Hacker News Reader

Comment by MyFirstSass | Hacker News Reader

- Models will be released

- Free to use for non commercial projects

- 20$/m subscription needed if project has less than $1m annual revenue or <1m users

- Undisclosed "Enterprise" subscription needed for projects larger than above

To me the $240/y sounds pretty awesome for a smaller commercial project, and i like they've set the threshold pretty high up.

But still don't like "undisclosed" black box enterprise pricing though when they're running their own API, because it basically means they can tax you to death if you build a service that competes with their API right - so in effect only viable to create small companies with this tech?

View on HN

> so in effect only viable to create small companies with this tech

I assume stability wants to be in the role of building AI models not applications, so if you provide a clear and nontrivial value add beyond their API you should be fine. If you build a tool that allows architects to make their building renderings more lifelike by adding realistic crowds, vegetation, storefronts etc right from the comfort of their existing tooling it's in Stability's interest that you are successful. If you only resell their API but in green they might not be as invested in your success.

"Should be fine" doesn't cut it if you want to base your business on it and have no alternatives.

Every Android or iOS App is a "should be fine" type of deal. So are lots of other things. If you are really worried I'm sure there's a sales person willing to take your call right now. It's not ideal, but honestly not that exceptional. And if push comes to shove you do have alternatives, you just need to sacrifice a bit of quality, maybe deployment complexity, and tune your prompts differently for one of the other models.

Do android and iOS stores have undisclosed fee structures for high revenue or high usage apps? I was under the impression that the fees were at least transparent, even if they do represent monopolistic rent seeking.

There were several instances that came out in recent court cases of the app stores negotiating custom deals with strategically-important apps.

E.g. Spotify: https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/20/23969690/google-spotify-...

So typical "above this negotiating power, let's talk terms", and everybody smaller has to pay list price.

The Android app stores. The iOS app store doesn't have any known deals.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/30/21348108/apple-amazon-pri...

> …they can tax you to death if you build a service that competes with their API right…

I'm curious why that'd be a concern, since building a service that effectively just resells an API isn't a viable business model.

What SaaS company discloses their Enterprise prices?

A tangent but i believe all pricing should public information by law above some threshold to battle corruption, nepotism, cartel making and monopolies.

I've seen too many governments and even medium sized companies paying absurd amounts to some shitty locked in cloud platform with lots of better alternatives, because someone got kickbacks, gifts, vacations or a seat on some board, and everyone should be more enraged.

The EU has tried to battle this with various public procurement processes but it's a big clown show of course so i don't know what the solution is.

Unless there's absolutely no alternative, and it's something I desperately need, I basically won't buy anything that says "call for pricing" or some such, because I interpret that as "call so one of our trained liars (i.e., salesmen) can figure out how hard we can screw you".

In many cases I'd even pay a premium to avoid talking to one of those people.

You're not the target market, the CTO, CIO, or business development representatives are. So many developers say they won't ever buy "call for pricing" software, like, yeah, they know you won't, in fact that's what they bank on.

And the execs won’t really worry about "how hard the salesmen can screw them", they know the rules of the game and understand that negotiations are negotiations. It’s a negotiator’s job to try to get a good deal, and that works both ways.

Yes. Devs who don't know sales are obviously not their demographic, they'll be speaking to layers of other biz dev people before they even get to the execs, and each one knows exactly how to extract concessions and discounts, and the opposing salesperson knows exactly how much of a discount they can give. In this way, it is much more of an efficient market than most devs think.

Devs' reaction to all this is honestly the same as when a non-technical exec tells a dev why they "can't just get it done in a day, it shouldn't be that hard right?" People have their own competencies and are usually blind to others'.

CTO in a financial institution here.

I don't talk to sales.

It depends on how large the institution is and how high up you are. At smaller institutions, C-level execs absolutely talk to sales, I've sold products to them myself.

> You're not the target market

I own the business and I buy stuff all the time, just not from places that say "call for pricing".

I've got too many other things going on to waste time listening to some lame pitch from a guy who was probably selling shoes last week.

If they don't want to sell me stuff because I'm "not their target market", that's fine with me.

I'll buy it elsewhere.

I'm not sure what crazoid B-school theory says that you should make it harder for customers to buy your stuff, but I'm pretty sure that's a really bad theory.

You are continuing to show exactly why you're not the target market. Those "call for pricing" companies are targeting large enterprises, not one person owned businesses. That you self select out of their market is exactly what they want. And yes, sometimes companies do make it harder to buy stuff simply because they can make more money and save on customer support and other operational costs if they have a few large companies paying them millions over having many smaller ones paying thousands.

> You are continuing to show exactly why you're not the target market.

You're continuing to justify the role of salesmen, which is an essentially parasitic role that results in higher prices for everyone.

If my company should get big enough that I have to hire someone to order stuff, I don't want that person wasting time on the phone with salesmen either. Every minute he spends on the phone listening to a sales pitch is a minute he's not actually doing the job I'm paying him for.

"Target market"... pfft.

