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Part of Prime is getting you to give them $120 membership fee so you feel youre getting some kind of bonus buying from them ("free shipping") which reduces comparison shopping. I'm probably not going to buy $100/year memberships to costco, walmart, amazon, and target, even though im half way there and really tempted to pull the trigger on another.

The membership fees almost pay for themselves just in preventing me from going into the store and impulse buying something on a shelf once a month.

As far as Amazon Prime, I have to believe the price of shipping is built into the products, and the membership is for other psychological and behavior control reasons.

Is part of this social network price the same thing. A cost to make it exclusive, acts as a bit of a spam filter. Then after having sunk money into it, you feel the need to make it worthwhile. I never think "ive been watching too much prime I better get my value out of netflix this month" but a communication tool might be different.

I agree with you on the Amazon Prime membership triggering impulse purchases, stickiness with the one day or two day deliveries and of course, shipping built into the products' prices. But Amazon Prime video here (in India) has a lot of local content and gets many new movies quickly onto it. My assessment is that Prime Video is probably a bigger attraction for people here (perhaps with Prime Music) than two day shipping alone (which is not very widely available on many products).

The one nice thing about Prime vs Prime video, is they advertise both prices separately, so we can at least get a peak at what percent of the prime cost amazon thinks video is worth. We know they arent selling Video by itself at a loss, it wouldnt make sense to give away video as a loss leader, if you arent snagging people elsewhere.

100$s? Amazon prime membership is 1000rs per year, which is less than 14$ a year.

Lucky you. In the US it is $119/yr.

Gotta be smart, I think Amazon technically paid me to have prime one year and this year I've negatived a good chunk of it. Any time they have the 1$ digital credit for delay shipping I select it which then subsidizes a good chunk of my eBook purchases. I think I've had 4$ in credit just this week and have another 1$ I'll get whenever the 5$ shoehorn I ordered yesterday ships.

This post shows how smart Amazon's Prime strategy is. We have someone probably spending thousands of dollars with Amazon (and Amazon taking a good chunk of that in commission) bragging about getting some free ebooks.

Spending money I'd spend at a brick and mortar store, that I'd have to drive to using oil life/tire life/gasoline/brake pad life/brake rotor life while also losing time.

Instead, I can think "oh hey I need to get a shoe horn, the heels on the uppers of the slip-ons I wear to church are getting funky" or "ah crap, I forgot to stop and get a new belt on the way home and this one is getting pretty loose on the last notch and I don't think this synthetic material is going to be happy if I punch a new hole" or "instead of driving to 6 stores hoping to find filters for my air purifier, I can buy 2 on Amazon right here on the toilet and be good for the next 2 years" and "my xlear nasal spray is about empty here at work and this heat is really drying my nose out, I'll just order another now instead of waiting until I go to the grocery Saturday" and "I need another USB C cable, this one is starting to get pretty stressed, I'll order one on Amazon instead of driving miles out of my way to go to Walmart or Best Buy hoping they have one".

Those are this week's purchases. All things I needed, all things I would have had to buy somewhere, all things I got a 1$ credit for which I will use towards eBooks I would have purchased either way.

Or last week when I ordered a tofu press, I have no idea where to buy a tofu press in the real world but wasting gobs of paper towels and using books just wasn't doing it for me.

It's not like I opened Amazon in a moment of boredom and said "let's see what I should waste money on today".

> oh hey I need to get a shoe horn,

Related, I went to buy a shoe stretcher on Amazon. Had to buy 3 before I got one that wasn't complete garbage.

I'd have gone to someplace local but none of the local places have much inventory for quality goods anymore either...

For me Amazon is still a net win in regards to convenience, but there are a lot of things I just won't buy.

Heck for a little while earlier this year the official Sonicare page was somehow taken over by people selling knock-off replacement heads, all the links from the manufacturers verified page went to obviously fraudulent misspelled products.

>For me Amazon is still a net win in regards to convenience, but there are a lot of things I just won't buy.

Yeah for me it's mostly books (digital and physical), Amazon basics stuff and stuff I can't get anywhere locally (that I know of) like a tofu press or hard to counterfeit stuff like my televisions/an iPad Air 2/my reconditioned vitamix.

And those are e-books that the buyer does not own for ever. Amazon can remove the e-books from its catalog anytime without prior notice.

Oh, I own them forever. You can strip DRM with Calibre via plugins or worst case you can print to PDF from inside Calibre with your Kindle connected.

https://calibre-ebook.com/

Besides, I don't think I've ever re-read an eBook. If I think I'll refer to something again I buy it in print.

The only time Amazon has done that, the buyers were refunded (and that's not just Bezos being polite, that's a meaningful legal obligation if it's a purchase).

USA prices.

Amazon $119, 5% cash back on Amazon CC, Prime Now has minimums, includes Whole Foods, has music and video included. Video is $108 by itself.

Walmart Grocery $98. (their CC is a 1 year bonus, not forever)

Costco $60-120 (120 price gets you 2% yearly cash back.)

