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Honestly the comments are a good example on how difficult it is to sell to developers and why startup ideas that target developers are dangerous to bootstrap.

by rcconf 3y ago

Honestly the comments are a good example on how difficult it is to sell to developers and why startup ideas that target developers are dangerous to bootstrap. Developers have high incomes, but are quite frankly, extremely cheap. And I actually mean cheap and not frugal. They will spend 40 hours/week for months to save $5/mo. There's basically no logic apart from that developers have a poor concept of time and money and are spending averse (again, cheap.) In this case, this tool is $30/mo, or about $360 / year, what is that, 3 dinners for 2 people in a year? The tool may save the developer, let's say 3-4 hours / week and at 52 * 3 or about 156 hours of savings a year. At even 30 an hour, it's saved the developer $4,680, or at 60/hour, close to $10,000, but I can guarantee that 99% of developers will not spend $30/month to make their lives easier. My only recommendation is try to sell this product to businesses and maybe offer them a deal based on the amount of developers they have. So sell it do a dev shop with 10 developers at $20/developer / per month. Businesses understand the time/money tradeoff and are not cheap. Developers, my only word of advice, is seriously.. stop being so cheap and spend some money to make your lives easier.

micromacrofoot 3y ago
> stop being so cheap and spend some money to make your lives easier if I wanted to make my life easier I'd stop using emacs and arch linux and no I won't
tmikaeld 3y ago
I don't think developers in general are cheap, it's that they are employed somewhere and therefore it doesn't benefit THEM to save time, it benefits their employer. It may even be detrimental to the developer as it put higher expectations on the developer to produce more if the suddenly perform better at a specific task..
- codemonkey-zeta 3y ago
  It absolutely does benefit me to save time, because writing css by hand is one of the most soul-crushingly boring tasks imaginable. Sure my employer also benefits, but that's only if I use that saved time to write more code. Maybe I use the extra time to walk my dog.
  - Hamuko 3y ago
    I have a fixed number of working hours in a week regardless of my efficiency, so even if I manage to make myself efficient, I don't reap the benefits.
- lolinder 3y ago
  Most tools like this are priced with the understanding that they'll be billed to the employer in the end, not paid out of pocket by the developer. They probably need to add org licenses soon in order to better accommodate that.
  - filmgirlcw 3y ago
    Yeah, but a lot of employers would still bristle at $180 a year (if you pay in advance) for a souped up version of dev tools. Not to mention that most places that would have a budget for something like this would need to do a security audit of anything like this. If you’re a consultant or have a lot of client projects, you can absolutely bill the client for this sort of thing. But that’s not the situation for everyone and certainly doesn’t strike me as the audience being targeted by the landing page.
    - sroussey 3y ago
      Back in the day, we had requested donations for Firebug (which had millions of installs) and the revenue was embarrassingly pathetic. We used it to give contributors in non-western countries some bonuses from time to time.
      - zerocrates 3y ago
        There you're taking the already high-ish barrier for devs to pay for tools, as discussed elsewhere in this thread, and adding on the really high barrier to get people to donate to things they can use for free.
        sroussey 3y ago
        True, but there was a high barrier to entry to just install it. And for a long time there was little else you could use. On the other hand, it was free and more important to get people to use it and be more productive then generate revenue.
        3y ago
speedgoose 3y ago
I understand your point but $30 more per month to have a web inspector that is slightly nicer in some way but also much more limited in many other ways is expensive. Monthly subscriptions adds up and not everyone has too much money.
- rcconf 3y ago
  Let's say they sells it at $10 / mo. They would need 1,000 customers to make a reasonable wage at $10,000 / month. If they sells it at $30/month, they would need only 300 customers. Can you imagine how annoying it would be to deal with 1,000 cheap customers that expect the world? Maybe they should sell it at $100/mo and sell it to only 100 people that really care about the problem. Maybe just sell it to a business for $200/mo for all developers, they would only need 50 businesses to make $10,000/month and they would also remove the annoying, cheap, high expectation developer out of the equation. Developers and engineers are probably the worst customer to have, insane expectations, complain about everything, criticize everything and use a magnifying glass to point out any issues, black/white thinking etc. My theory is writing code has all of these expectations in it. You need to be highly critical, black/white (or you would drift into a world of options.) have insane expectations (or your manager gets mad at you.) etc. All great qualities for writing code, but the worst qualities for a customer. I'm a developer too by the way, so please don't be offended, I've been there and done that, the other side is much nicer. For example, I activated my iCloud to 2TB at $10/mo instead of making a custom backup solution that I can run for $2/mo. Would I have done that years ago? Yes and the result would have been me spending 80 hours building the backup system that can't even get my photos back on my phone properly. What I'm trying to say is, it's sad to watch developers suffer for a small amount of money per month. I honestly believe it's a failure of the people who manage developers. I may be reaching here, but I think a lot of developers have been treated poorly in general from managers, projects and high expectations. They are rarely rewarded properly which is actual recognition for the work they do. It's not free massages, free lunches and cool workspaces. As a result, I believe developers are the givers and the companies and managers are the takers. The takers siphon the life out of developers and to the point where they're so risk averse they won't even spend $100 to go to a spa to relieve some stress. They're so risk averse they won't even spend $30/month to make their lives easier. What am I saying? Developers SPEND some money on yourselves. You DESERVE IT for the hard work you do. Stop being so risk averse just because the work you do is so. Rant over.
last_responder 3y ago
>Developers, my only word of advice, is seriously.. stop being so cheap and spend some money to make your lives easier. >but I can guarantee that 99% of developers will not spend $30/month to make their lives easier. Your post is insulting and it really seems like it is an ad for this product.
- sb8244 3y ago
  It is insulting, but sometimes the shoe fits. Developer tools is notoriously difficult because engineers (and their managers, and the teams) are very cheap.
  - sroussey 3y ago
    If a dev thinks they could build it themselves, they won’t pay. You have to cross a line where the dev does not want to even entertain the idea of building it. So backends for front end engineers, for example.
    - Sai_ 3y ago
      Yeah, this makes sense to me. I’m sure if you asked a trained chef if they’d buy some overpriced gourmet food at a chic place, they’d say no. They’re making exactly the same choice as a developer when it comes to visualising how much effort it takes to make a similar tool/food. Since developers know (broadly) how the sausage is made, it’s going to be hard to get them to spring for basic sausage dressed well and slickly presented.
ekianjo 3y ago
> Developers, my only word of advice, is seriously.. stop being so cheap and spend some money to make your lives easier. 30 USD here, 30 USD there, soon enough your bills go in the hundreds or thousands of dollars.
- patrec 3y ago
  So you mean if after 30 or so such subscriptions you only increase your productivity by 0.1% you still come out ahead?
  - interactivecode 3y ago
    9 other subscriptions and I only have to work 0 hours a week
quickthrower2 3y ago
* This tool may increase my time spent rather than save time. I need to spend time to find out. So I don’t buy every one of the million tools because I am too cheap. I don’t have time to evaluate all of them. * I have no way of cashing in saved time anyway * Developers can affect spending decisions at work worth $1000s to one SaaS at the expense of another or in addition. If we can save a hire through $50k/y in SaaS bills we will.
aceazzameen 3y ago
No. Monthly subscriptions suck. Every company wants to "tax" me monthly for something that's feature complete. The ones I already pay, I do so very begrudgingly. There's simply too many SaaS products out there. Let's go back to perpetual licenses. And I'll gladly pay for upgraded versions, or not if the upgrade isn't worthwhile. When it's not SaaS, I also get to control what version I'm using. The product doesn't own me, I get to own the product.
- ggoo 3y ago
  This is the most developer response I could've imagined. I love it.
- LeonB 3y ago
  It might be a pedantic point but when you buy a perpetual license you don’t “own” the product - you “own” a license to use the product, on the terms in the license.
  - aziaziazi 3y ago
    OP “own” the product in the sense “use it as long as he want in the terms defined in the license at the time it’s bought.” Adobe can’t change the license of the Photoshop CS3 cd-rom I bought a while ago. If I’m using their current subscription version I would only use the license to use the product in the time defined by the subscription.
    - sammyoos 3y ago
      I’m guessing the reason this is brought up is because of the concern about if the license server goes down or the company goes out of business can I still use the product.
      - aziaziazi 3y ago
        That would make sense! Could we use today an usb stick (similar to the digital wallet ones) to “validate” the ownership without relying on a server, like cd+license did 15 years ago?
globalise83 3y ago
Maybe this should have a slightly different audience than developers, namely UX designers, technical product managers (semi-technical folks who know about html and css), etc. so that they can play around with their products, produce prototypes based on the actual product, share design specifications more easily etc. For example, I am a semi-technical product manager, meaning I know enough about coding to be able to make whatever simple UI changes I want, but leave actual development of the products to the professionals. I would use this tool and maybe recommend to my business paying for it if it genuinely saves some time over making the same changes in dev tools. For example, the ability to prototype a new UI feature "inside" my existing products, and then share the prototype with someone would be extremely valuable to me. Currently I use the "edit as html" tool in dev tools and then apply some styling to the new elements. Of course, if I hit refresh by mistake, I would lose my changes. Has happened before!
tailspin2019 3y ago
