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Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

> To everyone else, this just looks like mustachio-twirling, cackling evil and unfathomable greed from a company that’s already the world’s richest and sitting on a mountainous pile of cash.

What’s really interesting to me is that moves like this are the embodiment of the “charge more” mantra that is (or at least was) extremely popular on Hacker News for years. For a long time it felt like every HN thread about pricing or salary negotiation was full of people insisting that you needed to “charge more” in every conceivable situation.

If you made a thing that was producing a lot of money for your clients, you needed to “charge more”! If your customers weren’t complaining and leaving, you needed to “charge more”!

Yet every time a company actually does a “charge more” type move, HN reaches for the pitchforks.

It’s interesting to see how clear-cut this dichotomy is depending on who the reader thinks is being charged more.

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> Yet every time a company actually does a “charge more” type move

"Charge your customer more for your work" is VERY meaningfully different from "Charge someone else's customer more for someone else's work, because you own the storefront for someone else's business".

Sure, building the storefront is hard and high leverage. But figuring out the moral answer to "who reaps the rewards" is an entirely different journey.

I fail to see how it’s different. Uber is the one paying this cost not the end customer. Sure they may pass the cost on, but they also would pass the cost on if any other layer of their stack started charging more.

The difference is Uber has a choice of different stacks for everything except for app publishing.

Apple in that regard is holding them hostage.

Much different point than the other comment was making. As far as their choice in using Apple’s platform I don’t disagree that it’s not really a choice and it’s potentially a problem.

Web?

Apple intentionally limits the capabilities of its web browser to keep it from being competitive with its native platform, and I’m sure there’s an email out there that says as much explicitly.

This is what Amazon does with Kindle sales already.

Uber paying the cost and passing it on is the customer paying the cost.

So is passing on any other cost. I’m pushing back on the idea that the problem is passing on the cost. The problem is that they don’t get to choose whether or not to pay this cost.

The cost always falls down to the end customers. "just don't buy it" doesn't work if everybody is doing it, which they all are in Silicon Valley.

s/Uber/Costco/ to see a better example: an iOS app is at best a minor convenience to an average costco member. Almost all costco customer acquisitions are through word of mouth / brand recognition and the vast majority of sales happen at brick and mortar stores. Why should costco fork over some 30% of revenue to apple?

Imagine Google pulling the same stunt for inclusion into their app store and it quickly becomes apparent how the pricing structure is laughable at face value.

> Imagine Google pulling the same stunt for inclusion into their app store and it quickly becomes apparent how the pricing structure is laughable at face value.

As of September of 2021 in the US[1], both Apple and Google's mobile app payment policies have converged[2] as Google mandates that all app developers use their payment platform and only their payment platform, along with mandating a 15% to 30% cut of all app payments. I believe Google's policy matches Apple's when it comes to this example.

[1] https://fossbytes.com/google-mandates-android-apps-to-pay-30...

[2] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...

The first sentence in your first link links to an announcement saying this:

> Android has always allowed people to get apps from multiple app stores. In fact, most Android devices ship with at least two app stores preinstalled, and consumers are able to install additional app stores. Each store is able to decide its own business model and consumer features. This openness means that even if a developer and Google do not agree on business terms the developer can still distribute on the Android platform. This is why Fortnite, for example, is available directly from Epic's store or from other app stores including Samsung's Galaxy App store.

The implication is that apps can choose to only publish in stores with more favorable IAP terms, not that each store is somehow eligible to a fixed percentage of the $120/yr fee for a costco membership that may or may not have originated within the app store's ecosystem. Otherwise, at a cut of 30% per store, an app would owe platforms 120% of subscription revenue to be on merely 4 stores, regardless of how the customer converted.

It’s different mostly in the sense that iOS is essentially a monopoly. You can not create anything like Uber without being present on iOS, even if Android has the other half of the market.

When you raise your prices on your own work, there’s usually an implied alternative like not hiring you. We know there’s no such thing when it comes to iOS.

