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Comment by scottydelta | Hacker News Reader

I might be an outlier but not a big fan of the pricing model.

$0.02 per submission can get very expensive very fast. For 10,000 submissions, it will cost the user $200 where as Typeform costs $83 for the same[1]. Is it really that expensive to store 10,000 rows of data?

I understand the other features provided with the storage such as analytics and integrations but it still doesn't justify the cost imo.

While you can argue that you offer self-hosting as well and as someone who is a big fan of self-hosting(I self-host over 8+ apps[2]), It's another thing I can self-host if I need to someday and I thank you for making it self-hostable/open-source. But from my experience, only very technical users self-host apps.

[1] https://www.typeform.com/pricing/

[2] https://vikashbajaj.substack.com/p/the-slippery-slope-of-sel...

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If it's really not that expensive, couldn't you just self-host it? I think the developer is just trying to make a reasonable amount for providing a service for those who don't want to self-host.

As someone who self-hosts a lot of apps myself[1], I can assure you it's not easy to self-host/maintain the apps. Even for very technical people, it still takes a lot of effort to self-host apps(setup server, run in docker, configure a web proxy like caddy/nginx, provision ssl certificates, add firewall security etc) along with doing regular db backups just for one person.

[1] https://vikashbajaj.substack.com/p/the-slippery-slope-of-sel...

Try something like cloudron or yunohost for selfhosting

I will try them out, thanks for the suggestion

I am sorry I failed to understand, so you just want everything for free?

The developer should not only open source his/her work but also host it free for you?

Typeform costs $83 for 10,000 responses[1](it's reliable, been around for almost a decade, used by leading companies around the world and it provides way more features than this) where as snoopforms will cost $200 for the same number of responses. That is more than 200% markup.

I am merely comparing prices here.

[1] https://www.typeform.com/pricing/

You are absolutely right and we are aware of this as we calculated it through.

Pricing an OS project isn't easy and we will introduce scaled prices per submission e.g. 500-2.000 -> 0,02$, 2.000-10.000 -> 0,01$ and > 10.000 -> 0,005$ or so.

We just didnt want to make it too complicated early on.

That makes sense. All the best. I will definitely recommend Snoopforms to people I know. I generally self-host whenever I can and I will self-host this when I need this in future. I hope I can still pay one-time fee down the line when I need it/self-host to support the project. Thanks

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