GP has a certain - admittedly orthogonal - point. At what point does "just two coffees per month" translate into "too many coffees traded for services"?
If it's relevant, a fairly high-end black coffee made from medium-roasted in-house coffee beans - which I strongly enjoy - costs me $1.70 in my local economy.
So this costs me 5x coffees, or a work-week of coffee. And I'm a pretty well-paid foreigner living in a strange land.
If I were to take a charitable reading of the GP - with no expertise in economics on my side - I'd say they were pointing out that you are potentially losing a 65+% of your market for whom $9 is not "a couple of coffees".
That's not an indictment - maybe you don't care! Maybe 100x customers @ $9 = $900/month and the service pays for itself.
I am a big fan of what I think is Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) / Pay What You Can (PWYC), even though I see it pretty rarely.
I guess it depends on whether you want to provide your product/service to as many people it can benefit at once, versus the minimum number of people who can support your costs with a profit.
Neither position is inherently "wrong"/"privileged", they just seem to have different incentives and/or target markets.
The voice of a potential target market that is being excluded seems valuable to me - even if the revenue increase might be negligible per-user, perhaps it's worth considering the volume of potential users in that market :shrug:
(To re-iterate that I'm trying not to pick a side here: maybe it's not - maybe the business model is to target affluent consumers. That doesn't make criticism of the exclusionary nature of this approach "privileged", however, in my view. YMMV)
(Edit: minor emphasis)
> uses sloppy reasoning, and tells us a lot more about yourself than about the topic you’re commenting on.
An example of being overly negative in one’s comments.
This doesn’t seem to be true.
> (2) that $9/month could be seen as a lot to many people
This is a fairly worthless piece of information in this context. Do we really need a “check your privilege!” comment every time we discuss a product?
> (3) it did not come off as overly negative, especially compared to some comment sections on controversial topics
Complaining about privilege in this context seems overly negative.