Let's not depict Uber and Lyft as victims. They would do the same - and they do, when freezing rain is falling on me and I need a ride to protect my health.

At least for surge pricing there is argument that you need to manage scarcity somehow. If everybody wants a ride because it’s raining, you can either rise prices or not, and make it a lottery. The latter is more fair, but the former has higher chance of bringing more drivers into circulation.

There might be more options if Uber hadn't used its wealth to drive them out of business.

Could be, but that is a separate problem. For example places I've been in Europe have multiple competing services, even when Uber is present. But that's because the typical Uber business model where drivers are not professional drivers is banned most everywhere.

And don't forget Uber eats. That's a 30% cut from the restaraunt, right?

Is Apple collecting rent from Uber? Apparently not.

Different things are different, sure. I just wonder who is the authoritative source of morals and who deserves what for doing what.

Creating and providing access to a lucrative market is valuable. What's the moral imperative for allowing others to provide access to the market you created or reduce your fees, both of which would reduce your profits for the benefit of everyone else who is trying to increase their profits?

I'm not sure it's that different. Not everything is an easily tangible product: We can debate the specifics of effort vs. reward, but I think it's pretty indisputable that the App store does provide at least a little bit of value add in the form of exposure for the vendor and convenience for the customer. So "charge more" applies to that value-add.

> but I think it's pretty indisputable that the App store does provide at least a little bit of value add in the form of exposure for the vendor and convenience for the customer.

I think it's disputable. It would seem to be adding about the same amount of value that the Windows store does for Windows users. How much is that?

Have you been on the windows store. It's a barren shit hole. Apple is doing something right, even if you can't point at it

No, I think it's pretty easy to point at: They monopolize distribution. (Un)fortunately Microsoft missed the boat on that one.

The windows store is barely used and devoid of probably 99.99% of applications. You can't search, for example, for "note taking" and find many of the most popular options. Heck, their search is so bad that even apps they don't have done show up. Microsoft's own app OneNote doesn't show in the results.

It is simple not at all comparable in quality to the app store on iOS.

HN is full of these cognitive dissonances; another example is the generally pro-immigration stance when it comes to low-wage workers, which is contrasted with the anti-tech immigration stance. I used to think it was different groups of people on different threads, but I have come to believe that many maintain diametrically opposed views.

There could be solid position there, as I have argued in the manner you have stated here.

"Tech Immigration" is largely H1B immigration is prefectly valid to be opposed to H1B while being pro immigration.

H1B is a predatory program designed to lower wages and put immigrants in a terrible stop when in comes to the immigration status, i.e the employer holds not only their income, but their ability to remain in the nation in the palm of their hands. This created a toxic and coercive relationship with the employer.

At the same time a correction to this program, and a correction to the low skilled workers is simply allowing more open immigration, if you want to come here to work you should be able to.

The 'open borders' position you describe would definitely be a consistent one, but it's not compatible with most of the HN arguments against tech immigrants. Most HN anti-H1B posts talk about how they depress wages, and it seems likely that a significant increase in software developer immigrants would depress wages even more than the H1B status quo.

The alternative to H1-B is not open borders…

The alternative is a sane program that is detached from your employer’s whims and provides you some stability and control. As of this writing, that program in the US is called a green card. But don’t get me started on how hard that is get.

>>not open borders…

I want to be clear no where did I say anything about "open borders", I said "more open immigration"

I do believe in some controls on immigration, security controls as an example. However I also believe it should be vastly easier than it is today, order of magnitude more open than it is today.

Of course I agree with my peer comment, that the alternative to an H-1B isn't open borders. There are a number of other countries with much more reasonable immigration programs - Canada and Australia for instance - which prioritize immigration of individuals that would provide the most value for the labor market by assigning skills and attributes a point value. It's important to separate out the quantity of immigration, what they do/where they go, and how they're restricted in the process.

