Hacker News Reader

Comment by smoldesu | Hacker News Reader

This is awesome! Your monetization scheme is abhorrent!

That's at least my first two reactions upon seeing this. Don't get me wrong, this idea is something I've wanted for a long, long time. Holy cow though, talk about a dark pattern: your credits method (and their 60 day expiry) has completely soured this experience for me out of the gate. I'm not going to sign up for a platform that continues to nudge me down a waterslide towards my wallet. Seriously, I'd probably rather have a subscription model for something of this caliber. If you want to attract a business crowd, you shouldn't implement a pay-as-you-go model. These companies want to integrate you into their SAAS stack and consider you a fixed-rate expenditure, not constantly worry about budgeting you into a part of their payroll.

View on HN

Thanks for the feedback! I answered a similar question in this thread with my reasoning for the pricing model, but it's really good to hear that I should probably change it from multiple people.

Briefly, I wanted to discount sporadic bulk usage (hence expiry of 7 days) and charge fairly for long term availability (expiry of 2 years), with everyone else being in the 30 days bucket and treating it like a subscription.

I'm aware that a larger company would not want to deal with purchasing regularly and my thinking was that the 2 years option is great for that. Buy a bunch of credits for 2 years and forget about them. If you stop using the product, just don't buy again, I'm not going to nag you for money. I haven't set up alerts that your credits are expiring soon or you're running out yet, but that would be the next logical step if I stay with this model.

I'd love to hear your ideas for how else I could price Creodocs! I'm open to anything, this was just the result of trying to accommodate the most use cases.

Why would credits expire? I like the idea of pay per use, but expiring credits plus the ability to only purchase in preset increments is a really bad idea. Even worse is paying more for credits that lasts longer.

Extremely customer hostile pricing structure.

Expiration because selling something that never expires is a permanent liability.

My friend had the idea that I could make all credits expire in 2 years (for the liability issue) and simply discount the cost/credit for larger numbers purchased at once, perhaps that would make it less confusing with the 7 days and 30 days options available currently? Perhaps combined with an option to repurchase the same amount automatically once your previous purchase expired/was used up would be better?

Thanks for the feedback, I thought the structure was actually customer-friendly (no subscriptions and lots of choice depending on your usage), but obviously I'm wrong from the feedback in this post. I'm definitely hearing that that's something I need to change.

"_*Permanent liability*_" Are you insane? You have the cash in-hand. The customer has made an interest-free loan to you. You're ACTIVELY trying to *DISCOURAGE* positive cashflow!?!?!?!?!?!

You should execute the exact opposite pricing scheme: provide discounts to your most loyal customers who are willing to provide you cashflow long in advance of your incurring an expense to provide services to them in order finance your operation.

I'm just trying to set explicit limits on liabilities. The alternative as I see it is to accept money to provide a service indefinitely, but have terms clauses that any purchased credits may be forfeited for any reason. Perhaps if that clause reads after more than 2 years from purchase then maybe that's fine. I'll think about it, thanks for the feedback.

I'm actually curious though, do many online platforms allow you to buy credits that never expire? The stock photography websites were one of my inspirations for the pricing scheme, and their credits certainly expire in a year or so.

Why not just let them be a permanent liability on the business?

Are you worried about claims in bankruptcy court or something?

It just feels wrong to perpetually owe many people with very little benefit for accepting that burden. I don't think there's much practical difference between forever and 2 years for a purchase like this, but for the business the difference is huge.

Just treat low usage as advertising, give it away.

$12 over 2 years from 1000 people is a lot of headaches/dollar.

Yeah, a free tier is on the table, particularly if there's little paid take-up over the next few months. The only issue is free comes with support and feature requests, and I'm doing this solo for now. As you said though, low-level users pose the same problem but at least they pay the server costs.

The amount of complexity you've put into your pricing structure makes me wonder about the complexity you add to the code you write.

The only place I remember seeing this model before was predatory telecom companies. Not a good association.

Product does look nifty, though.

My thoughts exactly. I'd rather not turn my document software into a Tracfone...

It's partly modeled on the ShutterStock pricing model, well, the on-demand part of it anyway.

Glad it looks nifty though!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com