From an economic standpoint, I don't think that argument holds water. You don't have to support readers the way you do SaaS customers. Is there such a thing as

From an economic standpoint, I don't think that argument holds water. You don't have to support readers the way you do SaaS customers. Is there such a thing as a parasitic reader? To the author: For a book with plenty of substitutes (as opposed to a presumably specialized SaaS product), I think it's much more likely that the demand curve is extremely elastic, meaning that as price decreases, quantity sold increases much more than enough to compensate for lower total revenue. And since marginal cost of each unit sold is effectively zero, this is all profit. Add in the fact that since you're early to the party, you could acquire these customers before substitute products hit the market. By the time they do, you could be the established product. I think Two Scoops of Django [1] got it right. They priced it to move. I bought it as an impulse purchase when they were in beta, and absolutely loved it. I can tell that many, many other people did the same, because I see it cited as an authority all the time on StackOverflow. It's up to "full price" now, but it's still affordable. [1] https://django.2scoops.org/ https://django.2scoops.org/