With that in mind, consider also that 'and according to a 2018 study by the National Foundation for American Policy, immigrants founded or cofounded 55% of the United States' billion-dollar companies.' [1] It's not a zero-sum game, and stapling would-be founders to companies they would rather not work at for decades (H-1B for Indian born folks) hoping to get the freedom to found the next unicorn is quite a waste of time, talent and their risk-on years.

As an aside, it's interesting that folks want high wages, high disposable income, low inequality, low prices and low inflation all at the same time. I strongly suspect that these are fundamentally incompatible goals. Feels like, at most, a pick-two kind of thing.

[1] https://hbr.org/2021/08/research-why-immigrants-are-more-lik...

> There could be solid position there, as I have argued in the manner you have stated here.

I may have done the same! Parent and gp are scrubbing any nuance and leaving cartoon version of arguments, then fighting that strawman. Not all immigration is the same, IMO, sameness is a requisite for arguing the only "rational" positions can either be pro-immigration (all of it) or anti-immigration, which is absurd and reductive.

This is not about Apple charging more - it's about Apple charging for something they did not add any value to. This is closer to Oracle's billing tactics, that rightfully get pilloried on HN, the only difference is I'm yet to encounter anyone on HN defend Oracle's billing practices.

Who decides H1B is predatory? Based on my personal experience,I don't think it is. H1B is boon for many people, who came here, got educated and started contributing to the local economy.

It appears your pro immigration stance is for people, who are less educated and more likely to provide cheaper non tech services. To summarize, your stance is not for pro or against immigration, but to serve your own interests like everyone.

H1B is predatory because switching jobs is very difficult. Due to the hardships of switching jobs, the immigrant may take on more abuse.

I do agree with you that most people will see their lives improved when compared to the country they immigrated from. However, the abuse does exist.

The complaint isn't that H1B should go away. It that it needs reform.

>>Who decides H1B is predatory?

Facts, Reality, 1000's of people that have exploited by the system and talk about their experiences publicly just like your fellow commenter that seems to have had a different experience than you.

>>Based on my personal experience,I don't think it is. H1B is boon for many people, who came here, got educated and started contributing to the local economy.

2 things can be true at the same time as well, it could very well be a boon for the person, but it could also artificially stunt their growth due to the restrictions placed on them by the program, I am not sure how anyone could honestly argue that is better for the immigrant to be locked into their employer, and for the employer to have the power to deportation over their employee.. Or honestly argue that would not be abused by less than ethical employers of which there many.

You may have found a good one, I can assure you not everyone does

>>It appears your pro immigration stance is for people, who are less educated and more likely to provide cheaper non tech services.

That seems to be a huge leap based on an assumption that does not track with reality. I am unclear as to what would prevent highly educated people from immigrating to the US with more open immigration, but how H1B does not?

>>To summarize, your stance is not for pro or against immigration, but to serve your own interests like everyone.

Does not serve my interests at all really. I am not impacted by immigration one way or the other.

Are you talking about victims of Indian consulting companies that are basically hacking the H1b system? Yes they need to be dealt with. Perhaps they need to just block consulting jobs from the program generally. Stick to at least enriching employers who add some value to the system other than just performing arbitrage.

As someone who has gone through the immigration process, I can affirm that once you are no longer beholden to your employer for work authorization, more opportunities are available, and that leads to significantly larger salaries.

I am sure a large part of it has to do with the fact that until certain points in the process, you cannot change your employer without restarting the process, so a lot of people just stay without making a fuss about it.

Edit. Regardless, as it stands, the current H1B is indeed a broken system ripe for exploitation.

This contradicts my experiences, as someone who personally went through it. Of all my immigrant friends and acquainteances (around 50 people) at different tech companies, around 90% are or are or were on H1B. Not a single consider themselves abused by their employer. Many of them have changed companies when they've been on H1B. Your status is tied to your employer, but you can find a new sponsor. H1B transfer is standard procedure.

