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Comment by danenania | Hacker News Reader

Is it really “lightweight”? Have you ever run a business and been responsible for pricing strategy? I have, and I thought the post made a good point—if pricing is tightly coupled to billing implementation, it discourages experimentation since pricing changes are technically non-trivial.

If you don’t relate to that, maybe the post just isn’t for you? HN is a forum for engineers and entrepreneurs—it’s run by a startup accelerator, after all. Not everything on it has to be purely technical.

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None of that changes the fact that this is marketing for their product. Many similar posts have made the front page of HN recently and it’s getting a bit formulaic. It’s great that you like some of them, but are you ok with HN just being a bunch of covert marketing copy?

I don't see the issue here. They're solving a real problem for developers with their open-source solution and telling people about it.

Most content is marketing in some form. Would you complain about a developer who blogs about open source so they can get consulting projects or a job? If the content is good and I can learn something useful from it, it seems like a win-win.

Social media users who have impracticably many dead authors’ books to read and choose not to are always going to complain about the impacts of cultural materialism, one comment at a time.

My main gripe with this article, is it mentions that their product was born as a result of a "painful expensive experience" of not creating a "Pricing Engine", but they don't at all elaborate on what that experience was.

I want to know what problems that they built this to solve specifically, so that I can foresee future problems that I may run into. But they don't elaborate at all, and instead just mention that their product solves those unmentioned problems.

That’s fair. Having dealt with this myself, I’m very familiar with the pain involved, as I’d imagine most developers/entrepreneurs who have had to implement billing and then iterate on pricing are. It gets messy really fast.

Perhaps they’re more targeting people like me who have experienced this issue and don’t really need it explained, but I agree going into more detail on the specific challenges is probably a good idea to appeal to a wider audience.

If you find bad posts you can flag them or write the mods to convince them to fix it. Posting meta about them mostly makes it worse.

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