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Comment by munchkinship | Hacker News Reader

SaaS is a disaster without controls. They make it damn hard to automatically disable users who are no longer active. Then you have users picking competing duplicative tools, and now users can't work together without having duplicate accounts in each tool. Once they get you in, you've got no leverage--they'll just keep increasing prices because you're locked in. Companies are pushing you from perpetual license to cloud not for your benefit.

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Name some examples of price increases that were unfair?

Price increases due to inflation are a necessity.

I can't see a world where I would buy a software once and use it forever, so paying for upgrades is necessary at some point.

There's a hell of a gap between "paying for upgrades is necessary at some point" and "my supplier can choose when I have to pay more".

At the startup I used to work at the MD spent quite a bit of time dodging calls from Cloudinary. Every few months we needed to be on a higher tier package. We'd generally be tasked with optimising whichever metric was causing the problem a coupe of times a year (deleting / consolidating versions of various images etc).

It felt pretty shady (both his behaviour and their pricing structures).

Some of us put accounts on pause if they've been inactive for 30 days. It's not the norm (yet), but the good PR and happy customers were well worth the extra business logic.

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