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Comment by brtkdotse | Hacker News Reader

Without knocking the creators achievement, I find it curious how devs will rage and cry murder when LastPass wants a few bucks for a hosted product but don’t bat an eye for shelling out $99 for what is, when you come down to it, a config file for your IDE .

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Do you know that it is the same people holding these conflicting stances? Seems like HN is a big place, room enough for both cheap devs and more well-heeled devs.

Nope, just some good ol’ generalizin!

Hahahha well, what do you think? Is this too pricey for what you get? Or do you feel it’s a unique buy that’s worth it?

I admire your honesty!

Intuitively I'd guess that they're very different audiences. I'm sort of near the type of person who would shell out for ease-of-use stuff like the same theme across editors, but also the type of person who would even want that.

I suspect a person similar to me would also pay a bunch of bucks for, say, a screen arrangement app for MacOS, or a way to more quickly pair AirPods (ToothFairy).

It's a type of user that has no problem paying for convenience, I suppose?

That said, $79 is too steep for me to pay for a set of themes, even though I do really like this one.

There is a large contingent on HN who are both rich and cheap, so I don't think this holds any water

According to your made up metrics?

$99 for a great config file is buying time. A good config can take years to hone. Easily adds up to 50 hours over 10 years.

How much are your 50 hours worth? What about cutting that 10 year lead time down to 1h?

LastPass on the other hand is a tool you use because the world sucks. And their UX is pretty bad. And switching away is an annoying chore. You feel trapped and extorted into paying.

I configured my own editor and people often ask for details. I use LastPass begrudgingly because at this point I’m too lazy/busy to switch.

> LastPass on the other hand is a tool you use because the world sucks

I feel like this gets missed a lot when questions about price/value come up.

Just because something's useful doesn't mean you want to buy it, and things you don't want to buy, but need, are likely to be thought of more harshly when it comes to price.

This emotion seems obvious and I wonder why we don’t have clear, sustained global consensus for creating/maintaining non-profit alternatives for strict needs.

Is this part of mainstream economics yet? I see “the economist” argue around the edges of this, but then they ran a front page hit on Bernie sanders.

I guess because the more it looks and feels like a public service, the more it feels like a tax. Or the more it feels like a non-profit, the more it feels like charity.

Each of those concepts has had a long time to become embedded, but the kind of globalised, "net-good" non-profit that still gives you as an individual benefits, has barely even reached the corners of HN yet (would assume there's people here who haven't yet discovered LetsEncrypt, for example).

I use BitWarden because the world sucks.

I use LastPass because my employer compels me to.

I am writing my own password manager because the world sucks. I use passpack because I am not done.

Switching away was actually very easy. You can get a CSV with all of your information in a few clicks.

Agreed, mostly. Expect for switching being an annoying chore.

Took my less than 10 mins to switch everything and download 1Password on all my devices. Super simple. Everything got imported over.

I have nothing neither against LastPass, nor for Dracula, and I've never used either so I might be wrong, but here are a few differences that IMO matter a lot:

- Dracula is FOSS. LastPass has some FOSS projects, but the key ones aren't.

- Dracula is a one-time-purchase, LastPass follows the terrible trend where everything must be subscription based.

- You can use Dracula when the server is down. You can't use LastPass when the server is down. Yes, you can manually backup the vault somewhere, but (a) there's AFAIK no way to automate it, and (b) you should be updating the backup every time you edit the database, which turns into a PITA.

As a customer I really dislike LastPass' business model. I rather use KeePass, and pay a hundred bucks for some Vim rice.

> - Dracula is a one-time-purchase, LastPass follows the terrible trend where everything must be subscription based.

Let's be fair here: LastPass needs to finance storage servers, network infrastructure, security engineers etc.. Dracula needs a CDN for downloads. Of course this is a bit simplified (the author needs the editors and a payment processer, for example), but it's a lot easier to work with a one-time fee when nearly all of your cost is up front and you have basically no running costs.

