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Startup owner using AI with this need - needless to say, a real problem. I've considered DIYing an internal service for this - even if we went with you we'd pro

Startup owner using AI with this need - needless to say, a real problem. I've considered DIYing an internal service for this - even if we went with you we'd probably have an intern do a quick and dirty copy, which I rarely advocate for if I can offload to SAAS. I'm sure you've put a fair bit of work into this that goes well beyond the human interaction loop, but that's really all we need. Your entry price is steep (I'm afraid to ask what an enterprise use-case looks like) and this isn't complicated to make. We don't need to productize or have all the bells and whistles - just human interaction occasionally. Any amount of competition would wipe out your pricing, so no I would not want to pay for this.

dhorthy 2y ago
thanks for the validation of the problem! totally open to feedback about the solution, and totally get that you only need something simple for now. I want to point out that we do have a pay-as-you-go tier which is $20 for 200 operations, and have a handful of indie devs finding this useful for back-office style automations. ALSO - something I think about a lot - if a all/most of the HumanLayer SaaS backend was open source, would that change your thinking?
- chalkycrimp 2y ago
  My gut feeling is with where we're headed we'll clear that 200 pretty quickly in production cases, so we'd be interested in bit higher volume. Our dev efforts would probably clear that 200/mo. If the flow/backend was open-source that'd be a total game changer for us as I see it as an integral part of our product. edit: I want to add here that while ycomb companies like yourself may have VC backing, a lot of us don't and do consider 500+/mo. base price on a service that is operations-limited to be a lot. You need to decide who your target audience is, I may not be in that audience for your SAAS pricing. This seems like a service that a lot of people need, but it also stands out to me as a service that will be copied at an extravagantly lower price. We have truly entered software as a commodity when I, a non-AI engineer, can whip up something like this in a week using serverless infra and $0.0001/1k tokens with gpt-o mini.
  - dhorthy 2y ago
    that makes sense - and have wondered a lot even more generally about the price of software and what makes a hard problem hard. Like Amjad from Replit said on a podcast recently "can anyone build 'the next salesforce' in a world where anyone can build their own salesforce with coding agents and serverless infra" I think in building this some of the things that folks decided they don't want to deal with is like, the state machine for escalations/routing/timeouts, and infrastructure to catch inbound emails and turn them into webhooks, or stitch a single agent's context window with multiple open slack threads, but you're right, that can all be solved by a software engineer with enough time and interest in solving the problem. I will need to clear up the pricing page as it sounds like I didn't do a good job (great feedback thank you!) - it's basically $20/200 credits, and you can pay-as-you-go, and re-up for more whenever you want. We are early and delivering value is more important to me than extracting every dollar, especially out of a fellow founder who's early. If you geniunely find this useful, I would definitely chat and collaborate/partner to figure out something you think is fair, where you're getting value and you get to focus on your core competency. feel free to email me dexter at humanlayer dot dev
    - conductr 2y ago
      I’m just armchair quarterbacking here but I feel like you should just do all features for every user with a single $/action rate, then give discounts for volume and/or prepayment. Even saying $20/200 is a clunky statement. You could just say $0.10 per action (the fact that you’re actually requiring me to make a $20 payment with a $20 charge once it gets to $10 or something like that isn’t even important to me on a pricing page, although when you mention it later in the billing page make sure you also tell people it’s a risk-free money back guarantee if that’s the case) If there’s something that truly has an incremental cost to you, like providing priority support, that goes into the “enterprise pricing” section and you need to figure out how to quote that separately from the service. My guess is most people don’t want to pay extra for that, or perhaps they’d pay for some upfront integration support but ongoing support is not too important to them. Idk, that’s just my guess here.
      - 2y ago
- davedx 2y ago
  Honestly: don't spend your time on HN comments like this. Focus on customers who want to pay you for it.
j45 2y ago
This might deserve to be the new to-do list everyone learns to build if only that there's so much to learn from trying on how to get it best.. this month or quarter.
hv23 2y ago
What's an example of the use cases you're seeing with agents in your day-to-day?
davedx 2y ago
Classic HN comment, almost a carbon copy of the Dropbox one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
fireflies33 2y ago
Hey, would you be open to checking out something I hacked together on GitHub? https://github.com/adrian-kong/hitl-middleware https://github.com/adrian-kong/hitl-middleware I wasn’t sure if this would be relevant to you or useful at all, but it’s a quick solution I built for HITL workflows. Happy to hear your thoughts or if you think it’s applicable!
endofreach 2y ago
I have built a dumb internal service for this that i have been using for more than a year now. And just today i've thought about turning it into a simple product, as i am in need to finance the work on my actual product. Then i saw this Show HN & then your comment. Which makes me wonder: how would you use such a service "occasionally"? And what would be your pricing expectation?

