4 ms·

Not sure why the community is being so hostile like use phoenix or it charges or its hostile Like no its not. This is a genuinely cool project and most parts

Not sure why the community is being so hostile like use phoenix or it charges or its hostile Like no its not. This is a genuinely cool project and most parts of it is open source and it can run on any language and its interesting that they are looking at a way so that they can fund the development of it in the process as well Its their project and they are the only ones entitled to really push things the way they want. It looks cool and I might hack with it in golang. Thanks a lot for your work. One minor feedback I want to share is that although I don't mind having a charge for things, 299$ especially in my country is a seriously lot of money and I think that some of these might be needed by me if I go full in on it but I genuinely can't afford even the single tier one. Could the non profit atleast have some dynamic pricing for all countries sort of like steam? And/or donating to people.... like I mean genuinely no shade whatsoever at the datastar team but animation etc. are already available in sveltekit for free and I don't want it for free but I just genuinely can't afford it here... Another suggestion could be to lean very heavily on the entreprise who can afford such things much rather easily or maybe even more and maybe you/team can lower the price for solo so that solo devs can try things out and not be worried for 299$-ish y'know? Deep respects for the project, Its another tool which is mostly free so the community's reaction is very weird for that... But if I can be genuinely honest, I am saying this as a guy who has never paid any community/anything online but I would for the first time genuinely sponsor the project for 5-10$ (I know it ain't much but that's all I am comfortable with donating as a teenager right now) Can you please charge atleast the solo level to atleast be the price of the silksong? I don't know but I will try the project out as it looks super cool

