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Comment by aparadja | Hacker News Reader

Author here. I have an open question about pricing. How do you feel about the price point? Some emails and comments have mentioned that $19 feels too expensive. To me, pricing seems like a dark art.

Now I ask you to put on your objectivity-soaked scientist's hat and answer: Would you have purchased the software if the price had been lower? If you already purchased, would you have been willing to go higher?

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Yeah, I'd say $19 is really pushing it for this sort of app, which is something that is zero-maintenance, zero-interaction, install and forget kind of thing. The app needs to have some sort of presence (perhaps it does, I would not know, I am on Windows) that would prove that it is alive and doing its job. At the very least I would expect some sort of subtle visual feedback in the event when the blocked app is actually prevented from getting out. Showcase it in action on the landing page too.

The way it stands, it looks like a pretty UI for configuring built-in firewall. And $19 for that is an overkill. Also, keep in mind who your audience is - (paranoid) geeks, so it is important to show that the app has some non-trivial content to it and it's not just an empty shell on top of what's available for free already.

In other words, if you manage to convince me that the app actually has some brains and smarts, that while it is simple, it is not trivial, then $19 is a fair price. If not, then even $10 is an overkill.

Thanks for your input. I'm currently running at $9 for benchmarking.

No problem.

Here's another nitpick. Upon checkout it detected that I was in Canada and showed the price in CAD. It came to $9.16, and this is very odd since USD has been cheaper than CAD for a while now. It should've been under 9 CAD. I don't know why it worked out to be 9.16 and I don't really care, I just know it's wrong. So, not to confuse people like me just show the price in USD.

Strange. I think FastSpring controls all the currency logic with an iron fist, but I'll see whether I can force a "show everything in USD" option.

On the price point - there's still the market buy/sell spread on the currency market.

Western Union exhibits similar behaviour.

I wonder if the currency conversion logic is mixed up. Google returns: 1 US dollar = 0.9839 Canadian dollars. I wonder if it's dividing by .9839 instead of multiplying by it, which does get you close to 9.16.

At least the USD to EUR conversion is fine. Not a mixup in the algorithm, at least.

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