It’s not just about the price. It’s also about how it’s pitched and what the on ramp looks like. In this case, without a free trial, there is a much bigger gap to traverse to go from “not a customer” to “paying monthly”. It’s also harder if you are not the one paying the bills and need to pitch/sell such a tool internally.
sy7ar 3y ago
Unless all your work involves CSS I doubt it saves 3-4 hours / week. Also, saving 3 hours of work doesn't mean you get paid for 3 hours more. It's also a dependency that's not guaranteed to exist as long as the default browser dev tools or available on every machine.
- mnsc 3y ago
  If all you do is css I doubt you have a workflow where this tool would save you 3-4 hours a week. It might even be ~20 minutes/week and 10 minutes/week stumbling while relearning your habits to use (depend on) this tool. And then a year later when you are completely dependent on this tool. Boom. It's now acquired by and part of Atom Text Editor Enterprise Ide where all those who invested too much in Atom went to die.
- methodical 3y ago
  Couldn't agree with this more. It's always nice to think that some super clean UI beats making quick CSS adjustments alongside HMR or a quick build time but in my experience it probably never does. If I wanted to test different font weights of some text I wouldn't go into the CSS in my browser and adjust it, I'd just change the value in my CSS (helped more-so by CSS frameworks such as Tailwind), and see how the output changed. The upside being that if I like how it looks, I've already made the change to my code. I don't know who this would realistically save any significant amount of time a week for outside of an inexperienced developer who doesn't have a pretty good idea of how slight style differences will impact the final product.
- tilakraj_0308 3y ago
  Hello everyone(edited)
lowercased 3y ago
I have opened myself up for more subscription services over the last couple of years. I freelance. My income is generally 'high', but irregular. Monthly subscriptions aren't irregular. Having a need for a tool for 2 months on a project, then... maybe needing it 4 months from now means I have to keep subscribing to the service even when I don't use it. I've kept things around at $30/month for months longer than I needed to because there wasn't a good way to export the data, then reimport it later if I needed it again in that tool. Taking time to determine the impact of stopping a subscription isn't always simple. I'm paying for 2 services that do something similar. Tried the second one that said "oh, we can import your data from the other service!". It can't, but I didn't try soon enough, and now I have setups in two services. My own fault for not trying soon enough, but taking time to manually move from svc 1 to 2 (or 2 to 1) will take a lot more than than any 'savings' I might get from these. I've paid for jetbrains for years, and I pay for some hosting/cloud services (linode, DO, AWS, etc). I've paid for copilot. I've paid for some other IDE helper/services. I've got clients who pay for dropbox/similar. Average of $25/month, but times... say 8 on average (monthly or yearly external services I use)... That's not nothing to me. I can live with it, but half of these I'm not using regularly, but am somewhat held hostage because cancelling the service will lose my data which I may want to use on another project in the near future. So.. I keep holding on to things I'm not using in the hopes that I'll "save 2 hours/week!" 4 months from now. Some of these services don't play nicely with sharing - many bootstrapped services don't give me ways to share my account with someone else, or transfer my data to a client, for example. (some do, but not all). Even if I want that feature, and I'm a paying customer, if I'm in the minority, I won't get that feature. I understand your sentiment about "stop being cheap" but... even once I got past that, and got comfortable paying for more services, it's not always a good ROI (short term, usually yes, long term... no). "to make your lives easier". My life would be easier if I could use the service for a time, export all my data, cancel, then resume service by bringing my data in again later. OR... let me 'pause' monthly rebilling for a few months. An account 'freeze' feature - suspend service and billing for X months, Y times per year - would let me feel I'm getting more value when I need it. Yes, it would disrupt projected cash flow, but it would "make my life easier". My gym lets me do this. I can 'freeze' my membership for up to 4 months at a time per calendar year. I've done it when I know I'm going to be out of town for a few weeks - no way I'm going to use for the next 6 weeks. I'll freeze for the next month, then resume.
monkey_monkey 3y ago
Or perhaps I don't want to get fleeced and/or locked in to a model where if I stop paying, I lose access to an offline program that costs the app developer NOTHING extra for my use
roblh 3y ago
It’s actually incredible how cheap we are. I catch myself doing it, and what makes it even more ridiculous is how much I won’t even think twice about spending on other things that are just hobbies. Why does my brain think it’s fine to spend hundreds of dollars on a microphone or a lens or even a plugin that is actually also software, but $50 for a tool that will help me with my 40 hour a week job is out of the question. A bit more on topic though, I don’t really see this as a tool aimed at developers. Watching the demo on the site, this isn’t really how I interact with css at all. I don’t need a color wheel or draggable sliders with ultra fine resolution. The real utility, for me, of a tool like this, would be if you could set up essentially an internal style guide that would limit the possible options for all of the values to retain consistency. Then it would be great for finishing touches, sitting beside a designer or something.
- JackFr 3y ago
  Well for me this would be a hobby purchase. The problem is that while I could justify dropping $150 on something like this to myself, I don't want to pay for it by the month, knowing that most months I won't use it.
- OJFord 3y ago
  If it's helping the job then we ought to (be able to) expense it, there's a much higher bar for getting me to pay personally to help my work - as in it can't just be 'do it faster' (at the end of the day, do/should I care?) it would need to be posture/eye strain improving and not offered by employer, or something like that. Imagine an embedded engineer personally buying a higher bandwidth 'scope (or whatever) to better debug an issue or QA before release. I don't doubt it happens, but I think it's more clearly unreasonable, and I don't think theres any reason it makes more sense with software. Especially since software might well have per-device licencing, so you put it on your work machine and then what? ('I have better kit at home, I'm taking the DUT home for the weekend' is still overworking, but probably a lot more common, and I don't think quite the same/as bad as personal spend motivated by work.) Regarding 'developers are cheap' directly, in my (limited, but spanning large & very small/growing company) experience businesses are cheap: they multiply the per-seat cost by head count and run scared, overlooking completely that it's a rounding error on payroll, or that it's more than covered by the unpaid salaries of open positions that might've been filled. (Obviously there are boring reasons this can be that you don't need to reply to me about. So too are there myriad reasons not to buy something personally beyond being 'cheap'.)
KomoD 3y ago
> Developers have high incomes, but are quite frankly, extremely cheap. We're not all making 100k+/yr, $30/mo is a significant amount.
kwanbix 3y ago
The problem is not a single subscription. The problem is that today everything is a subscription. So you end up paying 600 euros per month from 20 subscriptions of "just 30 euros" and if you don't pay attention, you can even pay more.
douglaswlance 3y ago
Developers in general aren't cheap. Developers who spend their time commenting about how something is too expensives are cheap.
filmgirlcw 3y ago
Spending money is one thing. I don’t think most devs are opposed to doing that, especially for things that are central to your work. But I’m hard-pressed to see how a browser extension that will improve but not demonstrable change how browser dev tools work is worth $30 a month. This reminds me of Mighty, the $30 a month web browser that promised to be a lot faster and better (it ran off of cloud servers), but was absolutely not worth $30 a month (and I tried it and gave it an honest shot and it wasn’t). Mighty failed and now I think is trying to pivot to some sort of AI generative art thing. Pricing too high will kill your business the same way pricing too low will. It has nothing to do with people being cheap, it has to do with value proposition, especially relative to other tools.
Alifatisk 3y ago
I think it’s the monthly subscription for a offline product is what makes the devs to loose their interest, and I get it. I don’t own the product when subscribing, I am only leasing it for as long as I pay. I don’t like that, I prefer to own my products. Everything is slowly turning into a subscription, sure this is only 30$ a month, but if all my products were subscription based, I would go bankrupt.
sammywater 3y ago
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unshavedyak 3y ago
> They will spend 40 hours/week for months to save $5/mo. There's basically no logic apart from that developers have a poor concept of time and money and are spending averse (again, cheap.) To slightly counter. I am a developer with a high-ish (average for the industry, i suppose) income. I love paying for my tools. HOWEVER, i expect you'd call me cheap. Why? Well because i am very averse to subscriptions, and i think this is primarily due to being a developer and being around this culture. This culture which is flooded with startups all wanting X$ per seat, user, etc. I've seen these things scale excessively on loop. It's not 1 $5 sub. It's the 20 tools all vying for subscriptions, tiers of subscriptions, etc. I happily pay for things i can buy that improve my DX or productivity. However subs have to be exceptionally good to justify because they're in competition, in my head, with every other sub i already manage. Even if it doesn't make sense to have X and Y products "compete" because they're not even remotely related - they are in my head. They're in the list of subscriptions which i obsessively prune because this industry has left me feeling like i need to. I love "subs" like JetBrains though.
unsupp0rted 3y ago
I have a theory that a lot of us became developers after being poor teenagers who downloaded warez for $0 in the olden days. For that reason, where software is concerned, for us the distance between $0 and $1 is even wider than the already wide distance it is for the general population.
deleted 3y ago
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monkeynotes 3y ago