Target Shipt $99, 5% back on Redcard, free Debit Redcard is all thats needed for free standard shipping, shipt is for same day like Now.

At the moment upgrading from 2day/nextday to same day costs around $100/year.

Newspaper prices are offset by advertising costs. It costs a bomb to advertise in newspapers and those are the primary revenue drivers for the newspaper publisher. In the case of Amazon, they are interested in you. You are the primary customer providing them will data points to feed their advertising business. Again, subsidize the cost of Prime membership but get folks to give up data in return. Prime no longer is about hassle free shipping. Prime serves as a vehicle to gobble up all kinds of data to serve their ad business. This is how i look at Amazon and Prime.

Netflix is in the content delivery business, for now. Hence they have to charge full price. If, and when their business model changes to become advertisement driven, you will see changes in the prices charged to end users.

I feel that Costco is worth it just based on bulk-buying toilet paper, dish detergent, and such.

I have Costco premium or whatever the highest one is.

Consistently great quality + deals.

Right now they're selling a Costco-sized box of 1,500 Legos for $40.

Also get the executive. At the end of the year you get back 2% or $60, whichever is higher. So if you can front the extra $60, there's no reason to not do it.

To get the up to $60 refund you have to quit the executive program. You dont get the difference every year, AND get to keep making 2%.

> a Costco-sized box of 1,500 Legos for $40.

Man, you can't just put information like this out there. I can't be trusted with this knowledge.

Yeah, I've been eyeing that as a good gift for family. Or myself. I like the old-school stuff that isn't tied to movies or whatever.

Is this kind of bulk really much cheaper than walmart?

Yes, and Walmart has a lower quality/price ratio. And people at Costco are nice to communicate with. And Costco treats them well.

I live in a small place so don't buy much in bulk, but pay for at least half my Costco membership in toothbrush heads alone.

we spent enough there that our rebate pays for the membership heh

oh wow!! can't amazon create a social network of buyers?

I agree Amazon Prime is a trap. Without it the free shipping starts at around €29. That alone makes me bundle my purchases, which hinders impulse buying.

Based on observing Prime members I feel most people would be much better off without the subscription.

This exact reason has helped me stop frivolous purchases as soon as I discontinued my prime membership.

I hate paying for shipping and most of the time the items in my cart are < $25 at which point I ask myself if I really need this item. If I really need it, I go to the target/Wal-Mart near my place since they always price match. Not renewing my prime membership has been by very liberating!

This is why the ad model works better. Local advertisers can bid on his data to show 5 cent ads where someone in northamerica may be worth 5 dollars. Trying to price this as a monthly service removes the ability to offer different prices per region without getting into fairness or causing people to get around the rules by signing up in different regions but watching from another.

They just pointed out that Netflix has different prices per region. Many service providers do.

Netflix has many problems with this model and is currently trying to find a solution. There are services setup to fool netflix into providing content outside of geograpical areas that they are liceased for.

An ad based model is 100% progressive though unlike any normal scheme. For example a homeless guy pay basically nothing for browsing Facebook on his phone even if he lives in USA since his attention is not worth anything.

> An ad based model is 100% progressive though unlike any normal scheme. For example a homeless guy pay basically nothing for browsing Facebook ...

A system in which a poor person making $30k/year and spends $500/year on products or content advertised via Facebook versus a rich person who makes $1M/year and spends $10k on products/content via facebook is not exactly progressive. The poor person ends up paying 1.6% of their income, while the rich person spends 0.1%.

The poor person spends 16X of their takehome earnings than the rich person, not exactly progressive.

I agree that regional or currency based pricing is not easy and comes with its own problems. But Wikipedia is one of those sites that's freely available and used by people around the world. I wouldn't have thought of the Wikipedia founder starting a venture that charges so much. The 2018-2019 fundraising report by Wikimedia Foundation [1] shows that all the countries in Asia combined contributed less than Australia and New Zealand put together. So he/they must have deep insight into how much money comes from where and the respective ability and willingness of people to donate from different places. They could've as well priced it proportionally with some adjustments on that data.

[1]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising/2018-19_Report

I'm dealing with this now with my app Polar. We're a cognitive platform for managing knowledge, education, and reading.

You MUST have localized pricing for these types of apps. We're going to cut our pricing for India, and basically all developing nations.

Students too... if you have a university email we'll give you a discount on top of your normal region-specific discounts.

It's a fools errand otherwise. These users will just NOT convert.

The price is not $12.99/month, it's free. The $12.99/month are for those that want to support the service financially, it's donationware similar to wikipedia. Jimmy Wales said the idea is that a small minority will pay for the service for everyone.

>showed the price to jump the waitlist (currently at 60k) as $12.99 a month

That's the cost to jump the waitlist, not the ongoing price for what will be (he hopes) the majority of users. Back when Facebook was Ivy-league only, there were TONS of students I knew who would have paid to get access. As it gets less exclusive the price will come down or become free

> For example, Cloudflare WARP+ costs about $0.97 a month (compared to $4.99 a month in the US).

