Frugly vs. Freemium
taylor.town
taylor.town
I really hope the author the best, they seem to be working on trying to figure out some way to monetize their project without doing anything evil. Which is a rare and admirable attempt. But the moral of the story here seems very contingent on whether or not their plan works out, right? And I think it is not a very sure thing.
The harsh truth is that only if the final result says what you wanted to say in terms of that topic, your considerations and reflection on that topic "count".
I am not saying that it is all about the result, because how many corpses you produced on your way there still makes a difference — but yeah in the end you will be judged by the final result.
> To work with my natural skillset, I focused on aesthetic downgrades over aesthetic upgrades. I call this “frugly pricing”, AKA “cosmetic crippleware“.
> It’s simple: I plaster the word “free” everywhere until consumers pay for a license. I’m not the first to do this, and I certainly won’t be the last.
From the title and other comments I was imagining that the UI itself was made uglier in the frugly version.
But it sounds like the only difference is that it has these messages.
Which reminds me more of being nagware than being cosmetically crippled.
However, these entities wish to have us comb through dozens of pages of legal agreements and review even more laws/regulations that they are subject to. When we tell them that they have to pay institutional pricing if they want require contract review, they balk and say that they cannot pay any more than the price on the website, which is for self-service. I understand that they want to pay the lowest price possible, but they need to respect that different customer types (with different contractual review needs) are fundamentally buying different products/services.
They aren't paying above market they are simply being billed for the actual terms and features they are demanding.
And usually those fees are close to negliable, should be considered in pricing as part of the overhead and are simply cost of doing business.
Good news, if you are already at the point your customer provided paper worl to be reviewed, you are pretty advanced in the sales process with a decent chance of making the sale.
There are laws (in some places) that prevent you from charging the government more for a product than you charge another customer. So you'd really want another SKU for a higher price tier to make it definitively a separate product rather then just telling them they'll need to pay more if they ask for something.
Also some forms of libraries and game engines ask that you pay $X per year if you earn more than $Y per year, including the reviled changes to the Unity license, as does Apple given the app store have a lower tier theoretically for smaller businesses.
I've done this in the past for people - same product, but "Certified HIPAA Compliant" or what have you, even when the base level is already HIPAA compliant. But we won't sign a BAA for you unless you cough up or demonstrate need.
You can do this with this kind of tool by offering a tier for private citizens, and a tier for governmental agencies. Or even rebrand with a separate tool: GovCloud, for example.
> Also some forms of libraries and game engines ask that you pay $X per year if you earn more than $Y per year, including the reviled changes to the Unity license, as does Apple given the app store have a lower tier theoretically for smaller businesses
Is it common for companies to try to find workarounds to stay on lower tiers (e.g. signing up on a personal email but using it for company work), especially when you can't verify which tier they should be on? I've rarely seen pricing tiers like this in smaller SaaS products for example and I'm curious how well they'd work.
I've had product ideas where I'd be happy to give it away for free to people that can't afford it but then I can't see a simple way to check this. You see "email us to use for free if you can't afford it" sometimes.
what a shame! make the "comb through legal agreements" plan 60k ACV?
They typically are looking to cover dozens, not hundreds/thousands of users. If that were the case we could offer a discount on ongoing usage, as long as they covered the one-time cost of contract review.
Aside from that your biggest competition is always going to be when “included” services does what you do as part of a package deal. Ten-fifteen years ago it wouldn’t have been weird to see an organisation using whatever was the equivalent to Microsoft Teams at the day, we used a couple I think one was called Jabra or something along those lines. Today you just aren’t very likely to see things like Zoom or Slack in the public sector because when you get Microsoft Teams as part of your deal anyway, then it’s really hard to justify paying for something similar.
This is also part of why Microsoft bought so heavily into OpenAI… they know that almost no one in enterprise is going to be buying anything but their AI when it’s part of their “package deal”. Even in the company where I work now, which is transitioning from startup to enterprise you see this. We now only use Enterprise Co-pilot (well in the dev department we still use gpt 3.5) but the company as a whole only uses (and pays for) co-pilot because it’s “free” for everyone on the sort of license we buy through our current third party Microsoft license vendor.
I mostly use it to make AI images of cats or ducks performing various functions for internal presentations.
I wonder what other variants are possible... perhaps something around ISO 9000 certification?
- user count
- tool integration
- compliance
- support
- processes
- any kind of other things
And yes, this is toyed constantly when it comes to public purchases of everything to assure the preferred supplier wins a bid and still makes money on his low ball offer.
For example, we typically want SSO and the ability to send a data file of users automatically. Those are both typically enterprise features.
Furthermore, I've yet to see a free tier product that doesn't explicitly or implicitly exclude business and government institutions from using the services.
If they dislike you or they're cheap, they'll use a workaround.
If they want to show their support, then they might pay you even though there's a workaround.
So the question is, how good are you at selling your website as something that people might have warm feelings about? Seems like a high bar.
streamers and online content creators have already solved this problem - parasocialism is the answer.
Not sure if it works in the tech world, but in the onlyfans/GFE world, it works amazingly well.
And what about people judging the app on the first look? Good design can interest people in checking out what the site is actually about in the first place.
This is how I can afford to spend so much time on free and useful things. A few pages on my website fund everything else.
In other words, genuinely helpful recommendations, not half-assed ads.
In general, services with recurring payments pay much higher commissions than single purchases.
Most affiliate deals are brokered through affiliate platforms. If you know your industry well enough and your own website is popular enough, you can broker your own deals with people that otherwise don't have a program.
I don't see this as a solution, and especially if a site offers RSS.
It sounds like the point of it is to try and get people to pay, if they can and if they want to, without compromising the product experience.
They _want_ to give this away for free, but also want to be able to cover the costs. Getting rid of the "ugly" doesn't really take money away from them if you were never going to pay in the first place.
I believe the real problem is larger than computers and technology. capitalism just doesn't play well with digital assets which have effectively 0 distribution costs
That said, I like the frugly approach. The cosmetic upgrade approach in Fortnite the author mentioned is also implemented in a new game I've been playing called The Finals. It is nice not to have winning behind a paywall.
Words aren't sentient and as such they cannot be ableist, only people can. It's perfectly clear that the author didn't intend to offend, demean, or discriminate against any disabled person with their choice of words, they were merely writing about their own software.