Hacker News Reader

Comment by http-teapot | Hacker News Reader

I am a bit at odd with the pricing. My team has 6 engineers and base price for Github is $24. Your product would increase our bill by $48, an increase of 200%. $48 is nothing compared to the salaries of 6 engineers but I am not convinced the feature set would make my team more productive.

If you told me that your solution help my team ship faster and saves an hour per engineer per week then that's easy math: your product pays for itself.

Suggestions:

  - Make all base features free (the ones on your site currently)
  - Add analytics to your product, collect data and put it behind a paywall (entirely or partially by truncating historical data)
  - Iterate on premium features that improves critical metrics
  - Offer analytics with a trial of 2 to 3 months, enough time for graphs to speak for themselves
  - Make sure the gains are seen by the manager or business owner or whoever is the person in charge

Pricing can be based on the average of hours saved.

View on HN

Suggestions:

- It sounds like you’re micromanaging your team’s metrics at a rate that’s fractional to one contributor’s hourly cost even though you don’t understand what helps them to be productive. Don’t do that.

- You’re asking for a Show HN to eliminate its price tag and give you everything the poster finds valuable for free, and offer an entirely different product. I’m pretty sure you’re not the audience for this product.

> - It sounds like you’re micromanaging your team’s metrics at a rate that’s fractional to one contributor’s hourly cost even though you don’t understand what helps them to be productive. Don’t do that.

You are seeing micro-management where I am looking for visibility and automation. I physically cannot micro manage my team.

> - You’re asking for a Show HN to eliminate its price tag and give you everything the poster finds valuable for free, and offer an entirely different product. I’m pretty sure you’re not the audience for this product.

  1. OP said feedback was welcome.
  2. I already pay for those features on Github. I suggested a different path to a bigger price tag.
  3. I realize I am not the target audience. Simply providing a different perspective.

I’m going to disagree, I think the model they have is both familiar to me as a potential user and priced such that, if it is even slightly better than GitHub, it’s a no-brainer. I wouldn’t pay extra for analytics, though, it just sounds like another thing to check.

IMHO if the one-month free trial isn’t enough to know whether a SaaS solution is worth an $8/head price, it’s probably not worth that price.

For me, the most worthy SaaS purchases usually have been the ones that I knew were worth it from day 0.

The trial has always just been a cherry on top.

I haven’t ever used the entire trial for the sake of “trying” and then choosing to not use the product further.

Adding Y to Xy is already a tough sell, but when the upgraded Y costs more than all of Xy? I sympathise with GP. GitHub can do it from an economy of scale and probably 'should' be more expensive, but it can manage not to be (maybe cheaper is actually optimal, given how many more will pay for it, point is it's in some sense 'worth' more) which puts OP in a tough spot.

Imagine trying to sell a better WYSIWYG editor for WordPress for example. You can be better, save time, etc. - it's still always going to be a tough sell to charge more than a fraction of WP itself which offers a WYSIWYG editor and everything else.

Hence my suggestion, if your product saves me $500/seat/month then I'll gladly pay $50/seat/month.

Wordpress is a great example, rather than build another Wordpress, solve one problem Wordpress doesn't solve (example: Elementor) and do it far better (depth vs breadth).

We are using this Github Action (https://github.com/flowwer-dev/pull-request-stats) for now, it adds stats to every PR, it has helped the team visualize their contributions and how critical it was for us moving forward and as a manager/tech-lead it helps me identify areas of improvements at the individual level. I think it's a simple idea with a lot of depth.

How does the metrics shown in the action help you?

If someone adds a lot of comments, are they nitpicking too much or providing more valuable feedback?

Does lack of reviewing PR hints lack of contribution or person being focused on something?

> How does the metrics shown in the action help you?

We've mostly looked at "Total reviews" and "Total comments". When I put the action in place, I told the team that the goal was for everyone to contribute to the process.

I was expecting to look at the stats, make some observations and action items and bring it up during our 1:1. I didn't even need to do that. Everybody took it to heart and contributed in different ways. Our most junior engineer ended up contributing in the most meaningful way and set a new standard for how far we take testing.

At this point, it's pretty clear that I see this more as a tool for individuals. For me, I am a bit constrained on time, I can check the table, notice a variation in the number (the action doesn't show variation so I do it out of memory) and decide to take an hour to explore the contributions. The goal being: how can I help them grow?

As an IC, I perhaps could project myself a bit based on my experience, if I am a junior engineer then I can see who comments the most, explore their comments and learn from them. As a tech lead, I'd want to make sure the tone of the comments are constructive (ie. definitely not toxic).

That's actually a use case I've thought about. When review time came around, one of my past managers would compile statistics on everyone's reviews to see how much they've been participating.

Another feature I've thought about is "show me all of person X's reviews and comments across all repos". That would have been super useful when I was on promo panels to go through and see if a promo candidate's review comments were useful, constructive, kind, etc.

Thanks for the feedback. I really appreciate it!

Exactly! You bring a great point with promo panels where the difference between the amount of time put into building a promo package and the amount of time the panel spend on it can be considerable (my experience at Twitter).

I think when it comes to per-seat pricing, it's good to remember that engineers don't put the credit card in. The person with the credit card will want to know ROI before investing. The engineers will want to try out first as a group and if their experience is positive (some of it might be subjective) then they'll need to build a case for why the company should pay for your product and that's where analytics can be leveraged for sales.

It’s not a GitHub replacement though, it’s an integration.

Is it still better? Maybe it is.

I don’t think that turning a PR comment into a floating box is a value-add… anyone can do that with a userscript or inline bookmark.

And ultimately…you can’t solve a people problem with tech.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com