dhorthy 2y ago

thanks for the validation of the problem! totally open to feedback about the solution, and totally get that you only need something simple for now. I want to point out that we do have a pay-as-you-go tier which is $20 for 200 operations, and have a handful of indie devs finding this useful for back-office style automations. ALSO - something I think about a lot - if a all/most of the HumanLayer SaaS backend was open source, would that change your thinking?

chalkycrimp 2y ago
My gut feeling is with where we're headed we'll clear that 200 pretty quickly in production cases, so we'd be interested in bit higher volume. Our dev efforts would probably clear that 200/mo. If the flow/backend was open-source that'd be a total game changer for us as I see it as an integral part of our product. edit: I want to add here that while ycomb companies like yourself may have VC backing, a lot of us don't and do consider 500+/mo. base price on a service that is operations-limited to be a lot. You need to decide who your target audience is, I may not be in that audience for your SAAS pricing. This seems like a service that a lot of people need, but it also stands out to me as a service that will be copied at an extravagantly lower price. We have truly entered software as a commodity when I, a non-AI engineer, can whip up something like this in a week using serverless infra and $0.0001/1k tokens with gpt-o mini.
- dhorthy 2y ago
  that makes sense - and have wondered a lot even more generally about the price of software and what makes a hard problem hard. Like Amjad from Replit said on a podcast recently "can anyone build 'the next salesforce' in a world where anyone can build their own salesforce with coding agents and serverless infra" I think in building this some of the things that folks decided they don't want to deal with is like, the state machine for escalations/routing/timeouts, and infrastructure to catch inbound emails and turn them into webhooks, or stitch a single agent's context window with multiple open slack threads, but you're right, that can all be solved by a software engineer with enough time and interest in solving the problem. I will need to clear up the pricing page as it sounds like I didn't do a good job (great feedback thank you!) - it's basically $20/200 credits, and you can pay-as-you-go, and re-up for more whenever you want. We are early and delivering value is more important to me than extracting every dollar, especially out of a fellow founder who's early. If you geniunely find this useful, I would definitely chat and collaborate/partner to figure out something you think is fair, where you're getting value and you get to focus on your core competency. feel free to email me dexter at humanlayer dot dev
  - conductr 2y ago
    I’m just armchair quarterbacking here but I feel like you should just do all features for every user with a single $/action rate, then give discounts for volume and/or prepayment. Even saying $20/200 is a clunky statement. You could just say $0.10 per action (the fact that you’re actually requiring me to make a $20 payment with a $20 charge once it gets to $10 or something like that isn’t even important to me on a pricing page, although when you mention it later in the billing page make sure you also tell people it’s a risk-free money back guarantee if that’s the case) If there’s something that truly has an incremental cost to you, like providing priority support, that goes into the “enterprise pricing” section and you need to figure out how to quote that separately from the service. My guess is most people don’t want to pay extra for that, or perhaps they’d pay for some upfront integration support but ongoing support is not too important to them. Idk, that’s just my guess here.
    - 2y ago
davedx 2y ago
Honestly: don't spend your time on HN comments like this. Focus on customers who want to pay you for it.

j45 2y ago

This might deserve to be the new to-do list everyone learns to build if only that there's so much to learn from trying on how to get it best.. this month or quarter.

hv23 2y ago

What's an example of the use cases you're seeing with agents in your day-to-day?

davedx 2y ago

Classic HN comment, almost a carbon copy of the Dropbox one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

fireflies33 2y ago

Hey, would you be open to checking out something I hacked together on GitHub? https://github.com/adrian-kong/hitl-middleware https://github.com/adrian-kong/hitl-middleware I wasn’t sure if this would be relevant to you or useful at all, but it’s a quick solution I built for HITL workflows. Happy to hear your thoughts or if you think it’s applicable!

endofreach 2y ago

I have built a dumb internal service for this that i have been using for more than a year now. And just today i've thought about turning it into a simple product, as i am in need to finance the work on my actual product. Then i saw this Show HN & then your comment. Which makes me wonder: how would you use such a service "occasionally"? And what would be your pricing expectation?