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Comment by newscracker | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how many paid users are there for the hosted version and how the pricing was arrived at. Paying $90 a year for a personal CRM seems quite high since this is for each user. The application allows adding people, relationships, notes about people, events, contacts had with people, etc. There is no integration with any data source to pull information automatically. There is no integration with any platform or application to communicate with others.

I believe the hosted application could earn a lot more to support development and maintenance at a lower price point and reaching many more people.

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How is $90 for a hosted application expensive?

You're paying somebody $7.50 each month. That's... a latte and a half for the Starbucks crowd. Even at minimum wage, you're paying somebody to do 45 minutes of work for you.

And if organizing your contacts/keeping a log/finding pertinent info is significantly less than 45 minutes/month of work, may I humbly suggest you don't need a CRM?

And my wild guess is the devs know that, and they know that they'll lose the casual crowd anyways. "We make it up in volume" doesn't work if the volume just kicks the tires and leaves.

In my experience, what people really want when they're in that range is not something to manage your contacts - you want help with keeping a household book. (Or butler's book). And I really haven't seen an app to help there yet.

$90 for a hosted application is expensive the same way $1.99 cents for a play store app is expensive. It's all about expectations, and users pay you not only with money, but also with attention and mindshare. If you place too much value on one of those, you lose out on the others, but it can be a non issue, such as when your money doesn't come from the end user.

It's expensive because it's a locked in subscription. If I buy a coffee it's "mine", I don't have to buy next time if it's too expensive.

It's a heavy pricetag considering other free alternatives exists. If you look at the features page, I could replicate that with Asana easily.

SaaS is another way of outsourcing IT. Personal IT or someone else's.

You could replace dropbox with an FTP server, too.

But most people value their time more and will just pay $90 who want this set of features.

Airtable as well

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