3 ms·

Still, $50/user/year doesn't give you that much room for manoeuvre as a startup...

• burke 14y ago
  If someone's already committed to paying, they can be convinced to pay more. It's hard to convince someone getting something for free that they should start forking over dollars.
• ams6110 14y ago
  Compared to what? You can provision your own apps and run your own services for less?
  • rdl 14y ago
    I think he means as a vendor of mail services, $50/year/mailbox means you can't make enough profit unless you're huge, and even mid-sized, $50/year/mailbox might not let you provide very good service.
• Firehed 14y ago
  Google just removed their own ability to convert free customers to paid ones as they grew. Switching cost of email is extremely high, so a startup in this space could easily charge more than $50/yr/user once they're already in. Granted they're lacking the integration with all of Google's other services, but given how bad google's multi-account sessions are and the fact that basically everyone is logged into their personal gmail account already, that might actually be a good thing. Plus, $50/yr/user adds up pretty darn quickly at scale. Not as much as all of these video services that cost about $100/yr, but like I said, the cost of switching email providers is insanely high - once you have a customer, it's almost guaranteed you'll have them forever unless you screw up at massive, catastrophic scale. Though because of that, you have to have a crazy-good hosted offering to get people to sign up in the first place; demoing a mail service is hard and Gmail (personal) has been a great way to show what their paid services offer for businesses.
• deleted 14y ago
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