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Comment by herpderperator | Hacker News Reader

(I am not OP, but this is pretty easily found on the site.)

$499 USD for the dish, $99 USD per month for service (no data cap.) Price seems to change to local currency if your country is not USA.

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£439 for hardware, £89/month service, £54 delivery in the UK. The equivalent of US$611, $124 and $75 respectively at today's rates. Our prices include sales tax (VAT) though.

Ooft, that's pricey.

It really isn't in a lot of european countries. For this speed, you'd be paying 60-90€ at any ISP in Germany, if it's even available to you.

> this is pretty easily found on the site

Is it though? Perhaps it's because it's not available in Croatia, but there is nothing on the front page that mentions price, and it's not in the FAQ either.

In my experience, if you enter the desired service address it is the very next thing that's displayed.

thanks, after putting in the service address all I see is a $99 deposit and no mention of a monthly or annual fee...

Ah, that explains it, the button says "Order Now", which scared me off as I wasn't interested in actually ordering but was curious about the price.

I really dislike this kind of (almost dark) pattern. TIDAL also is not showing you the cost until you start down the sign up process, it's quite frustrating if what you really want to do is compare service costs.

Since they use regional pricing, doesn't it make sense that it would require a service address before they can show you the price?

Besides, it's not like if you click that Order Now button that it instantly places an order and a SpaceX kit drops from space in your front yard seconds later. There's a few more steps before that happens, like payment info.

Valid points. I do think something like "Enquire" would be better though. With regards TIDAL they knew enough to tell me that I can't get it in Croatia based on IP (so I signed up using a UK debit card via a VPN to circumvent that nonsense).

>Price seems to change to local currency if your country is not USA.

Doesn't change to Rupees in India despite being able to find the address. Still shows 99$ for me.

I don't have any insider info but there is absolutely no chance that the dish is costing them even <2x what they are charging for it. I don't really see how their business model pencils out even assuming massive oversubscription, perfectly geographically distributed customers, and the new laser links. It's just hard to make it work when your satellites fall out of the sky and need replacing. The technology certainly works and is really cool to see as an engineer, don't get me wrong, but even Musk businesses will eventually need to make money. For Tesla, their path to profit was steep, but feasible; here I just don't see it at all.

Why? It will take less than two years, maybe one year subscription to pay for the dish, and calculation show $10 a month pays for the satellites. It looks like pure profit for any customer who uses their service for three or more years, and there are a lot of customers out there.

It's not pure profit because, a) you can only oversubscribe 20GB/s so much without data caps and speed limits b) a small fraction of the constellation will be over inhabited land and wealthy enough countries at any moment c) I am assuming they lose money the first ~1.5 years to recoup the dish cost and R&D, d) ground link opex e) sats fall out of the sky and need replacing f) subsidized launches via rideshare only work if there is enough demand into inclined LEO, otherwise its $30M per launch at per sat costs go way up g) Customers are not uniformly distributed over earth's landmasses

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