That's fairly country-dependant - I actually sent some feedback to Cloudflare expressing my disappointment with their pricing - it's currently 5.30 USD in my country with 20% lower purchasing power than the USA.

I recall Cloudflare mentioning something about the priced being proportionate to whatever a Big Mac costs. [1] Perhaps Cloudflare got it wrong with your country or a Big Mac costs a lot more than in the US (that sounds weird)?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index

Canada - Big Mac here is about the same absolute cost as the US before accounting for 20% PPP difference, and then Cloudflare rounded the American price down (from $5.51 to $5) and the Canadian price up (from $6.65 to $7) - so it's only a couple dollars, but it doesn't feel like good value. (Particularly compared to other consumer services, e.g. Apple Arcade, Dropbox, Netflix are only +1 CAD over their USD price starting from a higher base price, Spotify and Apple Music are priced with CAD at par, etc.)

I don't see why this should be expected of any company honestly. If I want to price for the country that I'm trying to sell to, why should I be forced to care about or focus on a market segment that doesn't matter much to me?

My screen was showing that they $100/yr lets you and 200 of your friends jump the waitlist. If you max that out, 50 cents per person isn't so bad.

EDIT: I logged out and back in and it looks like it let me in without paying...

My guess is that they'd get much more (more than 10x) uptake at $1.99 than they will at $12.99.

And they need volume to make it work. So this pricing seems like a big mistake to me.

> showed the price to jump the waitlist ... as $12.99 a month or $100 a year.

Yeah, not a big fan of this. You could buy very nice cloud hosting for $12.99 a month, and run your own instance of a federated social network like Mastodon.

Yeah, my parents are totally going to do that.

You could stand one up and your parents join it? Yes, not everyone can stand up their own self hosted stuff. In fact few of us can. There's a huge missing gap between your phone/desktop applications and just installing and running hosted applications, but I digress.

I stood up a Mastodon instance and invited a bunch of my friends. Only like 3 of us use it, but it's up and connected to the greater Fediverse.

No need to go that far. Maybe one HNer even does that or even wants to do it.

Or join an existing social network with a billion plus users.

Google+, now's your time to shine!

Why is there even a wait list at all? This feels sketchy from first use. And to not be up front about the cost before getting my personal information is, I feel, dishonest.

How can he expect to create a platform of honest people if he is dishonest from the point of account creation?

This is not the way to do it.

Why on earth does it feel sketchy to you. As far as I can tell this service will be devoid of adverts and tracking, which means that it will be entirely funded by subscribers. You can't really expect him to buy all the servers and bandwidth and provide it all to you for nothing out of his own pocket. That's just stupid. It seems to me the idea is that early access subscribers pay for the initial equipment. They then release an initial block of free accounts. As they get more paying subscribers they can invest in more infrastructure and release more free accounts.

If they were just to give accounts out free immediately they would be inundated and the servers might not be able to cope.

This allows them to grow the service organically with paying subscribers supporting the "freeloaders".

Hope that clears it up.

Just say that up front. Before i put in an email address.

Current wait list: 60,000 people (estimated hold time 30 days) but you can jump the queue for $12.99/mo or $100/yr.

Done. Honest. Transparent.

The site's current account flow is infected with dark patterns and turns off those familiar with them, like me.

Yeah. I knew (from TFA) that there was a charge to jump the queue. But there's no mention of that on the signup page. And no mention that they don't accept ~anonymous payments.

> seems like it's meant for some sections of first world inhabitants

Perfect great!

Imagine it’s intentional and a pretty effective way of doing business

Now lets just critique why it isn’t a luxury brand

Expensive luxury prices are fine for certain products but can be detrimental to social and communication tools.

I can easily afford this product myself but I don’t want to pay for a social network if a portion of my friends/contacts are priced out.

Yes, I can understand that.

But Facebook's model, for instance, also prices people out. I am entirely unwilling to use Facebook because I consider it far too expensive. True, I'm paying with data rather than cash, but it's still paying. From my point of view, $12.99/mo is actually cheaper (assuming that paying that means I'm not going to be datamined).

Being “priced out” because you personally value your data more than others is a valid viewpoint, but that’s not the same thing as being priced out because you don’t have money.

That seems like a difference in viewpoint. I can understand your stance, but I don't share it. To me, being "priced out" means that something costs more than you are willing and able to pay.

Fair enough. I was just trying say that being unwilling to pay is very different than being unable to pay.

Charging a high price for a luxury brand is a fine business model but I wouldn’t consider a product accessible to only some socioeconomic groups to a be a Facebook competitor (as indicated in the article).

My general observation (anecdotal) is that people are more willing to pay a whole lot more for physical goods than for services (including apps, content and Internet connectivity).

Depends on the signaling value of the apps and content. Remember that one of the first iPhone apps was one that cost $500 and did nothing but print "I am rich" to the screen.

it probably cost less than $1/month to host the average user... this is just craziness