Of course there is abuse. Even systemic abuse. This goes both ways though. For instance, Indian applicants can wait for over a decade for green card, we're talking completely americanized, fluent and self sufficient people, often with high positions at companies. People who did everything right, by any standard. Are these people abused? Perhaps, but if so, it's because the US government refuses to acknowledge them as permanent residents, which they clearly are for all practical purposes.

Alternatives and improvements to H1B is important, but suspiciously few in this community were interested in such a discussion at the time. Imo, parent comment is spot on that this is one of the hackernews dissonances.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”

> generally pro-immigration stance when it comes to low-wage workers, which is contrasted with the anti-tech immigration stance

I have the opposite view and don't believe they are diametrically opposed. I see many legitimate reasons to cap unskilled immigration while seeing virtually no good reasons to cap skilled.

HN is thousands of people.

I think the difference is the rent-seeking.

Imagine a web developer gets hired to build a landing page for a product. Yes please, charge twice as much for your work, sure. But say they tried to charge an ongoing 30% of all future revenue for that product. Do you think HN would be behind that?

Exactly, if a small company decides to charge more for their work, it's a risk they take, and their customers might just decide to go elsewhere. But if tomorrow Apple decides you owe them more, what are you going to do? Not stay on the Apple Store? I don't think so.

>"But if tomorrow Apple decides you owe them more, what are you going to do? Not stay on the Apple Store? I don't think so."

Actually many people do just fine without Apple.

Actually it’s insane to suggest Uber and Lyft could just abandon their iOS userbase.

It seems like that because there aren't many alternative beside iOS and android, and iOS market share is big.

However if many players decide to get out from Apple ecosystem, it'll be Apple that'll change stance here.

That’s a nice dream, but it’s highly unlikely individual companies that are already dominating a market would leave billions of dollars on the table to make a statement

The App Store and new iOS APIs is an ongoing fee, much more akin to a developer charging a fee to continuously support their (for example) Wordpress theme than a one-time fee for creating the Wordpress theme.

I think it's not about the fee for service model in general, but percentage of future earnings as the fee that people have an issue with.

That makes it unlike either a one-time or a flat maintenance fee.

I don't personally see a significant difference.

Computers are such an interesting and free mathematical concept. iPhone is compute.

Before iPhone, operating systems and the web were wide open for computation. You could install everything you wanted.

Apple views the iPhone as a sovereign territory, not just some generic compute resource. They can delete accounts, block access to the CPU, and charge whatever taxes they want. It's their land. In their minds, you're blessed to have the opportunity to be on their platform. Your users are strictly on loan from Apple, and you're going to pay for access to their customers. Your app better behave.

The market evolved into the shape that it did because Apple had a great product, a fun evolution of iPod, and a simple and compelling UI. Microsoft missed the shot, Android took time to get its act together.

None of this was a bad deal for developers at the time, but now there's no way to avoid it. We're now living in a sort of North Korea. Entrenched, with no way out. Over half of your potential customers don't have other devices and you can't reach them any other way than going through Apple.

It sucks for small companies in tech having to carve out ever smaller pieces of the pie. Year by year the market shrinks because the giants take it, tax it, and ration it out. If we'd have known then what we know now, we would have bought up every first generation iPhone and buried them all in a ditch.

iPhone is compute, but they'll be damned if you do anything that threatens their dear platform and profits.

We should push for our legislators to require open installs without an App Store. Customers already pay for the device. They shouldn't have to pay additional taxes for us trying to develop for them, trying to survive in this already hostile market.

> Before iPhone, operating systems and the web were wide open for computation. You could install everything you wanted.

That wasn’t always true of phones (pre-iPhone smartphones), PDAs, games consoles, workstations, or some mainframes. Platform owners requiring license fees for on developers on their platform, using their dev tools, was not invented by Apple.

I don’t see how a developer is comparable to marketplace with 1+ billion people turning over almost $100B every year?

Since you’re talking about web, if you want to be on Shopify’s or Salesforce’s marketplace, you need to share revenue too.

Shopify now takes zero share of your revenue for the first $1,000,000 each year (resets annually), then takes 15% (if I recall) after that.

