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I feel for you on the level of that is a scary moment when things stop working. And, I think it’s somewhat crummy of any company to not make downgrading a plan

by yial 4y ago

I feel for you on the level of that is a scary moment when things stop working. And, I think it’s somewhat crummy of any company to not make downgrading a plan work as smoothly as possible. However, you said this is for your company’s product, something you bring money in with? And it’s something that you were planning to migrate away from, but hadn’t yet? I just would say that one - on the other side, why should their business support a paid product for free? I think it’s nice they do, but they could as easily not allow the free plan to be projects that make money. Also, just as a business operations perspective, planning to migrate and migrating/migrated are very different things. Also, $99 a year is cheap as a business expense if it’s bringing you in money. Our fixed costs right now between tech, utilities, etc etc before come in at $4,500 ish per month. And I think we’re very frugal. Understand different scales but… Maybe I’m not understanding and I’m being overly critical? If so I apologize.

nkmnz 4y ago
I like your attitude and you’re mostly right! The thing I criticise (from a customer perspective) is not the terms of a downgrade, it’s the deceitful communication while downgrading: “you can stay, you fit the free tier” - later: “oh, that free tier really does not exist for you, now pay a 100 bucks, haha” From a business perspective, I think it’s not wise to treat long time customers that badly, I will never ever come back. From a founder/builder perspective, I mostly criticise myself: the first subscription was justified, because the license for the icons themselves is perpetual and they are really nice imo. The mistake was to rely on their kits because they are so convenient - of course, 99$ seems cheap at first, but so is this and that and a server here and a paid SaaS there… Sometimes you need to clean up a bit :) the real mistake, however, was to allow the dependency on a provider for such a thing like icons. It would have been very easy to either 1. Self host them 2. Download them at build time instead of run time 3. Implement fallbacks if their servers go down.
jasonkester 4y ago
$99 a year is cheap as a business expense if it’s bringing you in money. Indeed. They could have paid for another 15 years of the service for just what it cost this one engineer to clean up from this mistake. Probably another 30 years worth to stand up and migrate to their own hosted version, assuming it never needs any maintenance whatsoever. Hopefully they’ll have the sense to not touch it further.
- nkmnz 4y ago
  1) You overestimate a founder’s salary by 20-30x - 100 dollars is more than a day’s net salary. 2) The problem, again, is the false claim during downgrade. 3) self hosting a couple of icons is a matter of 15-30min - make a request to the kit, store assets, commit, push, deploy demo, test, deploy prod, done. But not if the kit is not accessible anymore - even though advertised as such. 4) I agree it has been a mistake to ever rely on a 3rd party to host icons. From todays POV, it’s ridiculous I’ve ever made that lazy decision.
  - jasonkester 4y ago
    You overestimate a founder’s salary by 20-30x - 100 dollars is more than a day’s net salary. When I’m bootstrapping, I tend to value my time at my normal consulting rate, since that’s what we’re ultimately comparing to. If I wasn’t putting this hour into the client on a work day, I’d be billing it to a client, so that’s the opportunity cost in my head. But yeah, that certainly changes the math a bit. My reply above was in the more normal context of a salaried engineer deciding to save the company £10/month by spending £15,000 in billable hours building an alternative.

by yial 4y ago

nkmnz 4y ago

I like your attitude and you’re mostly right! The thing I criticise (from a customer perspective) is not the terms of a downgrade, it’s the deceitful communication while downgrading: “you can stay, you fit the free tier” - later: “oh, that free tier really does not exist for you, now pay a 100 bucks, haha” From a business perspective, I think it’s not wise to treat long time customers that badly, I will never ever come back. From a founder/builder perspective, I mostly criticise myself: the first subscription was justified, because the license for the icons themselves is perpetual and they are really nice imo. The mistake was to rely on their kits because they are so convenient - of course, 99$ seems cheap at first, but so is this and that and a server here and a paid SaaS there… Sometimes you need to clean up a bit :) the real mistake, however, was to allow the dependency on a provider for such a thing like icons. It would have been very easy to either 1. Self host them 2. Download them at build time instead of run time 3. Implement fallbacks if their servers go down.

jasonkester 4y ago

$99 a year is cheap as a business expense if it’s bringing you in money. Indeed. They could have paid for another 15 years of the service for just what it cost this one engineer to clean up from this mistake. Probably another 30 years worth to stand up and migrate to their own hosted version, assuming it never needs any maintenance whatsoever. Hopefully they’ll have the sense to not touch it further.

nkmnz 4y ago
1) You overestimate a founder’s salary by 20-30x - 100 dollars is more than a day’s net salary. 2) The problem, again, is the false claim during downgrade. 3) self hosting a couple of icons is a matter of 15-30min - make a request to the kit, store assets, commit, push, deploy demo, test, deploy prod, done. But not if the kit is not accessible anymore - even though advertised as such. 4) I agree it has been a mistake to ever rely on a 3rd party to host icons. From todays POV, it’s ridiculous I’ve ever made that lazy decision.
- jasonkester 4y ago
  You overestimate a founder’s salary by 20-30x - 100 dollars is more than a day’s net salary. When I’m bootstrapping, I tend to value my time at my normal consulting rate, since that’s what we’re ultimately comparing to. If I wasn’t putting this hour into the client on a work day, I’d be billing it to a client, so that’s the opportunity cost in my head. But yeah, that certainly changes the math a bit. My reply above was in the more normal context of a salaried engineer deciding to save the company £10/month by spending £15,000 in billable hours building an alternative.