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Comment by csomar | Hacker News Reader

I used Focusmate a lot and then dropped it. I think it serves its purpose well until you get used to it and then productivity starts dropping again.

I also would like to highlight something which is not particular to Focusmate but rather a phenomena spreading to all these SaaS platforms: Focusmate is not free. It's a paying product that costs $5/month.

There is absolutely no details of pricing on the home page. There is no pricing page on the website. The FAQ itself doesn't mention pricing. This will only come up after you signup and start using it. There are details on the blog but that's about it.

It really gets on my nerves when services do that and I decided to ignore anything that ignores my right to know the price beforehand. But I can see it working with the general public for a while.

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Founder of Focusmate here.

I'm sorry to hear the effect that not having a pricing page has had on you. Thanks for sharing your feedback.

A few thoughts:

1) Focusmate IS free to use 3 times per week. Most of our users are on the free plan. You can use it in perpetuity for free.

2) We don't have a pricing page yet because we started charging 29 days ago, and because we're shipping product incrementally. (We are a 3-person team with 1 engineer, FWIW.)

3) At this very nascent stage, there is value to being able to run pricing tests, which we can't do if we publish a pricing page. (The downside is we annoy some people, which is not a trivial downside. Knowing the negative effect on you is meaningful to us/me.)

I welcome additional thoughts/feedback.

Taylor

At least you can make sure that the home page shows that it's only free for 3 sessions a week, then users have to pay, even if you can't/don't-want-to show the exact pricing.

> Focusmate IS free to use 3 times per week.

Better say that Focusmate is free to try. 3 times/week is so little to be any useful.

> 3 times/week is so little to be any useful.

If a user is exceeding this free teir, they're likely finding it useful enough to pay, and should pay

The lack of a pricing page usually infuriates me, but you've articulated a pretty good reason (#3) for it to be missing under some specific circumstances. I'd not thought of that.

To be honest though, I usually just see it as a dark pattern and quickly back-button away from wherever I am.

When someone hides a measure of value for an ongoing service, there’s a concern that the actual value doesn’t measure up to the real value. I think that’s what’s going here, and it probably works because $5 is a small amount.

It's been a huge value for me, and I get a ton more done with it. No joke, I would pay $100/month. (See my other comment about this article for how its been so valuable to me.)

Hi! Founder here. See my comment above on the reasons why we haven't published a pricing page yet. We just started charging, and will add a pricing page soon. BTW we could charge 10X what we do. The reason for the $5 price is that we're more interested in learning about who pays and why, than revenue-maximizing. That price also allows us to be inclusive of our student customers and international customers, for whom a US-centric price would be prohibitive. Note, we also have a scholarship program for those who cannot afford $5/month.

Yes, you could charge 10x more. You could charge N more (why stop at 10x, 1000x!), but would anyone pay?

You started at 5 USD and you're not publishing it because as you indicated earlier in the thread, you're price testing. I assume that means finding the price point the most people are willing to pay for the product. For a product with low marginal costs, getting data on what users want so you can keep expanding that pool is revenue maximizing.

Where's all that negativity coming from? The founder is being transparent about his budding business and you're at him harder than hn was on Apple's stance on Hong Kong.

You're free to not use the product, but to character assassinate a small, indie Dev house because you disagree with the price point, is just not OK. BTW - this rant you went on, is the quintessential indicator of you not being there target customer, you will generally be ignored by makers.

You should also read patio11's essay on pricing: https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/saas_pric...

A business that looks at what users want and can pay, and adjusts accordingly? Sounds like a competently run business!

Thank you Taylor for sharing your comments here as a founder. Some of us at HN still love hearing about actual new startups, business models, pricing strategies etc.

> BTW we could charge 10X what we do.

So we can expect that the price will eventually increase to $50 a month when your company is transitioning out of its growth phase and into generating revenue.

Good to know.

If a service provides a useful value that people are willing to pay for at $50 then why shouldn't the service provider charge $50?

I would recommend you take a look at Sococo then (disclaimer -- I don't work for them but know people that do): https://www.sococo.com/

Much more upfront about their pricing structure.

It’s much more expensive and not the same thing at all. That’s totally fine since Sococo is doing their own thing. Focusmate is entirely different though

I had the same experience. I ended up getting used to the mild uncomfortableness of having someone watching you "work", which led to me dropping the service. Found myself not working even when the camera was on.

In fairness to Focusmate, they only added their paid plan a couple of weeks ago, and they sent a lot of emails trying to get user support for the move.

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