> The tool may save the developer, let's say 3-4 hours / week Seriously? Half a day a week?? As a professional FE dev there is no way this would save me 4hrs a week, every week. The existing dev tools are familiar, and while not perfect, get the job done. This tool is sugar on top of that, I can't see how it would save me so much time. I think regular folk, and non front-end engineers could find it easier and more approachable than dev tools, but I can see why target audience engineers won't put up $30/m for it. Edit: If this tool could demonstrably show a 3-4hr a week time saving go and show it to managers, they'll snap it up. Fact is corps are cheaper than ICs at the coal face. This is if you class "cheap" as being extremely efficient with your resources. Just because engineers are well paid doesn't mean they should stop being efficient with their income. I'd rather spend $30 a month on lunch than on another magic tool.
marcosdumay 3y ago
People don't like subscriptions. And for entirely rational reasons, even if they can't articulate them. If you insist on selling subscriptions for people, they will treat it as predatory pricing (because for them it is) and will antagonize you. Companies, on the other hand, just love subscriptions. Also for entirely rational reasons. Now, if you insist on ignoring that fundamental difference, it's a "you" problem, not with your public.
- n8cpdx 3y ago
  People keep saying there are rational reasons, but I haven’t seen a single response here that doesn’t boil down to “feels”. They have a perpetual license option, not hidden. I think maybe people have so much feels that they are just bandwagoning here rather than using their noggins and evaluating the value of the product. Disappointing. Wanting to pay $900 for a product that might stop existing or be outcompeted in a year is not rational.
  - Domenic_S 3y ago
    There are a bunch of good responses here. 1. You don't own the software. Company decides to turn off the license server you're SOL. 2. Managing subscriptions is hard. So hard that multiple companies have popped up that purport to save you money by finding subscriptions you forgot about. I can think of a few that I have that I forget about until I see the invoice every month (and then forget it again). 3. Canceling subscriptions can be hard but it's impossible to know until you try. Some companies let you sign up with 2 clicks but make you call a phone number (that's only open odd hours) to cancel, and other well-known dark patterns. Aversion to that is aversion to subscriptions.
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    There were plenty of reasons on the threads here if you look for it. Just because somebody is mostly talking about emotions doesn't mean the argument are not rational. Anyway, people have different risk profiles than companies. Interest-rate based present day adjustments are meaningless, because they don't have the same opportunities on monetary markets; existential risks are well, really existential, instead of what they are for companies; power relations are extremely important, because people don't get any power; and so on. Again, if you insist on fixing it, it's a "you" problem that will lead to well deserve failures.
woodpanel 3y ago
> Developers have high incomes, but are quite frankly, extremely cheap. And I actually mean cheap and not frugal. They will spend 40 hours/week for months to save $5/mo Personal anecdote: Long time ago when still working in a physical office building, the co-workers and me would each amass significant amounts of empty returnable bottles by the end of each week on one's desk. This irked me because it looked rather unprofessional, cost desk- or foot space and came with recurrent noise of someone knocking over the whole assortment. I then bought me a potato sack to just place my bottles in it in order to give the place a more hipsteresque feel and to give me more dignity carrying those bottles away. So what do you think my high income comrades did? Yes, they did buy potato sacks as well... after studying customer reviews for multiple potato sacks on Amazon for a week (Goes without saying that they bought them all regardless of the week-long study effort to try them out and send the "non-performant" ones back to get refunded).
interactivecode 3y ago
the way you calculate savings is not really true in reality. even if I can now do my work 4 hours a week faster. I'm not immediately getting a pay bump, my boss just gives me 4hours of extra work. It won't give me 4 hours a week back, because my boss still reserves my time for those 4 hours. My household won't have an extra 30 euro a month to spend on those dinners. actually it will directly have 30 euro less to spend on dinners. so yeah all those considerations make me cautious paying for more subscriptions.
demarq 3y ago
1000% agree. Don’t sell to devs, always sell to their employers. I now see how keeping your price hidden could be beneficial. The person you’re selling to isn’t the person who should be interested in the price!
halostatue 3y ago
I’m responding to this more because of the change to Kaleidoscope (MacOS diff tool) from one-time to subscription pricing. I have paid for Kaleidoscope at least four times and each time was more expensive (I think the total I spent was about US$300—probably closer to CA$450). I justified it because it was the best-in-class Mac-assed Mac app for its purpose and it really did and does save me time or frustration. I’d have happily paid another US$150 (~CA$200 today) for an upgrade to Kaleidoscope 4. I’m just not sure that I want to pay a variable amount per month amounting to US$96 (~CA$115) annually, because I already have subscriptions that I’m paying for which I don’t use enough (WebSequenceDiagrams is a good example; I happily pay, because when I need it I really need it and there’s nothing quite as good IMO). I know it’s hard, but subscriptions are the wrong choice most of the time, unless you can review and manage them in one place like you can with the Apple App Store. Because otherwise, you have to trust the company to not only (a) keep the subscription price fair without surprise increases but also (b) not use Adobe-level or NYT-level dark patterns for cancellation. I’m not cheap, but I am far more price sensitive to subscriptions than I am to one-off purchases. The bar for getting me to subscribe rather than buy is ten to twenty times higher, and most subscription software isn’t that much better.
- candiodari 3y ago
  That is the central point of subscriptions, of course. They make people totally misjudge how much they pay for something. And that then enables $5 instead of $50 software. $5 is cheaper than $50, isn't it? Of course, no, it isn't, but that's the point. Microsoft office used to be $80, now it's $5 per month. And you can bet that's a price rise, since MBAs are thoroughly in control at MS. And if you calculate: * At $5 per seat the formula for "can this software exist?" is something like $months_of_work * 10k / 5. Which translates to 1 month of work per 2000 paying customers. * At $5 subscription per seat, avg retention 1 yr, you get one month of work per 167 paying customers, or about 12 times more pay. That justifies a lot more software.
eagleinparadise 3y ago
You should talk to real estate, especially commercial real estate people. They are just as cheap, even though a commission could be $100k net or a new deal could yield $1M in profit in the next 5 years
kodah 3y ago
I'd like to point out that developers are likely exposed to more subscription costs than most average people. This or that tool is $5/m, hosting is $80 (or you run your own server, of which the electricity usage is constant), GitHub is $5-$15/m, Jet brains is close to $20. Calling us cheap I think overlooks the enormity of tools and businesses that chose this model and calculated that they're the only ones doing it. Subscription costs are charged whether you use the tool or not, and if you stop subscribing you lose any previous versions you've paid for. It's a uniquely grimey model.
dhosek 3y ago
It’s long been this way, even in the days when we had to (gasp) spend money for compilers. I remember feeling like the typical user on Usenet back in the day would rather smelt sand to make a microchip than spend money on computer stuff. It’s also why I spend my own money on subscriptions to IntelliJ and CLion. I spend a lot of time in those tools and it’s worth it to me to pay to see them advance. Likewise, I just signed up to pay for Mimestream email because that’s something else that I always use.
rusl1 3y ago
It's incredible how American centric you are. 360 $ is a whole month of food for two people in Europe. Not joking.
ESTheComposer 3y ago
$360 is only 3 dinners for 2 people?
- rafark 3y ago
  Agreed. $120 per dinner?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- Dma54rhs 3y ago
  Developers are cheap and the loudest are the most privileged living in SV earning insane wages can be true at the same time
  - ESTheComposer 3y ago
    I think what I'm getting at is that the OP is really out of touch with reality if they think that $120 per meal for a couple is normal
donmcronald 3y ago
Subscriptions have ruined software development by introducing a ton of external SaaS dependencies. For example, I have Java projects that are old enough to use the pre-subscription versions of IntelliJ IDEA. I can still install (ex:) IDEA v8, check out the project, and work on it immediately. That took some work because the Gradle wrapper needs to pull Gradle from a local server, I made a build task to pull in a project JDK, all the dependency artifacts need to be available locally, etc.. When I set that stuff up, I thought development environments would evolve to do that kind of thing automatically. For example, using a modern analogy, I run 'docker compose run dev' and get a project specific development environment that's from an exact point in time, even if it's 10+ years old. Instead, we got subscriptions where I need to deal with a ton of continually changing SaaS dependencies that could disappear tomorrow. If you let a project idle for a year there's a decent chance it won't work when you go back to it. I also disagree with the mentality that costs (to me) should be judged by how much value I get while being completely divorced from the costs (to them) of operating. By that logic, you should sign your entire paycheck over to the grocery store, right? I don't have a problem with ongoing costs if they're providing value to me, but I'm not willing to pay forever, even when I'm idle, for someone else to control part of my workflow. The loss of control alone is a bad deal. The introduction of the iPhone in 2008 is about the time I think things started changing. We went from developers that were concerned about maintaining control of their workflows, build systems, distribution, etc. to a new group of developers that are happy to become dependent on rent seeking SaaS middlemen while telling everyone else they're getting good value. Even Jetbrains is turning their products into something you can't rely on via Jetbrains Space. If a critical mass of developers buy into that, I'd be willing to bet the standalone editors get dropped at some point.
nawgz 3y ago
Do I not know how to write CSS? Why is someone else's opinionated GUI generating CSS for me adding value? Devs aren't cheap, tools like this are useless. "Don't write code - use our GUI!" has been a winning proposition almost never.
- ozim 3y ago
  Add to that most of the time GUI is just so much more work then writing code. I don’t have to click around to change small thing I can jump to place in file and have it changed with 2-3 moves and GUI always is open some panel find another option open pop up etc.
LapsangGuzzler 3y ago