The "charge more" advice I've seen, e.g. from patio11, seems to be aimed at charging _new clients_ or for _new contracts_, and in almost all cases has the caveat that one should almost never up-charge existing clients for the same service that they already have. You can add a new higher-price service tier, or grandfather them in _forever_ at the original price, etc, or quote them a larger price for the next consultation ("My fee is now X"), but in every case they have the option to walk away.

Agreed. HN cheers in the name of disruption and competition when rideshare apps gouge taxi drivers and when delivery apps gouge restaurants and couriers. But when it’s developers being gouged …

Not specific to developers. It goes like this: It's a recession when my neighbor loses his job; it's a depression when I lose mine.

For startups, the advice is specifically given in the context that cheap customers are often "high maintenance", whereas deep-pocketed customers w/ accounts payable budgets provide more reliable income streams with less drama.

The only thing that is interesting to me is that you somehow have no idea how to mentally differentiate between a solo developer trying to find a way to be successful on their own, and the world's biggest company with cash reserves large enough to purchase entire countries. It's almost as if advice is naturally context dependent!

What shouldn’t be context dependent, in that way at least, is the law. It should apply equally to everyone and each company regardless of how successful they are.

Apple didn't become to worlds biggest company with cash reserves large enough to purchase entire countries by missing out on opportunities to generate additional revenue.

Apple, much like the solo developer, is looking out for its best interests and what will help it continue to grow.

> the “charge more” mantra that is (or at least was) extremely popular on Hacker News

You'll need to ask patio11 for comment. He might have had some disciples regurgitating it, but he's ultimately responsible for this viewpoint. (Not saying I entirely disagree...)

I believe this is the original post: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2006/08/14/you-can-probably-stand-...

And here's a comment with more; it has definitely been a theme:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15828115

Groups tend to look homogeneous from a distance until you zoom in like this. And when you find a dichotomy, it isn't necessarily that the group is a hypocritical entity, it's that it consists of sub-groups with differing opinions.

It's true that it isn't necessarily hypocritical at the detail level, but the question remains: to what degree is it actually like that at the detail level?

Everything can be taken to unhealthy extremes. It’s one thing to “charge more”, when people can actually take their business elsewhere.

It’s a different thing entirely when you’re the sole gatekeeper between hundreds of millions of customers and anyone wanting to sell them apps and digital services.

It might not qualify as monopoly in the legal sense, but you’re still being a bully, abusing a position of power in the market.

Charging less sometimes can give you interesting advantages. For instance, Xiaomi effectively crushes their competitors by purposely cutting their profit margin[1], such that:

- If you are to build a product with similar quality to Xiaomi's, it has to be priced higher than Xiaom's, because unless your production/sales volume is on par with Xiaomi, your production cost is very likely higher than Xiaomi's. Customers will prefer Xiaomi's product because it is cheaper.

- If you cut down production cost by bringing down quality, you might be able to price the product in Xiaomi's price range. But customers will still prefer Xiaomi because it has better quality for the same price range.

1: https://www.gizmochina.com/2019/11/28/xiaomi-ceo-says-that-g...

You can do something good, bring it to an extreme exaggeration and turn it into something bad, you know?

HN isn’t one entity with a set of consistent beliefs.

No Dichotomy there, its one thing to 'charge more' for your services, its another thing to ask for 30% of your client's SaaS subscription revenue, because you built them a website.

>Yet every time a company actually does a “charge more” type move, HN reaches for the pitchforks.

This sort of cognitive dissonance is pretty par for the course for communities like this.

Context matters. Nobody here would complain about Apple charging more for an iPhone or iPad.

There is a difference between a pricey product and a high taxes.

Are we supposed to be rooting for monopolies now? Of course not.

But you are right, HN used to be about the little David entrepreneur. Since ~2012 it's all about "fuck making a startup and go work for The Man"

I wonder how many of these "Execs" are Libertarians, who oppose any form of tax.

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