Okay, it is clear you've never done sales in your life. Even for the products I make I still have to do sales to convince bigger clients to buy them. If you don't like the game, don't play it, but don't think you're somehow above the game. I will point you to another comment I made regarding the arrogance of developers sometimes when it comes to other disciplines and thinking that others are somehow stupider than themselves [0]. Regardless, I don't think this conversation will yield more productive insights. Goodbye.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40065114#40067754

> Okay, it is clear you've never done sales in your life.

What was your first clue? The fact that I consider salesmen to be parasites?

>If you don't like the game, don't play it, but don't think you're somehow above the game.

Oh, I am totally above the game, because I will not talk to you or your fellow salesmen. I will not call you. Ever. If you cold-call me, I'll hang up and block your number. If you show up in person, you'll be asked to leave and informed that any future visits will be considered trespass and result in a call to the towing company to have your car removed and a call to the police to have you removed.

I thought that was made clear.

Is this what you call "negotiation"? Because you suck at it, dude. srsly.

You are in the business of conning people into paying a higher price for goods and services for which they would otherwise have paid less. Every penny of your commission is ripped right out of the customer's pocket, for zero value added.

Don't waste your time, he literally works in sales.

Yeah on multiple occasions I've e-mailed said businesses and said "This other business has it for $X. Beat that and I'll buy yours. I don't have time for a call."

I want products at my doorstep in exchange for $. I don't want a goddamn coffee chat.

I fully agree, or at the VERY LEAST pricing information should be disclosable and any NDA around pricing should be automatically void and unenforceable.

How the hell do I know they're not giving me higher prices due to racial profiling or some other unethical reason?

That would allow, at least, some sort of website or chrome plugin to exist that fetches and displays previously-submitted pricing information as an overlay next to any idiotic "call for pricing" statements.

That is the way I would run a country if I was its president.

I specialize in costing/pricing, not in saas however. There are a lot of reasons why what you are asking for is likely not realistic. It unfortunately does get abused, though, and I fully agree with how bullshit some of the arrangements are. It's just the people taking advantage of the situation are doing so knowing that the "cover" for it is legitimate.

Maybe there are ways to address the abuse without forcing upfront pricing?

Cost/pricing is similar enough to a salary, why is it not realistic to have these costs front facing? I can't see anything positive from the consumer perspective with hiding the numbers. The business side, there is always a reason to hide things.

I think demanding upfront pricing could hurt the customer. The company would be forced to overestimate their costs to cover the risk associated with unknown use-case details, making the enterprise price inflated. There would be a big "**" next to the price as well with a long list of conditions that need to be met.

The true costs are not front facing because it may not be clear which part of your product is going to be bearing most of the weight of the enterprise customers use-case until you know exactly what they are buying. Your costs may change a lot based on the nature and scale of what they are buying.

For example, you may be rate limited on a background service they use and the customer usecase will likely pish you over your limit. the next product tier from the background service vendor that's required to fulfill the enterprise company's use-case may cost way more and offer way more capacity than that company is going to use by itself. So you have to make a bet on how much cost to assign to that customer, and how much to assign to other/future customers given you buy that new tier and use it to change what you offer to other customers to try to make use of it. It may lower your cost overall if it supports a feature you can upsell relatively easily. Or it may be a service hardly used at all andyou really can't justify going up to that next tier unless this one enterprise customer pays for nearly all of the added cost

> But still don't like "undisclosed" black box enterprise pricing though when they're running their own API, because it basically means they can tax you to death if you build a service that competes with their API right - so in effect only viable to create small companies with this tech?

"undisclosed" doesn't imply changing the price after it was negotiated with you. It just mean they will negotiate the contracts for large projects, without disclosing the terms to the public ... in my view.

The "undisclosed" also mean they can just straight up give you different prices than they give to your competition which can affect fair competition in your field. Imagine that you compete with them in some different field..., or an easier one - if you compete with their investors' other investments...,

or you're in a country with politicians donation/spending limits (which are common outside USA) and they give their software for $1 to "that one annoying politician" and it won't count as a discount towards their donation limit, because the "original price" is unknown.

> The "undisclosed" also mean they can just straight up give you different prices than they give to your competition which can affect fair competition in your field.

They could do that anyways. This changes nothing.

Negotiating custom contracts is standard practice at the high end anyways. If your company is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars each month on something at list price, chances are you either got too much money or the company is run by suckers.

*under $1m annual revenue and <1m users

Seems ripe for a "project sharding" platform that splits your project into multiple identical backend projects that each have <1M annual revenue and <1M of your users.

Would save you from the unnecessary calls and coffee chats, you just pay N * subscription fee and get on with your life.

You could probably also use part of the revenue to buy treasury bonds and automagically pay the subscription fees, and it would be a closed intervention-free system.

I'm still goofing around with stable diffusion 1.5 based models. It has such a vibrant open source scene and it's free for commercial usage forever so.. I'm not really interested in V3. I guess corporations might be or whatever?

The enterprise subscription costs $120k/year. You might be able to haggle it down.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com