> stop being so cheap and spend some money to make your lives easier. How many times have you been sold on the idea that X tool is gonna make life easier without any tradeoffs only to be disappointed? It’s happened so many times to me, I’ve lost count. Developers understand the inherent complexity involved with adding dependencies because we are paid to understand and manage that complexity in our jobs. I pay for lots of software as an engineer, but I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve purchased a subscription that only did 80% of what I needed, which ultimately led me to churn as a customer.
deleted 3y ago
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chillbill 3y ago
I have no idea what you do (and what startup idea you tried before and got burned) but your generalization is not accurate. You can also say that developers are extremely particular about what they want to pay for. Developers spend hours to automate something that takes 5 minutes every week is because it's fun. Obviously my previous two statements don't apply to every developer, hence the generalization is wrong. Some are cheap, some are particular, and some are even more particular. Just like every other field I suppose, who would've thought!
moneywoes 3y ago
Conversely, what personas have a higher marginal propensity to spend, IT folk? Sales?
lelanthran 3y ago
> In this case, this tool is $30/mo, or about $360 / year, what is that, 3 dinners for 2 people in a year? The tool may save the developer, let's say 3-4 hours / week and at 52 * 3 or about 156 hours of savings a year. I think you're being unnecessarily harsh. I can afford lots of things; I don't run out and buy them though. So this tool might save you maybe 4 hours a week (I cannot really see it saving 4 hours a week, but lets go with your numbers here). That is not "4 extra hours I get to spend sleeping". It is not "4 extra hours I get to spend with my kids". It is not "4 extra hours I use on my hobbies". It's "4 extra hours that my employee gets from me". > At even 30 an hour, it's saved the developer $4,680, or at 60/hour, close to $10,000, Nonsense. It's saved the company $10k. It's saved the developer exactly $0. > My only recommendation is try to sell this product to businesses I agree. Businesses get the savings from any tool they purchase for employee use, not employees, so they are more willing to shell out for productivity tools. > Developers, my only word of advice, is seriously.. stop being so cheap and spend some money to make your lives easier. Well, it seems to be working for them, isn't it? And you're being awfully judgemental about what other people find value in. This tool, which you say will save 4 hours a week, costs $30/m. ChatGPT 3.5 saves me much more than 4 hours a week, and costs $0/m. Copilot costs $10/m, and saves me more than 4 hours per week. Git (and things like gitea, etc) provide orders of magnitude more value than this, and you can find someone to provide a hosting plan for it for less than $10/m. It's all about value delivered, which you seem to be missing. It's a purely rational and economic decision. I can afford office 365, but I find myself getting by without that subscription. If I purchased every single devtool subscription, the monthly cost would exceed about half my salary, and all the benefits go to my employer.
- theonething 3y ago
  If you're using a paid service for work, the company should pay for it.
  - mynameisvlad 3y ago
    “Should” and “does” are widely different. They certainly should but it takes time to get a new tool approved and the hassle is rarely worth it.
recursive 3y ago
> 360 / year, what is that, 3 dinners for 2 people in a year? Either that math is wrong, or we're eating different dinners.
sharemywin 3y ago
I think your lumping developers all in the same category, but either way there's not much value in a subscription for a developer. If your a developer business owner(not hourly freelancer) than absolutely makes financial sense. If your an hourly freelancer your customers probably aren't going to offer you more money for your time. If you work for someone else they should pay for it. If you are fixed bid or some variation on that then probably makes sense because your time is money.
CryptoBanker 3y ago
You act like 3 dinners for 2 people in a year is nothing. Some of us only eat out once a week because we have debts, or we have children, or we live in an expensive place. Some people eat out even less than that. Would I sacrifice ~6% of my meals out for this tool that (no disrespect to the developer, is a glorified color palette picker)? Definitely not, and it's not a matter of being "cheap." Not to mention, I think you're grossly overestimating how much time a tool like this would save. If I truly spend 200 hours a year picking colors, I likely would memorize a few by that point.
dubcanada 3y ago
While true, this comment is entirely US centric. $30 USD a month is not a joke to a good chunk of the world. Just because developers in US in San Fran make $350k a year doesn't mean everyone does. And it's incredibly short sighted to assume that. But ignoring all of that, your only recommendation is to sell it cheaper B2B... doesn't that defeat the whole purpose of keeping the $30 price?
Aperocky 3y ago
I'd be very surprised there's any developer that spends more than 4 hrs per week to tweak CSS to begin with, I just don't see the savings that you outlined. I also think that you might be misunderstanding developers, we'll pay for lots of things to save time, but not when we either don't need it or can do it ourselves. I wrote my own cron jobs that saved countless hours - I don't need to buy that.
sgallant 3y ago
After seeing the demo, I was really stoked about this product and was ready to buy but then I was turned off from the recurring monthly price. FWIW, if it were a 1-time price I would have paid probably $50 - $99 for that. Here's a good interview with Adam Wathan from Tailwind about lifetime pricing: https://hackersincorporated.com/episodes/lifetime-pricing-is-underrated https://hackersincorporated.com/episodes/lifetime-pricing-is... Congrats on making it to the homepage of HN!
bryanrasmussen 3y ago
On the other hand there are thousands of things that will make my life easier and you're right I will not spend 30,000 dollars a month to make my life easier. At any rate I'm not sure if I think this thing would actually make my life easier. Arguments: 1. For all the whining CSS is actually one of the easiest parts of the stack, when there is a CSS bug it is generally something like - a thing is slightly off position on this screen size or the color is a bit wrong not it is possible to access another customer's account if you know what day they signed up and their email (not real bug that I've ever encountered) 2. I'm relatively good at CSS so probably this will produce worse CSS than I would do myself - although nowadays the libraries that are most popular tend to hide the 'complexity' of CSS in a JavaScript layer that produces the actual crap CSS for you so whatever. 3. I have to click and point on things etc. I hate that. That makes things slower for me. I write text in files. quick. This is actually probably not for a developer - but for a designer who can have a design view of what the developer did and tweak a few things with this tool, hopefully make a PR and so forth. Yes it should be bought by a company because then - tax deductible and designer is using with developer so on team.
pcthrowaway 3y ago
It's actually $180/year (works out to $15/month), not $360/year And I was definitely interested in trying it out; however, I don't see a free trial. Also, does it make you more money if you have an employer? There's a good chance your employer will pay you the same whether or not you use this tool. If it saves the employer money or makes you more productive, then the employer should pay for it right? But as a developer, I'd usually have to be the one advocating for it, then the employer would have to assess and approve the expense. All so I can start using a tool that costs money, which I won't be able to take with me to a different employer. When I'm assessing the tools I might invest my time in, I generally prefer tools which are portable. The only way something like CSS Pro makes sense to me, is if I'm self-employed or freelancing; in that case I can either raise my rates or bill the same amount while working a bit less. But even for freelancers, many wouldn't consider it without a trial. > $360 / year, what is that, 3 dinners for 2 people in a year Nice of you to assume we're all cheap, when many of us are scraping by and have to be pretty cautious where we spend our money. $360 US is nearly what I spend on food in a month. edit: I tried playing with it in the page, and it's incredibly limiting. Tailwind and hot reloading make things so much easier faster. With this tool, I can't really position elements, I can't add new DOM nodes and delete others. Or I couldn't figure out how to anyway. This is definitely not the tool for me, but might be useful for a non-technical designer who is just starting to learn CSS or doesn't know CSS
Apofis 3y ago
After subscribing to absolutely everything and wondering where your paycheck is going every pay period, you sort of learn to just stop subscribing to anything at all. It's not cheap, you just learn the hard way you'll just make your paycheck evaporate otherwise.
taskforcegemini 3y ago
you sound like someone with an sf salary.
pjmlp 3y ago
Not all of us, thankfully. I have a job to do and can't afford to create the computing world from scratch just to be cheappy. Likewise I want the folks that provide the tools I enjoy using, to also afford the same lifestyle I can enjoy having.
squirtlebonflow 3y ago
If you're starting your own project, sure. But most people are paid hourly or salary and not paid based on completion of tasks, so I don't really care if it saves me hours at work - I'll be given more work to do. If the company is paying for it, I'd be happy to use it, but then your cost-effectiveness comparison goes out the window.
hjkl0 3y ago
> The tool may save the developer, let's say 3-4 hours / week This is the main flaw in your argument. For any developer who will actually save 3-4 hours a week with this tool, there are a thousand developers who will only save 3-4 hours a year. As a potential user, how do you know which group you’ll be on? And as business, how do you make the decision to only target one in a thousand potential users?
miragecraft 3y ago
It’s not about being cheap, it’s about not wanting a company to own your workflow and not wanting to limit your knowledge and skill to a proprietary product.
avighnay 3y ago
Also there is an inherent 'I can do this way better myself' as part of the developer psyche. Though no one gets around to actually doing it.
rrix2 3y ago
> Developers have high incomes, but are quite frankly, extremely cheap. That also comes down to many it being difficult for some organizations to purchase software on for their devs, either as a policy of the organization or the software not making this simple. Some companies make this a laborious approval process but then some vendors will make it nearly impossible to pay in bulk, or have easy delegated payment options. Developer tools oughta be as easy as possible to get your employer to pay for given how much of a force-multiplier a good dev tool can be for them.

