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Comment by edreichua | Hacker News Reader

We are still in the process of improving the survey, so your feedback is super valuable. So far, we have been over-indexing on helping our users figure out the severity of their insomnia and their sleep habits so we can create a personalized program, so our survey can be quite lengthy. Will definitely look into making it shorter. We do have pricing information in our FAQ (https://stellarsleep.com/faqs) but yes, it's easily missed on the page with other information. We'll look into making it clearer to our users.

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You're missing the point - sure a long questionnaire is annoying but the real complaint here is the fact your site's primary CTA is to go straight into a survey that does not mention it will require payment afterwards.

You're effectively holding users (and especially their data) hostage by exploiting sunk cost fallacy, rather than letting the value of your product stand on its own weight.

Here is a recent thread on this exact topic with much more discussion about how user-hostile this is, and how it makes many assume that your primary goal is to collect data to sell rather than to help any individual with any benevolent task.

Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36962502

Thanks for sharing! Will look into how we can make the fact that this is a paid app more apparent from the onset. We do have pricing information on our homepage (https://stellarsleep.com/faqs) but I'll be the first to admit that it's not easy to find.

That is curious, since price is the first thing many people look for. You’d think it would be displayed prominently. The fact it’s not almost makes one wonder if there is something untoward happening.

It costs $63 per month and you need to pay quarterly. I guess that’s why it’s buried.

Nothing shows confidence in your product quite like requiring an extended lock-in, does it?

Wow! Is this mostly meant to be prescribed rather than subscribed to?

Your pricing is buried inside a collapsed FAQ? I was charitable to you when reading these comments, since I know sales is hard, but this is as shady as I've never seen before. It's a shame, because it casts a shadow on everything else and makes me question whether I should give you credit and really try this...

I don't think you're really hearing the feedback here.

When someone says "you're being shady" the right answer isn't "we'll look into how we can be less shady." The right answer is "oh snap, you're right. Sorry. We'll fix this asap please check back later today."

They are mostly interested in making money, not helping people with insomnia, so shady is fine for that goal.

the `/faqs` page is not the homepage.

Why is pricing on the `/faqs` page and not it's own page?

Hanlon's razor doesn't apply to YC backed startups. This is shady not sloppy.

Be honest, do the survey answers affect the resulting program? I literally put in random numbers and answers each time and it took me to the same exact payment page.

There's also a "loading" screen that doesn't do anything except spin.

You also throw in random interstitials all over the place making it even slower to onboard.

You use savvyy nocode builder and this "onboarding" looks eerily similar to their "sleep app" template: https://trysavvy.com/example/sleep-reset-assessment.

I see this playbook far too often. I'm sorry, but it sucks.

Be honest with your users. Just provide them with clear info about what your service does and how it does it, and how much it costs, off the get go.

Thank you for the feedback! We'll make information regarding pricing and program clearer to our users.

Regarding your question, we do send the survey results to our backend, and based on that, we 1. generate a sleep report 2. assign you to one of several tracks we have. We also personalize your specific program within the track (e.g. we'll adjust your sleep restriction window based on your sleep efficiency etc).

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