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Comment by ChadNauseam | Hacker News Reader

Economics prohibits it. Consider a feature that will cost 1 month of developer time, let’s put that at $10k. 20 companies using the product want that feature, and each would be willing to pay $1k for it. No problem, right? The community would be willing to pay $20k total, and the feature would only cost $10k to implement, so why can’t it get done?

It can’t get done because every company wants to let some other sucker pay for the feature, and then free-ride after it’s implemented. No individual company would pay the $10k, because the feature is only worth $1k to them, even though it’s worth $20k to society.

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So how did Penpot come into existence? Because some 'sucker' paid for it?

Kaleidos, the creators of Penpot, built a tool that they need and invested to make it open. And they get recognition for it which builds their brand and gets them more customers and employees.

Paying for feature X and having that advertised in the ChangeLog and on the sponsors page is a sound business decision.

Soon enough, businesses pay fees to Adobe only to have their data taken hostage in the cloud will be known as suckers.

But on the other hand a lot of companies are quite happy to pay a subscription of 1000k a year (which increases if the company grows) to get the same features. Let's be real purchasing decisions are often not based primarily on economics otherwise companies wouldn't have large marketing and sales departments which throw huge parties at trade shows.

In the long run, a company that wastes money on purchases will be beaten in the market by a company that isn't so wasteful. Marketing and sales is not wasteful, but actually creates profit.

I don't believe either of those are true. As it happens, the largest companies capture so much of the market that they can afford being inefficient, and they still have the power to push the competition into a corner.

There are small-margin markets where this doesn't happen, bit then those markets don't have huge companies either.

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