by rcconf 3y ago

micromacrofoot 3y ago

> stop being so cheap and spend some money to make your lives easier if I wanted to make my life easier I'd stop using emacs and arch linux and no I won't

tmikaeld 3y ago

I don't think developers in general are cheap, it's that they are employed somewhere and therefore it doesn't benefit THEM to save time, it benefits their employer. It may even be detrimental to the developer as it put higher expectations on the developer to produce more if the suddenly perform better at a specific task..

codemonkey-zeta 3y ago
It absolutely does benefit me to save time, because writing css by hand is one of the most soul-crushingly boring tasks imaginable. Sure my employer also benefits, but that's only if I use that saved time to write more code. Maybe I use the extra time to walk my dog.
- Hamuko 3y ago
  I have a fixed number of working hours in a week regardless of my efficiency, so even if I manage to make myself efficient, I don't reap the benefits.
lolinder 3y ago
Most tools like this are priced with the understanding that they'll be billed to the employer in the end, not paid out of pocket by the developer. They probably need to add org licenses soon in order to better accommodate that.
- filmgirlcw 3y ago
  Yeah, but a lot of employers would still bristle at $180 a year (if you pay in advance) for a souped up version of dev tools. Not to mention that most places that would have a budget for something like this would need to do a security audit of anything like this. If you’re a consultant or have a lot of client projects, you can absolutely bill the client for this sort of thing. But that’s not the situation for everyone and certainly doesn’t strike me as the audience being targeted by the landing page.
  - sroussey 3y ago
    Back in the day, we had requested donations for Firebug (which had millions of installs) and the revenue was embarrassingly pathetic. We used it to give contributors in non-western countries some bonuses from time to time.
    - zerocrates 3y ago
      There you're taking the already high-ish barrier for devs to pay for tools, as discussed elsewhere in this thread, and adding on the really high barrier to get people to donate to things they can use for free.
      - sroussey 3y ago
        True, but there was a high barrier to entry to just install it. And for a long time there was little else you could use. On the other hand, it was free and more important to get people to use it and be more productive then generate revenue.
        3y ago

speedgoose 3y ago

I understand your point but $30 more per month to have a web inspector that is slightly nicer in some way but also much more limited in many other ways is expensive. Monthly subscriptions adds up and not everyone has too much money.

rcconf 3y ago
Let's say they sells it at $10 / mo. They would need 1,000 customers to make a reasonable wage at $10,000 / month. If they sells it at $30/month, they would need only 300 customers. Can you imagine how annoying it would be to deal with 1,000 cheap customers that expect the world? Maybe they should sell it at $100/mo and sell it to only 100 people that really care about the problem. Maybe just sell it to a business for $200/mo for all developers, they would only need 50 businesses to make $10,000/month and they would also remove the annoying, cheap, high expectation developer out of the equation. Developers and engineers are probably the worst customer to have, insane expectations, complain about everything, criticize everything and use a magnifying glass to point out any issues, black/white thinking etc. My theory is writing code has all of these expectations in it. You need to be highly critical, black/white (or you would drift into a world of options.) have insane expectations (or your manager gets mad at you.) etc. All great qualities for writing code, but the worst qualities for a customer. I'm a developer too by the way, so please don't be offended, I've been there and done that, the other side is much nicer. For example, I activated my iCloud to 2TB at $10/mo instead of making a custom backup solution that I can run for $2/mo. Would I have done that years ago? Yes and the result would have been me spending 80 hours building the backup system that can't even get my photos back on my phone properly. What I'm trying to say is, it's sad to watch developers suffer for a small amount of money per month. I honestly believe it's a failure of the people who manage developers. I may be reaching here, but I think a lot of developers have been treated poorly in general from managers, projects and high expectations. They are rarely rewarded properly which is actual recognition for the work they do. It's not free massages, free lunches and cool workspaces. As a result, I believe developers are the givers and the companies and managers are the takers. The takers siphon the life out of developers and to the point where they're so risk averse they won't even spend $100 to go to a spa to relieve some stress. They're so risk averse they won't even spend $30/month to make their lives easier. What am I saying? Developers SPEND some money on yourselves. You DESERVE IT for the hard work you do. Stop being so risk averse just because the work you do is so. Rant over.

last_responder 3y ago

>Developers, my only word of advice, is seriously.. stop being so cheap and spend some money to make your lives easier. >but I can guarantee that 99% of developers will not spend $30/month to make their lives easier. Your post is insulting and it really seems like it is an ad for this product.

sb8244 3y ago
It is insulting, but sometimes the shoe fits. Developer tools is notoriously difficult because engineers (and their managers, and the teams) are very cheap.
- sroussey 3y ago
  If a dev thinks they could build it themselves, they won’t pay. You have to cross a line where the dev does not want to even entertain the idea of building it. So backends for front end engineers, for example.
  - Sai_ 3y ago
    Yeah, this makes sense to me. I’m sure if you asked a trained chef if they’d buy some overpriced gourmet food at a chic place, they’d say no. They’re making exactly the same choice as a developer when it comes to visualising how much effort it takes to make a similar tool/food. Since developers know (broadly) how the sausage is made, it’s going to be hard to get them to spring for basic sausage dressed well and slickly presented.

ekianjo 3y ago

> Developers, my only word of advice, is seriously.. stop being so cheap and spend some money to make your lives easier. 30 USD here, 30 USD there, soon enough your bills go in the hundreds or thousands of dollars.

patrec 3y ago
So you mean if after 30 or so such subscriptions you only increase your productivity by 0.1% you still come out ahead?
- interactivecode 3y ago
  9 other subscriptions and I only have to work 0 hours a week

quickthrower2 3y ago

* This tool may increase my time spent rather than save time. I need to spend time to find out. So I don’t buy every one of the million tools because I am too cheap. I don’t have time to evaluate all of them. * I have no way of cashing in saved time anyway * Developers can affect spending decisions at work worth $1000s to one SaaS at the expense of another or in addition. If we can save a hire through $50k/y in SaaS bills we will.

aceazzameen 3y ago

No. Monthly subscriptions suck. Every company wants to "tax" me monthly for something that's feature complete. The ones I already pay, I do so very begrudgingly. There's simply too many SaaS products out there. Let's go back to perpetual licenses. And I'll gladly pay for upgraded versions, or not if the upgrade isn't worthwhile. When it's not SaaS, I also get to control what version I'm using. The product doesn't own me, I get to own the product.

ggoo 3y ago
This is the most developer response I could've imagined. I love it.
LeonB 3y ago
It might be a pedantic point but when you buy a perpetual license you don’t “own” the product - you “own” a license to use the product, on the terms in the license.
- aziaziazi 3y ago
  OP “own” the product in the sense “use it as long as he want in the terms defined in the license at the time it’s bought.” Adobe can’t change the license of the Photoshop CS3 cd-rom I bought a while ago. If I’m using their current subscription version I would only use the license to use the product in the time defined by the subscription.
  - sammyoos 3y ago
    I’m guessing the reason this is brought up is because of the concern about if the license server goes down or the company goes out of business can I still use the product.
    - aziaziazi 3y ago
      That would make sense! Could we use today an usb stick (similar to the digital wallet ones) to “validate” the ownership without relying on a server, like cd+license did 15 years ago?

globalise83 3y ago

Maybe this should have a slightly different audience than developers, namely UX designers, technical product managers (semi-technical folks who know about html and css), etc. so that they can play around with their products, produce prototypes based on the actual product, share design specifications more easily etc. For example, I am a semi-technical product manager, meaning I know enough about coding to be able to make whatever simple UI changes I want, but leave actual development of the products to the professionals. I would use this tool and maybe recommend to my business paying for it if it genuinely saves some time over making the same changes in dev tools. For example, the ability to prototype a new UI feature "inside" my existing products, and then share the prototype with someone would be extremely valuable to me. Currently I use the "edit as html" tool in dev tools and then apply some styling to the new elements. Of course, if I hit refresh by mistake, I would lose my changes. Has happened before!

tailspin2019 3y ago

It’s not just about the price. It’s also about how it’s pitched and what the on ramp looks like. In this case, without a free trial, there is a much bigger gap to traverse to go from “not a customer” to “paying monthly”. It’s also harder if you are not the one paying the bills and need to pitch/sell such a tool internally.

sy7ar 3y ago

Unless all your work involves CSS I doubt it saves 3-4 hours / week. Also, saving 3 hours of work doesn't mean you get paid for 3 hours more. It's also a dependency that's not guaranteed to exist as long as the default browser dev tools or available on every machine.