cindyllm 1y ago
[dead]
sarchertech 1y ago
The problem is that a small company still needs to provide support from their own very high cost of living country. $5 doesn’t cover the cost of you filing a single support ticket.
- Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
  I understand it sincerely. Is there some middle way that I could use these datastar attributes/paid offerings via lets say 5$ but I wouldn't get support from the team itself. I think that they might have a discord server as well and so I am more than okay to take support from the community itself if I can be honest... Simply because like me and others, we simply can't pay 299$ when we don't require support. Could another tier be created that allows people to use it but just without any official support in the sense that maybe you could create github issues or something about it but don't expect mission critical of sorts... I hope you can see things from my perspective as well & I know some companies / projects which also do something similar where they offer support seperately / at a higher price but using the product itself doesn't cost you / costs you very little and you can always use unofficial-ish help. What are your thoughts? Do you think that datastar could integrate something like this?
  - nchmy 1y ago
    they do have a discord server, and it is full of excellent conversation. But I expect that you would receive a similar response to what we've given "sorry, but no. But, also, you dont actually need the pro features. Build with the free version and profit from it"
  - sarchertech 1y ago
    There are so many issues with doing something like this that it's almost never going to be financially viable for small companies. - Some jurisdictions require some level of warranty, extended refund periods, or limit your ability to avoid liability for product defects. - You need to spend time doing research to set prices for each country or region. - You need to combat fraud from people trying to buy your product using a VPN from low cost regions. - This one is a big one. Chargebacks tend to be higher from low cost of living countries. Payment processors will drop you if your chargeback rate gets too high. Risking a $25 chargeback fee and being dropped from your payment processor for $5-10 payments is often not worth it. - There are only 20 million professional software developers in the world. If you say half of those are web developers and you are phenomenally successful and 1 out of every 1000 web developers in the whole world buys your software. That's 10k sales. At $5 per sale that's $50k revenue across the entire life of the product. $50k for a team of people isn't a financially viable endeavor.
nchmy 1y ago
This is the only valid and reasonable criticism I've seen here so far, kudos to you. 299 is, indeed, inaccessible for many people. But, the devs live in places where things cost more, so its also a tiny price compared to the relative value that they provide. I do think that some sort of geo-relative pricing structure would be worth looking into, but how does one even implement something like that? Is there something that makes it all "just work"? I suspect not. Moreover, the devs have already given away so much of their time - it doesnt make much sense for them to invest even more of it into designing a pricing system like this, from which they are going to possibly earn only a negligible amount from. Perhaps this is a problem that you might like to address yourself? Anyway, the devs are very clear that most people should never need the Pro license. 95+% of the functionality and value is available for free in the open-source library. Use it, enjoy it, learn from it, profit from it!
- markusw 1y ago
  What I've done in a project once is use Purchasing Power Parity: basically, there's an index for purchasing power, and you adjust your pricing based on that. It's implemented in some major payment platforms, like Gumroad: https://gumroad.com/help/article/327-purchasing-power-parity https://gumroad.com/help/article/327-purchasing-power-parity
  - nchmy 1y ago
    Yeah, something like PPP seems to be the way to do it. But it seems non-trivial to implement in reality. Gumroad consequently charges 10% fees. I think it is very unlikely that Datastar would implement something like this - but just as a matter of limited time, rather than lack of empathy with the situation. Still, people are welcome to bring it up in their discord - perhaps they will actually do it! And i say all of this as someone who lives in central america, and am building a nonprofit project for which i have zero funding assistance. I already bought the pro license (which is 60% of my monthly cost of living...), mostly just because i see huge value in it all and wanted to support them.
  - sudodevnull 1y ago
    Datastar author here, neat idea. Join the Discord and talk to us about how to implement. We're just a few guys and just don't have the cycles to explore every option for every facet of the project. Some of this is pure overhead
HiPhish 1y ago
> Not sure why the community is being so hostile I cannot speak for other people, but here is where I'm coming from: - There is no mention of Pro on the home page, I only found out about Pro after flipping through the documentation. This comes off as sleazy, like "Look at our cool open-source project", and then after they have you hooked they go "oh, if you want all all of it you gotta get Pro". - Pro is locking genuine features, not just support, video tutorials or code examples. - It is vendor lock-in, if you want to rely on any Pro feature you are now at the mercy of the maintainers. - What make the vendor lock-in particularly problematic is the fact that without Datastar your website will not work. Sure, it does suck if your CI service, test platform or whatever does not work, but as long as you can compile and deploy the code you will survive, even if you have to do it by hand. Not so with a library. - There are no examples of what your are buying. At least with the non-Pro features you can try them out for free without any commitment, but when it comes to Pro you are just taking a blind guess as to whether any of them are what you want. Compare that to the Pro examples Alpine has[1], where you can play around with them in the browser. - I don't know if you get source code, but even if you do you cannot share your improvements with anyone. Note that I never mentioned the price. The value will vary from person to person, for some it will be unaffordable, for others it will be a great deal (e.g. freelancers who will make the money back within one gig). I got my employer to sponsor Alpine a year ago and they have given more to Alpine than what Datastar are charging for Pro. For reference, two projects which have non-objectionable Pro versions are Alpine.js[2] and React Flow[3]. React flow even have a link to their Pro page right on the home page. [1] https://alpinejs.dev/components https://alpinejs.dev/components [2] https://alpinejs.dev/components https://alpinejs.dev/components [3] https://reactflow.dev/pro https://reactflow.dev/pro
- nchmy 1y ago
  congrats, you have described external dependencies

cindyllm 1y ago

[dead]

sarchertech 1y ago

The problem is that a small company still needs to provide support from their own very high cost of living country. $5 doesn’t cover the cost of you filing a single support ticket.

Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
I understand it sincerely. Is there some middle way that I could use these datastar attributes/paid offerings via lets say 5$ but I wouldn't get support from the team itself. I think that they might have a discord server as well and so I am more than okay to take support from the community itself if I can be honest... Simply because like me and others, we simply can't pay 299$ when we don't require support. Could another tier be created that allows people to use it but just without any official support in the sense that maybe you could create github issues or something about it but don't expect mission critical of sorts... I hope you can see things from my perspective as well & I know some companies / projects which also do something similar where they offer support seperately / at a higher price but using the product itself doesn't cost you / costs you very little and you can always use unofficial-ish help. What are your thoughts? Do you think that datastar could integrate something like this?
- nchmy 1y ago
  they do have a discord server, and it is full of excellent conversation. But I expect that you would receive a similar response to what we've given "sorry, but no. But, also, you dont actually need the pro features. Build with the free version and profit from it"
- sarchertech 1y ago
  There are so many issues with doing something like this that it's almost never going to be financially viable for small companies. - Some jurisdictions require some level of warranty, extended refund periods, or limit your ability to avoid liability for product defects. - You need to spend time doing research to set prices for each country or region. - You need to combat fraud from people trying to buy your product using a VPN from low cost regions. - This one is a big one. Chargebacks tend to be higher from low cost of living countries. Payment processors will drop you if your chargeback rate gets too high. Risking a $25 chargeback fee and being dropped from your payment processor for $5-10 payments is often not worth it. - There are only 20 million professional software developers in the world. If you say half of those are web developers and you are phenomenally successful and 1 out of every 1000 web developers in the whole world buys your software. That's 10k sales. At $5 per sale that's $50k revenue across the entire life of the product. $50k for a team of people isn't a financially viable endeavor.

