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Comment by fencepost | Hacker News Reader

If there are companies paying $thousands per month then you may have just not been looking at the right potential customers. At 10-20x the price with service guarantees (maybe spread it across DO, AWS, Azure and emphasize your independence from problems with any) you might have been taken seriously by some of the companies paying higher bills. For enterprise customers the processing cost of paying $5-10/month recurring charges might be higher than the actual charges.

Edit: that doesn't mean it's bad to serve small clients, but if the concern is significant revenue....

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The concern wasn't significant revenue, it was really just to cover the cost of the more robust infrastructure without a single point of failure.

The initial product was just an nginx config for me and Austin's shortlinks and domain forwards. And that actually ran just fine for months with no downtime.

Problem is then you get customers and you want to promise them no down time, so you have to allow for failovers and high availability, and that adds complexity that really isn't needed... until it is. And in the almost 3 years, we had 1 database fail over to a slave that got promoted to master, and actually stayed that way for months before I manually failed it back to the bigger server.

Why not increase your prices and target larger customers then?

I had a letter of intent for a large order right before the company froze budgets and the point of contact left, it was for $9k/year if I built an API for them to manage their domains inhouse. Currently they had a vendor they were paying $15k/mo and then on top of that $150 each time they wanted to add or edit a new link or domain. It was a win/win, our service remained viable, I could afford to make it better, and they have a 90% reduction in cost for that service.

Even if it had worked out, it still really wasn't worth it to increase revenues by $9k unless I was closing this sized deal at least monthly.

TBH, the price difference makes me think you underbid.

If the service is worth 150k a year, you could of sold it for 75k. Then it becomes possible to hire someone else to handle the day to day.

I think you made the right choice, having 10$ a month clients who expect hours of support per month isn't practical.

Interesting. I would think that $9k a month rather than year would've been better. $9k a month is really undercutting it. I've also seen that higher prices actually make customers more willing to buy, not less, especially big ones.

This was after many back-and-forths. So we put together a contract that would be the same price as if they were a customer using our UI, but they would pay all at once instead of each time they added a domain, and they would get an API to manage their domains.

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