> For an emotional appeal to be successful, there needs to be a strong relationship (business, private, social) between the partys involved. An "emotional appe

> For an emotional appeal to be successful, there needs to be a strong relationship (business, private, social) between the partys involved. An "emotional appeal" is also known as an appeal to empathy, and humans empathize for many reasons other than personal relationships. When you hear about starving children in some far away place, you empathize, not because you know the suffering children, but because we're hard wired to protect our young. Other times, we empathize because we can identify with another person's experience. HttpWatch is a tool for developers, made by developers. Their hope with this message is that other developers will identify with their challenges. Every developer who sells their software in the app store has struggled with the pricing question. The addition of empirical evidence to support their pricing was a nice touch. There's always a skeptical subset of people who will not respond to any appeal. In my experience, that group is overrepresented here on HN, so I'm not surprised at the responses, but my hunch is that this message will have some positive effect for HttpWatch.