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Comment by jarenmf | Hacker News Reader

They are using an app https://countthings.com/

This seems rather a simple task, however, the app is expensive ($100 per month per device) and limited with the templates for things it can count [1].

[1] https://countthings.com/en/counting-templates

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> This seems rather a simple task, however, the app is expensive

It's easy to do it in an unreliable way. 1000$ a year doesn't seem very expensive if your business depends on it and you're saving a lot of time like in the OP.

> and limited with the templates for things it can count

It seems very specialized towards certain businesses, if you have a specific use case that isn't covered I'm guessing you can probably contact them and see if they can add it?

You are totally right. We usually work with businesses that have a counting need and we create a new template for their use case.

1k a month wouldn't seem ridiculous unless individual companies currently have several devices

All these comments make me wonder if these people have ever worked with B2B pricing

> Before they started using CountThings from Photos, counting pearls took almost 100 hours a year. After installing this app, the time needed for counting pearls has been reduced by 80%. It takes only 20 hours now.

Depending on what the salary is it barely breaks even, it's saving 2 working weeks a year. Depending how spread out the process is it might not even be time that can be put into something else, if it only save 5 minutes a day for instance, that's 5 minutes that's probably going towards lunch.

It's fairly disappointing for an off the shelf product that does exactly what you want, if you had to pay for any customization or RnD it's probably not worth it.

You missed an important part of the article:

...this app not only helps Eiko Pearl to cut 80% of the time needed for counting pearls, but it also helps them reduce 3 months of labor cost.

3 months, not 80 hours.

It's not really clear where that 3 months figure comes from. Do they have 6 people all saving 2 weeks? And if so do the share the device or is the cost scaling with employees? There's also another part:

> When taking inventory, they had 2 members of the staff counting pearls and it took 2 full days.

Besides the cost cutting, keep in mind that the employees that don't have to manually count are not getting fired. They are providing more and better client services.

I think this is an important point. It doesn't have to be "machines took my job". When I helped automate/streamline a government welfare program, it didn't mean case workers suddenly were without a job. It meant they could spend less time clicking on a computer, and more time doing the important human to human stuff and provide better care.

It doesn't have to, but eventually it will. At the first inevitable downturn, jobs that get cut in a newly-automated field will never come back.

People are creative, we will find new things to do (particularly as more and more people will get taught automation and coding in school, making them tech-adaptable for life, as opposed to the "boomer" generations who were often fundamentally tech-averse), but let's not kid ourselves that technology isn't burning away a bunch of jobs.

Some of those counting templates are very niche, which makes it intriguing to think of who is using them.

For instance, there is a 'Movie Tickets' counter, but it's not counting paper tickets. Instead, the example photo looks like a screenshot of a 'pick your seats' page from a theatre's booking process. So who is doing the counting here? It can't be the theatre, as they would already know the numbers. So is the customer using this with an automated process to find out how many tickets another company is selling?

Financial analysts trying to figure out if AMC are gonna hit their quarterly numbers?

Here's a hint: NO

Seems like a low price if it saves labor costs like in the OP. But they can only ask that price because it's such an obscure niche and other people probably didn't even consider that something like that is needed. Good chance they'll soon have competition.

edit: The app has 500k+ downloads and is rated at 3.5/5. People seem to complain about the fact that the templates are so limited. Real opportunity right there I'd guess.

It really depends how much time they are losing while manually counting. For most, the price is not high, the employees doing the counting can now focus on other more valuable tasks. We also have pack of 24hour licenses that they can activate when it's inventory time, for example.

Our app is mostly targeted to businesses. Besides counting, we also have a ton of other features (e.g. forms, reports, integrations, etc).

Do you know the true cost of a developer? When they are already hired they may seem free, but in practice that $100 dollars is probably less than hour worth of time.

This is a B2B app.

I can imagine $100 a month for having an instant count so simply being a bargain for many.

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