Ask HN: Help Price Website Builder | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Help Price Website Builder

1 pointzupa-hu4 comments

Hi all!

I have a dream of providing a website builder for everyone on the planet. I have a working, robust product, people tell me the results start to look great. So far it has been free but obviously this model doesn't scale. I can't possibly pay the operating costs for that many websites.

I wanted to come up with a pricing that is 1) free for hobby sites, 2) really cheap for professional use, 3) pays the bills. Here is the best I was able to come up with:

http://boomla-theme.boomla.net/pricing

What do you think? (Time to be ruthless.) Or maybe you can suggest something even better?

Cheers, Tibor

View on HN

If patio11 ever read this, he would say:

fake quote> Raise your price! Raise your price! Raise your price!

https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/saas_pric...

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2006/08/14/you-can-probably-stand-...

Also, the price structure is too complicated. How much should I pay for an obscure blog that is hit from time to time with a small HN visit?

Take a look at https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/03/fantasy-tarsnap/ HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7523953 801 points | Apr 3, 2014 | 311 comments. But note that cperviva actualy lowered his price a few days after this post. Not everyone agree with patio11 :).

Appreciate the first comment!

Yeah, I know that is patio11's slogen. Interestingly, my users never tell me this. :D Also, I think having to pay $19/month is prohibitive for way too many use cases. Like, there are lots of websites on Boomla that are personal, web based documents. Eg. notes on how to play Bridge, the card game.

Anyways, I'll check out the links you sent again.

> Also, the price structure is too complicated. How much should I pay for an obscure blog that is hit from time to time with a small HN visit?

Interesting point. Let's say you get 50k visitors at a 1MB page load size. Substracting the free tier, that's 50GB data transfer -> $3.6. Visit pricing would be $49. CPU is probably $0.

If you get to the front page 1x a year, that's on average $4.4/mo. It's very unlikely that you will be on the front page very often. Do you think that's reasonable?

I understand your concern is that it's complicated. True, but if it wasn't, I'd spread the cost of high-traffic websites on everyone. So instead of paying $1/mo you would have to pay $10/mo. Or I'd have to cancel your account as many hosting companies do. As a user, I'd rather have my own electricity usage metered.

Wouldn't you agree?

Nobody ask to be charged more, but trusting you to put the credit card number is difficult, so the people that would pay $1 per month and $2 per month is almost the same.

I have my electricity usage metered, but I have a very good estimation that the bill next month will be $40 or $50 (The numbers are in US$. Hi from Argentina!)

The phone bill is more tricky. It´s usualy $10 (It is metered here, including local calls). But there are a lot of posible events that may increase the bill a lot. For example calling a mobile phone or calling abroad. I make a few calls to mobile phones and I very rarely call abroad, but it is scarry that the bill is essencialy unbounded.

With a webpage, it is more difficult to have a good estimation of the cost beforehand.

Yes, good point. I ended up removing the variable cost.

Hello from Hungary! :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com