mnsc 3y ago
If all you do is css I doubt you have a workflow where this tool would save you 3-4 hours a week. It might even be ~20 minutes/week and 10 minutes/week stumbling while relearning your habits to use (depend on) this tool. And then a year later when you are completely dependent on this tool. Boom. It's now acquired by and part of Atom Text Editor Enterprise Ide where all those who invested too much in Atom went to die.
methodical 3y ago
Couldn't agree with this more. It's always nice to think that some super clean UI beats making quick CSS adjustments alongside HMR or a quick build time but in my experience it probably never does. If I wanted to test different font weights of some text I wouldn't go into the CSS in my browser and adjust it, I'd just change the value in my CSS (helped more-so by CSS frameworks such as Tailwind), and see how the output changed. The upside being that if I like how it looks, I've already made the change to my code. I don't know who this would realistically save any significant amount of time a week for outside of an inexperienced developer who doesn't have a pretty good idea of how slight style differences will impact the final product.
tilakraj_0308 3y ago
Hello everyone(edited)

lowercased 3y ago

I have opened myself up for more subscription services over the last couple of years. I freelance. My income is generally 'high', but irregular. Monthly subscriptions aren't irregular. Having a need for a tool for 2 months on a project, then... maybe needing it 4 months from now means I have to keep subscribing to the service even when I don't use it. I've kept things around at $30/month for months longer than I needed to because there wasn't a good way to export the data, then reimport it later if I needed it again in that tool. Taking time to determine the impact of stopping a subscription isn't always simple. I'm paying for 2 services that do something similar. Tried the second one that said "oh, we can import your data from the other service!". It can't, but I didn't try soon enough, and now I have setups in two services. My own fault for not trying soon enough, but taking time to manually move from svc 1 to 2 (or 2 to 1) will take a lot more than than any 'savings' I might get from these. I've paid for jetbrains for years, and I pay for some hosting/cloud services (linode, DO, AWS, etc). I've paid for copilot. I've paid for some other IDE helper/services. I've got clients who pay for dropbox/similar. Average of $25/month, but times... say 8 on average (monthly or yearly external services I use)... That's not nothing to me. I can live with it, but half of these I'm not using regularly, but am somewhat held hostage because cancelling the service will lose my data which I may want to use on another project in the near future. So.. I keep holding on to things I'm not using in the hopes that I'll "save 2 hours/week!" 4 months from now. Some of these services don't play nicely with sharing - many bootstrapped services don't give me ways to share my account with someone else, or transfer my data to a client, for example. (some do, but not all). Even if I want that feature, and I'm a paying customer, if I'm in the minority, I won't get that feature. I understand your sentiment about "stop being cheap" but... even once I got past that, and got comfortable paying for more services, it's not always a good ROI (short term, usually yes, long term... no). "to make your lives easier". My life would be easier if I could use the service for a time, export all my data, cancel, then resume service by bringing my data in again later. OR... let me 'pause' monthly rebilling for a few months. An account 'freeze' feature - suspend service and billing for X months, Y times per year - would let me feel I'm getting more value when I need it. Yes, it would disrupt projected cash flow, but it would "make my life easier". My gym lets me do this. I can 'freeze' my membership for up to 4 months at a time per calendar year. I've done it when I know I'm going to be out of town for a few weeks - no way I'm going to use for the next 6 weeks. I'll freeze for the next month, then resume.

monkey_monkey 3y ago

Or perhaps I don't want to get fleeced and/or locked in to a model where if I stop paying, I lose access to an offline program that costs the app developer NOTHING extra for my use

roblh 3y ago

It’s actually incredible how cheap we are. I catch myself doing it, and what makes it even more ridiculous is how much I won’t even think twice about spending on other things that are just hobbies. Why does my brain think it’s fine to spend hundreds of dollars on a microphone or a lens or even a plugin that is actually also software, but $50 for a tool that will help me with my 40 hour a week job is out of the question. A bit more on topic though, I don’t really see this as a tool aimed at developers. Watching the demo on the site, this isn’t really how I interact with css at all. I don’t need a color wheel or draggable sliders with ultra fine resolution. The real utility, for me, of a tool like this, would be if you could set up essentially an internal style guide that would limit the possible options for all of the values to retain consistency. Then it would be great for finishing touches, sitting beside a designer or something.

JackFr 3y ago
Well for me this would be a hobby purchase. The problem is that while I could justify dropping $150 on something like this to myself, I don't want to pay for it by the month, knowing that most months I won't use it.
OJFord 3y ago
If it's helping the job then we ought to (be able to) expense it, there's a much higher bar for getting me to pay personally to help my work - as in it can't just be 'do it faster' (at the end of the day, do/should I care?) it would need to be posture/eye strain improving and not offered by employer, or something like that. Imagine an embedded engineer personally buying a higher bandwidth 'scope (or whatever) to better debug an issue or QA before release. I don't doubt it happens, but I think it's more clearly unreasonable, and I don't think theres any reason it makes more sense with software. Especially since software might well have per-device licencing, so you put it on your work machine and then what? ('I have better kit at home, I'm taking the DUT home for the weekend' is still overworking, but probably a lot more common, and I don't think quite the same/as bad as personal spend motivated by work.) Regarding 'developers are cheap' directly, in my (limited, but spanning large & very small/growing company) experience businesses are cheap: they multiply the per-seat cost by head count and run scared, overlooking completely that it's a rounding error on payroll, or that it's more than covered by the unpaid salaries of open positions that might've been filled. (Obviously there are boring reasons this can be that you don't need to reply to me about. So too are there myriad reasons not to buy something personally beyond being 'cheap'.)

KomoD 3y ago

> Developers have high incomes, but are quite frankly, extremely cheap. We're not all making 100k+/yr, $30/mo is a significant amount.

kwanbix 3y ago

The problem is not a single subscription. The problem is that today everything is a subscription. So you end up paying 600 euros per month from 20 subscriptions of "just 30 euros" and if you don't pay attention, you can even pay more.

douglaswlance 3y ago

Developers in general aren't cheap. Developers who spend their time commenting about how something is too expensives are cheap.

filmgirlcw 3y ago

Spending money is one thing. I don’t think most devs are opposed to doing that, especially for things that are central to your work. But I’m hard-pressed to see how a browser extension that will improve but not demonstrable change how browser dev tools work is worth $30 a month. This reminds me of Mighty, the $30 a month web browser that promised to be a lot faster and better (it ran off of cloud servers), but was absolutely not worth $30 a month (and I tried it and gave it an honest shot and it wasn’t). Mighty failed and now I think is trying to pivot to some sort of AI generative art thing. Pricing too high will kill your business the same way pricing too low will. It has nothing to do with people being cheap, it has to do with value proposition, especially relative to other tools.

Alifatisk 3y ago

I think it’s the monthly subscription for a offline product is what makes the devs to loose their interest, and I get it. I don’t own the product when subscribing, I am only leasing it for as long as I pay. I don’t like that, I prefer to own my products. Everything is slowly turning into a subscription, sure this is only 30$ a month, but if all my products were subscription based, I would go bankrupt.

sammywater 3y ago

[dead]

unshavedyak 3y ago

> They will spend 40 hours/week for months to save $5/mo. There's basically no logic apart from that developers have a poor concept of time and money and are spending averse (again, cheap.) To slightly counter. I am a developer with a high-ish (average for the industry, i suppose) income. I love paying for my tools. HOWEVER, i expect you'd call me cheap. Why? Well because i am very averse to subscriptions, and i think this is primarily due to being a developer and being around this culture. This culture which is flooded with startups all wanting X$ per seat, user, etc. I've seen these things scale excessively on loop. It's not 1 $5 sub. It's the 20 tools all vying for subscriptions, tiers of subscriptions, etc. I happily pay for things i can buy that improve my DX or productivity. However subs have to be exceptionally good to justify because they're in competition, in my head, with every other sub i already manage. Even if it doesn't make sense to have X and Y products "compete" because they're not even remotely related - they are in my head. They're in the list of subscriptions which i obsessively prune because this industry has left me feeling like i need to. I love "subs" like JetBrains though.

unsupp0rted 3y ago

I have a theory that a lot of us became developers after being poor teenagers who downloaded warez for $0 in the olden days. For that reason, where software is concerned, for us the distance between $0 and $1 is even wider than the already wide distance it is for the general population.