Lesson for startups is it's easier to start high and drop prices but fucking hard to bend user expectations and increase prices

Lastpass aren't the first or last company that has felt this blowback

I think I am one of those. I generally don't like "subscription model" products. I am OK paying whatever price one time to buy something, but having to keep paying recurrently for some service incites locking to me, as the moment I decide I don't want to pay anymore I end up empty handed.

Yeah, I feel like paying a subscription to keep using software just feels like a rip off, even if it's actually a fair price, and am much less inclined to sign up for it.

I’m asking out of curiosity, as someone who is thinking about implementing a subscription model, do you not like it even though you know the product you’re using has recurring costs for usage (e.g. charges for API/DB calls), or are you only against subscription models when the cost of usage is minimal to none (e.g. MS Office, Adobe CS)?

Both Office and Adobe CS now have hosted features (file sharing) too so they are moving more in that direction.

I have no problem paying for recurring usage costs. For example I have a paid vps and paid email. But in my mind I'm paying precisely for the compute, storage, and network infrastructure behind them, not paying, e.g. to run linux. And I'm happy to pay for someone else to manage that infrastructure because the setup is nontrivial, I dont need to own the infra, etc.

Contrast this with Office 365, or even more niche pay per use or per month products, that are not better in any way that matters to me because they are hosted elsewhere. With these products I feel like someone wants me to pay a recurring fee just to run their code. Some of it is psychological, but I feel like I'm getting ripped off, that someone is trying to find a way to get me to keep paying for something (which they are).

Spotify and Netflix have found a good balance of offering a subscription, but providing such a large catalog that the value vs. actually owning all the content is clear. Most SaaS feels more like having to pay monthly just to own a single DVD.

But TLDR for me is I dont want to pay recurringly for the privilege of executing your code, I will pay recurringly for needed* infra, support, etc that goes along with it.

*not just tacked on to make it SaaS or to deploy it as SaaS

So if a SaaS offered a prepaid consumption plan alongside a monthly subscription you'd be more likely to buy?

Like $19/month unlimited use or $50 for x amount of usage (api calls, transactions, assets, etc.)? Then you decide if you want to reup when you've used up your credits?

Usually both of those costs are added to the product specifically to have an excuse to charge a subscription, which gets especially galling when 99% of users have no real use for it.

But the most hilarious/sad model has to be Elastic's "you need to pay us based on how bloated our garbage is, regardless of whether we're actually involved in hosting it".

That's just a lesson in promising things to your customers - if you never promise free nobody bitches; changing things you've already delivered is the simplest way to a marketing problem.

Personally, I have no problem paying for it, but I hate the bait and switch crap. I'd rather pay someone who has always been paid, then wait for lastpass to decide to strip more features unless you pay up more.

I had the same question. But when I saw how many apps he supports, and it comes with decent fonts... I'm quite tempted. I'm normally one of the cheapskates. But getting consistent and good themes across my desktop? That's a hell of a lot of work for something I'd really appreciate.

If that doesn't tell you how bad LastPass is, I guess there's nothing to learn here.

FWIW... I guess, the paying customer segment might be different. Since he seems to be selling the bundle, he may not be knowing the demographics. I vaguely guess the paying segment might be from the designer ecosystem like Sketch or Figma.

For me, it's one-time purchase vs. subscription. For example, I was happily paying 1Password every couple of years for a long time, and left when they made it clear subscriptions were the future.

This is a SUPER important topic. I don't think Dracula Pro would be as successful if it was a subscription. There's definitely a subscription fatigue going on, and people who invest on one-time purchase models will be able to benefit from that

> LastPass wants a few bucks for a hosted product

Many people already have cloud storage (dropbox, icloud) and don't see the need for another subscription. I certainly don't.

If people are buying it then the argument can be made it is both useful and fairly priced to the customer. It’s not like the company has a monopoly on IDE configuration.

Looks like the set of developers who cannot edit their own config files and the set of developers who are careful enough to use a password manager are mutually exclusive.

It illustrates what people are really willing to pay for.

Which is the more satisfying purchase?

I'd enjoy spending money on a nice meal or say a guitar, things that bring joy rather than a say a boiler that brings utility.

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