5 ms·

Yikes, you're making a fundamental mistake. A mistake that can destroy your business. What is a "request"? This is your mistake - it's not at all clear what you

Yikes, you're making a fundamental mistake. A mistake that can destroy your business. What is a "request"? This is your mistake - it's not at all clear what your pricing involved. You see, when I write, I spell check the document about 20-30 times. And your thing only allows 80 requests in a month. Is that a joke? Explain what a request is, otherwise I look at the pricing page and shut it down, because it's totally overpriced. Now, if you you would say each article I write gets spellchecked for $0.063, no matter how many times I spellcheck it, then I would be fine with that. But everytime I spell check I pay that amount? Ridiculous! And I think it's also a bit unclever how you did the pricing. You should go like this: "Get your article professionally spellchecked for 7cents. That's all you pay". People don't pay per month, they just pay per article. However, the minimum amount they can put on their account is $5. You can't actually put 7 cents. And there should be no monthly recurring bill.

ashleyw 17y ago
Definitely! I'd easily need 500 checks a month, and to me that isn't worth $20/mo.
- buro9 17y ago
  I'd also like to make this available to my users. 2,500 posts per day, some edited a few times. That's averaging 76,041 unique posts being spell checked each month... What realistic price should this be? The demo works very well btw, I am impressed. It's the pricing you need to think about. You might want to consider pricing that reflects the type of site... how would you charge HN for the service? There are enough users here who would benefit from it. Does it really costs you X to spell check? Could you lower the costs to achieve a faster growth?
  - ashleyw 17y ago
    It does soon ramp up, $1500+ month maybe? At that point, it could become worthwhile to just dedicate your own time to implement the feature. Not that I like the idea of that when this service seems to do the job well, but not many startups have $20k+ a year to spend on spell checking...or should I say, no sane startup would spend $20k/yr on spell checking!
    - sgrove 17y ago
      I think you may have missed the service plans page: http://www.afterthedeadline.com/commercial.slp http://www.afterthedeadline.com/commercial.slp The top plan is for an estimated 500 writers, with 50,000 requests/month, and costs $200.00. That's significantly lower than $1500/month. Beyond that, seems like you can work out a licensing deal to host your own server. Problem solved. It doesn't seem like a huge price to pay for a startup that relies of well-written material.
raffi 17y ago
Thanks. I'll clarify this on the site. I arrived at the numbers using data I collected about the behavior of my beta users over the past 90 days. One of my users is a blog with eight writers on staff and they do nine requests/day. If the pricing is wrong, it'll change.
- joel_feather 17y ago
  That's the mistake - maybe people actually only do 9 requests per article. But the think they do a lot more. I personally think I do about 1000 spell check requests a month, but I don't know because it's not something I've ever thought about. So you may have very concrete data on actual usage, but have you also looked at what users think about your pricing?
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

ashleyw 17y ago

Definitely! I'd easily need 500 checks a month, and to me that isn't worth $20/mo.

buro9 17y ago
I'd also like to make this available to my users. 2,500 posts per day, some edited a few times. That's averaging 76,041 unique posts being spell checked each month... What realistic price should this be? The demo works very well btw, I am impressed. It's the pricing you need to think about. You might want to consider pricing that reflects the type of site... how would you charge HN for the service? There are enough users here who would benefit from it. Does it really costs you X to spell check? Could you lower the costs to achieve a faster growth?
- ashleyw 17y ago
  It does soon ramp up, $1500+ month maybe? At that point, it could become worthwhile to just dedicate your own time to implement the feature. Not that I like the idea of that when this service seems to do the job well, but not many startups have $20k+ a year to spend on spell checking...or should I say, no sane startup would spend $20k/yr on spell checking!
  - sgrove 17y ago
    I think you may have missed the service plans page: http://www.afterthedeadline.com/commercial.slp http://www.afterthedeadline.com/commercial.slp The top plan is for an estimated 500 writers, with 50,000 requests/month, and costs $200.00. That's significantly lower than $1500/month. Beyond that, seems like you can work out a licensing deal to host your own server. Problem solved. It doesn't seem like a huge price to pay for a startup that relies of well-written material.

raffi 17y ago

Thanks. I'll clarify this on the site. I arrived at the numbers using data I collected about the behavior of my beta users over the past 90 days. One of my users is a blog with eight writers on staff and they do nine requests/day. If the pricing is wrong, it'll change.

joel_feather 17y ago
That's the mistake - maybe people actually only do 9 requests per article. But the think they do a lot more. I personally think I do about 1000 spell check requests a month, but I don't know because it's not something I've ever thought about. So you may have very concrete data on actual usage, but have you also looked at what users think about your pricing?

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]