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monkeynotes 3y ago

> The tool may save the developer, let's say 3-4 hours / week Seriously? Half a day a week?? As a professional FE dev there is no way this would save me 4hrs a week, every week. The existing dev tools are familiar, and while not perfect, get the job done. This tool is sugar on top of that, I can't see how it would save me so much time. I think regular folk, and non front-end engineers could find it easier and more approachable than dev tools, but I can see why target audience engineers won't put up $30/m for it. Edit: If this tool could demonstrably show a 3-4hr a week time saving go and show it to managers, they'll snap it up. Fact is corps are cheaper than ICs at the coal face. This is if you class "cheap" as being extremely efficient with your resources. Just because engineers are well paid doesn't mean they should stop being efficient with their income. I'd rather spend $30 a month on lunch than on another magic tool.

marcosdumay 3y ago

People don't like subscriptions. And for entirely rational reasons, even if they can't articulate them. If you insist on selling subscriptions for people, they will treat it as predatory pricing (because for them it is) and will antagonize you. Companies, on the other hand, just love subscriptions. Also for entirely rational reasons. Now, if you insist on ignoring that fundamental difference, it's a "you" problem, not with your public.

n8cpdx 3y ago
People keep saying there are rational reasons, but I haven’t seen a single response here that doesn’t boil down to “feels”. They have a perpetual license option, not hidden. I think maybe people have so much feels that they are just bandwagoning here rather than using their noggins and evaluating the value of the product. Disappointing. Wanting to pay $900 for a product that might stop existing or be outcompeted in a year is not rational.
- Domenic_S 3y ago
  There are a bunch of good responses here. 1. You don't own the software. Company decides to turn off the license server you're SOL. 2. Managing subscriptions is hard. So hard that multiple companies have popped up that purport to save you money by finding subscriptions you forgot about. I can think of a few that I have that I forget about until I see the invoice every month (and then forget it again). 3. Canceling subscriptions can be hard but it's impossible to know until you try. Some companies let you sign up with 2 clicks but make you call a phone number (that's only open odd hours) to cancel, and other well-known dark patterns. Aversion to that is aversion to subscriptions.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  There were plenty of reasons on the threads here if you look for it. Just because somebody is mostly talking about emotions doesn't mean the argument are not rational. Anyway, people have different risk profiles than companies. Interest-rate based present day adjustments are meaningless, because they don't have the same opportunities on monetary markets; existential risks are well, really existential, instead of what they are for companies; power relations are extremely important, because people don't get any power; and so on. Again, if you insist on fixing it, it's a "you" problem that will lead to well deserve failures.

woodpanel 3y ago

> Developers have high incomes, but are quite frankly, extremely cheap. And I actually mean cheap and not frugal. They will spend 40 hours/week for months to save $5/mo Personal anecdote: Long time ago when still working in a physical office building, the co-workers and me would each amass significant amounts of empty returnable bottles by the end of each week on one's desk. This irked me because it looked rather unprofessional, cost desk- or foot space and came with recurrent noise of someone knocking over the whole assortment. I then bought me a potato sack to just place my bottles in it in order to give the place a more hipsteresque feel and to give me more dignity carrying those bottles away. So what do you think my high income comrades did? Yes, they did buy potato sacks as well... after studying customer reviews for multiple potato sacks on Amazon for a week (Goes without saying that they bought them all regardless of the week-long study effort to try them out and send the "non-performant" ones back to get refunded).

interactivecode 3y ago

the way you calculate savings is not really true in reality. even if I can now do my work 4 hours a week faster. I'm not immediately getting a pay bump, my boss just gives me 4hours of extra work. It won't give me 4 hours a week back, because my boss still reserves my time for those 4 hours. My household won't have an extra 30 euro a month to spend on those dinners. actually it will directly have 30 euro less to spend on dinners. so yeah all those considerations make me cautious paying for more subscriptions.

demarq 3y ago

1000% agree. Don’t sell to devs, always sell to their employers. I now see how keeping your price hidden could be beneficial. The person you’re selling to isn’t the person who should be interested in the price!

halostatue 3y ago

I’m responding to this more because of the change to Kaleidoscope (MacOS diff tool) from one-time to subscription pricing. I have paid for Kaleidoscope at least four times and each time was more expensive (I think the total I spent was about US$300—probably closer to CA$450). I justified it because it was the best-in-class Mac-assed Mac app for its purpose and it really did and does save me time or frustration. I’d have happily paid another US$150 (~CA$200 today) for an upgrade to Kaleidoscope 4. I’m just not sure that I want to pay a variable amount per month amounting to US$96 (~CA$115) annually, because I already have subscriptions that I’m paying for which I don’t use enough (WebSequenceDiagrams is a good example; I happily pay, because when I need it I really need it and there’s nothing quite as good IMO). I know it’s hard, but subscriptions are the wrong choice most of the time, unless you can review and manage them in one place like you can with the Apple App Store. Because otherwise, you have to trust the company to not only (a) keep the subscription price fair without surprise increases but also (b) not use Adobe-level or NYT-level dark patterns for cancellation. I’m not cheap, but I am far more price sensitive to subscriptions than I am to one-off purchases. The bar for getting me to subscribe rather than buy is ten to twenty times higher, and most subscription software isn’t that much better.

candiodari 3y ago
That is the central point of subscriptions, of course. They make people totally misjudge how much they pay for something. And that then enables $5 instead of $50 software. $5 is cheaper than $50, isn't it? Of course, no, it isn't, but that's the point. Microsoft office used to be $80, now it's $5 per month. And you can bet that's a price rise, since MBAs are thoroughly in control at MS. And if you calculate: * At $5 per seat the formula for "can this software exist?" is something like $months_of_work * 10k / 5. Which translates to 1 month of work per 2000 paying customers. * At $5 subscription per seat, avg retention 1 yr, you get one month of work per 167 paying customers, or about 12 times more pay. That justifies a lot more software.

eagleinparadise 3y ago

You should talk to real estate, especially commercial real estate people. They are just as cheap, even though a commission could be $100k net or a new deal could yield $1M in profit in the next 5 years

kodah 3y ago

I'd like to point out that developers are likely exposed to more subscription costs than most average people. This or that tool is $5/m, hosting is $80 (or you run your own server, of which the electricity usage is constant), GitHub is $5-$15/m, Jet brains is close to $20. Calling us cheap I think overlooks the enormity of tools and businesses that chose this model and calculated that they're the only ones doing it. Subscription costs are charged whether you use the tool or not, and if you stop subscribing you lose any previous versions you've paid for. It's a uniquely grimey model.

dhosek 3y ago

It’s long been this way, even in the days when we had to (gasp) spend money for compilers. I remember feeling like the typical user on Usenet back in the day would rather smelt sand to make a microchip than spend money on computer stuff. It’s also why I spend my own money on subscriptions to IntelliJ and CLion. I spend a lot of time in those tools and it’s worth it to me to pay to see them advance. Likewise, I just signed up to pay for Mimestream email because that’s something else that I always use.

rusl1 3y ago

It's incredible how American centric you are. 360 $ is a whole month of food for two people in Europe. Not joking.

ESTheComposer 3y ago

$360 is only 3 dinners for 2 people?

rafark 3y ago
Agreed. $120 per dinner?
- deleted 3y ago
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Dma54rhs 3y ago
Developers are cheap and the loudest are the most privileged living in SV earning insane wages can be true at the same time
- ESTheComposer 3y ago
  I think what I'm getting at is that the OP is really out of touch with reality if they think that $120 per meal for a couple is normal

donmcronald 3y ago

Subscriptions have ruined software development by introducing a ton of external SaaS dependencies. For example, I have Java projects that are old enough to use the pre-subscription versions of IntelliJ IDEA. I can still install (ex:) IDEA v8, check out the project, and work on it immediately. That took some work because the Gradle wrapper needs to pull Gradle from a local server, I made a build task to pull in a project JDK, all the dependency artifacts need to be available locally, etc.. When I set that stuff up, I thought development environments would evolve to do that kind of thing automatically. For example, using a modern analogy, I run 'docker compose run dev' and get a project specific development environment that's from an exact point in time, even if it's 10+ years old. Instead, we got subscriptions where I need to deal with a ton of continually changing SaaS dependencies that could disappear tomorrow. If you let a project idle for a year there's a decent chance it won't work when you go back to it. I also disagree with the mentality that costs (to me) should be judged by how much value I get while being completely divorced from the costs (to them) of operating. By that logic, you should sign your entire paycheck over to the grocery store, right? I don't have a problem with ongoing costs if they're providing value to me, but I'm not willing to pay forever, even when I'm idle, for someone else to control part of my workflow. The loss of control alone is a bad deal. The introduction of the iPhone in 2008 is about the time I think things started changing. We went from developers that were concerned about maintaining control of their workflows, build systems, distribution, etc. to a new group of developers that are happy to become dependent on rent seeking SaaS middlemen while telling everyone else they're getting good value. Even Jetbrains is turning their products into something you can't rely on via Jetbrains Space. If a critical mass of developers buy into that, I'd be willing to bet the standalone editors get dropped at some point.

nawgz 3y ago

Do I not know how to write CSS? Why is someone else's opinionated GUI generating CSS for me adding value? Devs aren't cheap, tools like this are useless. "Don't write code - use our GUI!" has been a winning proposition almost never.

ozim 3y ago
Add to that most of the time GUI is just so much more work then writing code. I don’t have to click around to change small thing I can jump to place in file and have it changed with 2-3 moves and GUI always is open some panel find another option open pop up etc.

