it for longer than I've been writing computers but I'll say it anyway -- Stripe is the dream SaaS company, essentially a financial middleman that no one hates (yet?). The SaaS promised land is a somewhat close cousin of the dystopian everyone-is-a-renter-and-only-a-few-own-the-capital future. Maybe the hand wringing I'm doing is wrong -- maybe it should have been the case all along that solution providers should have extracted a never ending royalty on the revenue generated by the solutions they provide. Not only service providers but maybe workers should want that (no one remembers pensions, but they kind of were this) too. Who knows. If you can sell a music single album to 0.3% of America for $1, you get $1MM. If you do that with a Stripe store, Stripe gets ~$30k, for infrastructure that probably cost them less than $300 to host (for a single customer) and an ever-decreasing amortized amount to build (assuming they eventually stop growing their development workforce for growth stake). The artist that just made $1MM probably doesn't care about $30k as a millionaire (maybe they should, maybe they shouldn't). It's a win-win, and it's why Stripe's goal is to increase the GDP of the internet.

justsomeuser 5y ago
Apparently Buffet calls this a “toll booth” business. Once the road is built (customer integrates Stripe into their state machine), you can just keep collecting their toll for driving on the Stripe highway.
- hardwaresofton 5y ago
  Middlemen all the way down. At this point I think the question is when does the fatigue start? Maybe it never does -- if 10 companies all take 0.5%, you're at 5% but what if you use them to run 90% of the work of running your actual business? For many businesses that would be worth it (and most SaaS-ers and proper business people would heartily agree). I'm about to go off on a wild tangent here but I think this is the obvious endgame for autonomous vehicles (article from Ars Technical on this hit HN just today[0]). More narrative for that world where no one owns anything and everyone rents forever and if you didn't own capital by 2100 your chance to do so is now infinitesimal. Safety of autonomous cars will surpass human driving, human driving will be outlawed, and the toll booth behavior will kick in with either companies licensing self driving technology, or the cars, or just running the services. Yeah, you never pay the $1-2k to buy a beat up first car (that could have lasted you 5 years with careful care and proper maintenance), but you're stuck on the $8.50/day ($2040/year if you commute to work 240 days/year), forever. Another wilder tangent (possibly too much of a distraction from the topic at hand) -- this future is one of the reasons I am skeptical of UBI. UBI feels like the fastest way to encourage every kind of company to take this route. If you know every citizen will get $1k/month, the monopoly-dominated markets will fight (initially, at least) to get their share of that guaranteed $1k, almost as a form of governmental graft. Differentiated work pools get rarer and rarer (people specialize up, but automation gets better, ad infinitum), and at some point a large mass of people are getting UBI + gig economy wages. The corporations who have carved their part of the daily budget out never stop winning -- they now don't need to worry about economic conditions for their now-somewhat-more-distant gig worker force, the government will step in to help citizens, and those corporations can continue to influence those proceedings. What breaks this cycle? Is the goal a utopian world where $UBI is actually enough to free people of work completely? That never seems to be the goal, or maybe I just haven't seen enough people play out enough steps in the UBI plan. I just know that when people doing really well in the current capitalism-on-overdrive system start to get behind something that really seems like a utopia for those doing not-so-well in the current system, there's a catch. [0]: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/06/volkswagen-plans-to-offer-subscriptions-for-autonomous-driving-extra-ev-range/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/06/volkswagen-plans-to-off...
- cashewchoo 5y ago

justsomeuser 5y ago

Apparently Buffet calls this a “toll booth” business. Once the road is built (customer integrates Stripe into their state machine), you can just keep collecting their toll for driving on the Stripe highway.

hardwaresofton 5y ago
Middlemen all the way down. At this point I think the question is when does the fatigue start? Maybe it never does -- if 10 companies all take 0.5%, you're at 5% but what if you use them to run 90% of the work of running your actual business? For many businesses that would be worth it (and most SaaS-ers and proper business people would heartily agree). I'm about to go off on a wild tangent here but I think this is the obvious endgame for autonomous vehicles (article from Ars Technical on this hit HN just today[0]). More narrative for that world where no one owns anything and everyone rents forever and if you didn't own capital by 2100 your chance to do so is now infinitesimal. Safety of autonomous cars will surpass human driving, human driving will be outlawed, and the toll booth behavior will kick in with either companies licensing self driving technology, or the cars, or just running the services. Yeah, you never pay the $1-2k to buy a beat up first car (that could have lasted you 5 years with careful care and proper maintenance), but you're stuck on the $8.50/day ($2040/year if you commute to work 240 days/year), forever. Another wilder tangent (possibly too much of a distraction from the topic at hand) -- this future is one of the reasons I am skeptical of UBI. UBI feels like the fastest way to encourage every kind of company to take this route. If you know every citizen will get $1k/month, the monopoly-dominated markets will fight (initially, at least) to get their share of that guaranteed $1k, almost as a form of governmental graft. Differentiated work pools get rarer and rarer (people specialize up, but automation gets better, ad infinitum), and at some point a large mass of people are getting UBI + gig economy wages. The corporations who have carved their part of the daily budget out never stop winning -- they now don't need to worry about economic conditions for their now-somewhat-more-distant gig worker force, the government will step in to help citizens, and those corporations can continue to influence those proceedings. What breaks this cycle? Is the goal a utopian world where $UBI is actually enough to free people of work completely? That never seems to be the goal, or maybe I just haven't seen enough people play out enough steps in the UBI plan. I just know that when people doing really well in the current capitalism-on-overdrive system start to get behind something that really seems like a utopia for those doing not-so-well in the current system, there's a catch. [0]: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/06/volkswagen-plans-to-offer-subscriptions-for-autonomous-driving-extra-ev-range/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/06/volkswagen-plans-to-off...
cashewchoo 5y ago