nchmy 1y ago

This is the only valid and reasonable criticism I've seen here so far, kudos to you. 299 is, indeed, inaccessible for many people. But, the devs live in places where things cost more, so its also a tiny price compared to the relative value that they provide. I do think that some sort of geo-relative pricing structure would be worth looking into, but how does one even implement something like that? Is there something that makes it all "just work"? I suspect not. Moreover, the devs have already given away so much of their time - it doesnt make much sense for them to invest even more of it into designing a pricing system like this, from which they are going to possibly earn only a negligible amount from. Perhaps this is a problem that you might like to address yourself? Anyway, the devs are very clear that most people should never need the Pro license. 95+% of the functionality and value is available for free in the open-source library. Use it, enjoy it, learn from it, profit from it!

markusw 1y ago
What I've done in a project once is use Purchasing Power Parity: basically, there's an index for purchasing power, and you adjust your pricing based on that. It's implemented in some major payment platforms, like Gumroad: https://gumroad.com/help/article/327-purchasing-power-parity https://gumroad.com/help/article/327-purchasing-power-parity
- nchmy 1y ago
  Yeah, something like PPP seems to be the way to do it. But it seems non-trivial to implement in reality. Gumroad consequently charges 10% fees. I think it is very unlikely that Datastar would implement something like this - but just as a matter of limited time, rather than lack of empathy with the situation. Still, people are welcome to bring it up in their discord - perhaps they will actually do it! And i say all of this as someone who lives in central america, and am building a nonprofit project for which i have zero funding assistance. I already bought the pro license (which is 60% of my monthly cost of living...), mostly just because i see huge value in it all and wanted to support them.
- sudodevnull 1y ago
  Datastar author here, neat idea. Join the Discord and talk to us about how to implement. We're just a few guys and just don't have the cycles to explore every option for every facet of the project. Some of this is pure overhead

HiPhish 1y ago

> Not sure why the community is being so hostile I cannot speak for other people, but here is where I'm coming from: - There is no mention of Pro on the home page, I only found out about Pro after flipping through the documentation. This comes off as sleazy, like "Look at our cool open-source project", and then after they have you hooked they go "oh, if you want all all of it you gotta get Pro". - Pro is locking genuine features, not just support, video tutorials or code examples. - It is vendor lock-in, if you want to rely on any Pro feature you are now at the mercy of the maintainers. - What make the vendor lock-in particularly problematic is the fact that without Datastar your website will not work. Sure, it does suck if your CI service, test platform or whatever does not work, but as long as you can compile and deploy the code you will survive, even if you have to do it by hand. Not so with a library. - There are no examples of what your are buying. At least with the non-Pro features you can try them out for free without any commitment, but when it comes to Pro you are just taking a blind guess as to whether any of them are what you want. Compare that to the Pro examples Alpine has[1], where you can play around with them in the browser. - I don't know if you get source code, but even if you do you cannot share your improvements with anyone. Note that I never mentioned the price. The value will vary from person to person, for some it will be unaffordable, for others it will be a great deal (e.g. freelancers who will make the money back within one gig). I got my employer to sponsor Alpine a year ago and they have given more to Alpine than what Datastar are charging for Pro. For reference, two projects which have non-objectionable Pro versions are Alpine.js[2] and React Flow[3]. React flow even have a link to their Pro page right on the home page. [1] https://alpinejs.dev/components https://alpinejs.dev/components [2] https://alpinejs.dev/components https://alpinejs.dev/components [3] https://reactflow.dev/pro https://reactflow.dev/pro

nchmy 1y ago
congrats, you have described external dependencies