LapsangGuzzler 3y ago

> stop being so cheap and spend some money to make your lives easier. How many times have you been sold on the idea that X tool is gonna make life easier without any tradeoffs only to be disappointed? It’s happened so many times to me, I’ve lost count. Developers understand the inherent complexity involved with adding dependencies because we are paid to understand and manage that complexity in our jobs. I pay for lots of software as an engineer, but I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve purchased a subscription that only did 80% of what I needed, which ultimately led me to churn as a customer.

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chillbill 3y ago

I have no idea what you do (and what startup idea you tried before and got burned) but your generalization is not accurate. You can also say that developers are extremely particular about what they want to pay for. Developers spend hours to automate something that takes 5 minutes every week is because it's fun. Obviously my previous two statements don't apply to every developer, hence the generalization is wrong. Some are cheap, some are particular, and some are even more particular. Just like every other field I suppose, who would've thought!

moneywoes 3y ago

Conversely, what personas have a higher marginal propensity to spend, IT folk? Sales?

lelanthran 3y ago

> In this case, this tool is $30/mo, or about $360 / year, what is that, 3 dinners for 2 people in a year? The tool may save the developer, let's say 3-4 hours / week and at 52 * 3 or about 156 hours of savings a year. I think you're being unnecessarily harsh. I can afford lots of things; I don't run out and buy them though. So this tool might save you maybe 4 hours a week (I cannot really see it saving 4 hours a week, but lets go with your numbers here). That is not "4 extra hours I get to spend sleeping". It is not "4 extra hours I get to spend with my kids". It is not "4 extra hours I use on my hobbies". It's "4 extra hours that my employee gets from me". > At even 30 an hour, it's saved the developer $4,680, or at 60/hour, close to $10,000, Nonsense. It's saved the company $10k. It's saved the developer exactly $0. > My only recommendation is try to sell this product to businesses I agree. Businesses get the savings from any tool they purchase for employee use, not employees, so they are more willing to shell out for productivity tools. > Developers, my only word of advice, is seriously.. stop being so cheap and spend some money to make your lives easier. Well, it seems to be working for them, isn't it? And you're being awfully judgemental about what other people find value in. This tool, which you say will save 4 hours a week, costs $30/m. ChatGPT 3.5 saves me much more than 4 hours a week, and costs $0/m. Copilot costs $10/m, and saves me more than 4 hours per week. Git (and things like gitea, etc) provide orders of magnitude more value than this, and you can find someone to provide a hosting plan for it for less than $10/m. It's all about value delivered, which you seem to be missing. It's a purely rational and economic decision. I can afford office 365, but I find myself getting by without that subscription. If I purchased every single devtool subscription, the monthly cost would exceed about half my salary, and all the benefits go to my employer.

theonething 3y ago
If you're using a paid service for work, the company should pay for it.
- mynameisvlad 3y ago
  “Should” and “does” are widely different. They certainly should but it takes time to get a new tool approved and the hassle is rarely worth it.

recursive 3y ago

> 360 / year, what is that, 3 dinners for 2 people in a year? Either that math is wrong, or we're eating different dinners.

sharemywin 3y ago

I think your lumping developers all in the same category, but either way there's not much value in a subscription for a developer. If your a developer business owner(not hourly freelancer) than absolutely makes financial sense. If your an hourly freelancer your customers probably aren't going to offer you more money for your time. If you work for someone else they should pay for it. If you are fixed bid or some variation on that then probably makes sense because your time is money.

CryptoBanker 3y ago

You act like 3 dinners for 2 people in a year is nothing. Some of us only eat out once a week because we have debts, or we have children, or we live in an expensive place. Some people eat out even less than that. Would I sacrifice ~6% of my meals out for this tool that (no disrespect to the developer, is a glorified color palette picker)? Definitely not, and it's not a matter of being "cheap." Not to mention, I think you're grossly overestimating how much time a tool like this would save. If I truly spend 200 hours a year picking colors, I likely would memorize a few by that point.

dubcanada 3y ago

While true, this comment is entirely US centric. $30 USD a month is not a joke to a good chunk of the world. Just because developers in US in San Fran make $350k a year doesn't mean everyone does. And it's incredibly short sighted to assume that. But ignoring all of that, your only recommendation is to sell it cheaper B2B... doesn't that defeat the whole purpose of keeping the $30 price?

Aperocky 3y ago

I'd be very surprised there's any developer that spends more than 4 hrs per week to tweak CSS to begin with, I just don't see the savings that you outlined. I also think that you might be misunderstanding developers, we'll pay for lots of things to save time, but not when we either don't need it or can do it ourselves. I wrote my own cron jobs that saved countless hours - I don't need to buy that.

sgallant 3y ago

After seeing the demo, I was really stoked about this product and was ready to buy but then I was turned off from the recurring monthly price. FWIW, if it were a 1-time price I would have paid probably $50 - $99 for that. Here's a good interview with Adam Wathan from Tailwind about lifetime pricing: https://hackersincorporated.com/episodes/lifetime-pricing-is-underrated https://hackersincorporated.com/episodes/lifetime-pricing-is... Congrats on making it to the homepage of HN!

bryanrasmussen 3y ago

On the other hand there are thousands of things that will make my life easier and you're right I will not spend 30,000 dollars a month to make my life easier. At any rate I'm not sure if I think this thing would actually make my life easier. Arguments: 1. For all the whining CSS is actually one of the easiest parts of the stack, when there is a CSS bug it is generally something like - a thing is slightly off position on this screen size or the color is a bit wrong not it is possible to access another customer's account if you know what day they signed up and their email (not real bug that I've ever encountered) 2. I'm relatively good at CSS so probably this will produce worse CSS than I would do myself - although nowadays the libraries that are most popular tend to hide the 'complexity' of CSS in a JavaScript layer that produces the actual crap CSS for you so whatever. 3. I have to click and point on things etc. I hate that. That makes things slower for me. I write text in files. quick. This is actually probably not for a developer - but for a designer who can have a design view of what the developer did and tweak a few things with this tool, hopefully make a PR and so forth. Yes it should be bought by a company because then - tax deductible and designer is using with developer so on team.

pcthrowaway 3y ago

It's actually $180/year (works out to $15/month), not $360/year And I was definitely interested in trying it out; however, I don't see a free trial. Also, does it make you more money if you have an employer? There's a good chance your employer will pay you the same whether or not you use this tool. If it saves the employer money or makes you more productive, then the employer should pay for it right? But as a developer, I'd usually have to be the one advocating for it, then the employer would have to assess and approve the expense. All so I can start using a tool that costs money, which I won't be able to take with me to a different employer. When I'm assessing the tools I might invest my time in, I generally prefer tools which are portable. The only way something like CSS Pro makes sense to me, is if I'm self-employed or freelancing; in that case I can either raise my rates or bill the same amount while working a bit less. But even for freelancers, many wouldn't consider it without a trial. > $360 / year, what is that, 3 dinners for 2 people in a year Nice of you to assume we're all cheap, when many of us are scraping by and have to be pretty cautious where we spend our money. $360 US is nearly what I spend on food in a month. edit: I tried playing with it in the page, and it's incredibly limiting. Tailwind and hot reloading make things so much easier faster. With this tool, I can't really position elements, I can't add new DOM nodes and delete others. Or I couldn't figure out how to anyway. This is definitely not the tool for me, but might be useful for a non-technical designer who is just starting to learn CSS or doesn't know CSS

Apofis 3y ago

After subscribing to absolutely everything and wondering where your paycheck is going every pay period, you sort of learn to just stop subscribing to anything at all. It's not cheap, you just learn the hard way you'll just make your paycheck evaporate otherwise.

taskforcegemini 3y ago

you sound like someone with an sf salary.

pjmlp 3y ago

Not all of us, thankfully. I have a job to do and can't afford to create the computing world from scratch just to be cheappy. Likewise I want the folks that provide the tools I enjoy using, to also afford the same lifestyle I can enjoy having.

squirtlebonflow 3y ago

If you're starting your own project, sure. But most people are paid hourly or salary and not paid based on completion of tasks, so I don't really care if it saves me hours at work - I'll be given more work to do. If the company is paying for it, I'd be happy to use it, but then your cost-effectiveness comparison goes out the window.

hjkl0 3y ago

> The tool may save the developer, let's say 3-4 hours / week This is the main flaw in your argument. For any developer who will actually save 3-4 hours a week with this tool, there are a thousand developers who will only save 3-4 hours a year. As a potential user, how do you know which group you’ll be on? And as business, how do you make the decision to only target one in a thousand potential users?

miragecraft 3y ago

It’s not about being cheap, it’s about not wanting a company to own your workflow and not wanting to limit your knowledge and skill to a proprietary product.

avighnay 3y ago

Also there is an inherent 'I can do this way better myself' as part of the developer psyche. Though no one gets around to actually doing it.

rrix2 3y ago

> Developers have high incomes, but are quite frankly, extremely cheap. That also comes down to many it being difficult for some organizations to purchase software on for their devs, either as a policy of the organization or the software not making this simple. Some companies make this a laborious approval process but then some vendors will make it nearly impossible to pay in bulk, or have easy delegated payment options. Developer tools oughta be as easy as possible to get your employer to pay for given how much of a force-multiplier a good dev tool can be for them.