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Comment by ZeroBugBounce | Hacker News Reader

It's a business decision which will make them more money.

In Universe A they sell only the most powerful version of the product for 1x price and them make some money.

In Universe B they sell the most powerful for 1x AND a slightly less powerful version for 0.9x price and they make MORE overall profit.

I'm not saying that's a bad thing. There are customers who will want to pay less and not need the most powerful product.

I fail to see how the company in Universe B is morally worse than those in Universe A. One could argue they are superior, in that they offer more choices.

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Exactly right. It is acceptable to argue that the pricing is too high and unfair. But to say the structure itself is wrong isn't correct.

Breaking up the total price of a product by it's component features and then creating variants of the sold product with certain features enabled vs disabled and hence having different total prices is one fair way of create products that are tailored to customers needs.

When pricing individual features, the prices may not correlate relative to each other. There may be factors like which features are most used by which segment of customers and how valuable the feature is to that segment customer and hence how much they are willing to pay.

Demanding that all the features should be sold at the lowest total cost doesn't make sense. We don't do this in any other domain.

"Moral" is a loaded word to throw in here. I wouldn't use that term. Customer-unfriendly etc. I think fit better. And if we're positing hypothetical universes, let's a Universe C: They give customers the faster version that doesn't cost them any more, and as a result they build more brand loyalty and good will, leading to more sales, market share, etc.

But profits are somewhat besides the point: I'm saying simply that some policies are not customer friendly. Whether or not you consider that to be good or bad may very well depend on whether you are a customer or a shareholder.

If the less powerful costs the same to make and is just crippled full version, then for me it’s not ethical and calling it a choice is a farce.

Btw obviously I’m not talking about software. Im not talking about pricing things with no marginal cost.

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