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Comment by olieidel | Hacker News Reader

I disagree - I don't think $10 / month is insane. Our low price expectations are driven by SaaS companies optimizing for growth, not profitability. Look at some of those "affordable" products out there: Slack, Asana, Shopify, all not profitable. The biggest surprise here, I think, is that VC-driven "growth first" companies have shifted customer expectations to think that everything should either be free or sub-$10 / month. The economic reality, however, looks quite different, if companies would aim for profitability (not many in the HN bubble do).

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If you consider all the other software you use daily that should also get $10/mo from you, it adds up to the point where we'd all have to start touching grass for most of the day while general purpose computation becomes more exclusively for the affluent. I mean maybe that's a good thing but it feels pretty radical from status quo

That touches on the general dissatisfaction many people have with cloud-first subscription based software. For a service like kagi, it makes sense since search needs that model. When software that doesn't need to doesn't depend one someone else's computer, the good old one time purchase option at large enough scales with optional upgrades every few years becomes more viable again.

If we get technical enough you can have a decentralized search index that's automatically distributed in a torrent-like manner so it's possible with some AI models that eventually, after a year or so, you almost don't hit the network when you search.

But nobody from the business circles wants that outcome.

We’d have a totally new equilibrium. Where would the money currently spent on advertising go?

If distributed equitably, you’d imagine we, as consumers, might not actually be worse off in net; instead of coming from advertisers, it gets sent through us to the same software companies that we currently pay by proxy through advertising.

> If you consider all the other software you use daily that should also get $10/mo from you

Except that it shouldn't. The software I use every day is not a service that incurs ongoing costs to the developer. A one-time fee is the correct model for that.

More and more services ask for money -- really, it was about time they stopped pretending the VC money will never dry up, and I approve that they are finally waking up.

But notice the "more and more" part. $10 is nothing but we also have to take into account how many times we have to multiply $10 each month.

And that equation started becoming unfavorable for us the consumers.

I won't blame VCs but the 0% interest rate environment.

When money had no "price" to it, it made absolute sense to borrow as much as possible from the future, and thus delaying profits for growth.

That's why we start seeing this world change now, rates are no longer 0 and money isn't free. You have to pay now, and so you have to have some cash flow now.

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