Honest Pitch | Hacker News Reader

Honest Pitch

forms.md

2 pointsdarkhorse1311 comments

It's a nice business model, possibly. However, there are many free alternatives. I would choose v0.dev, Lovable, Bolt.New, or something similar.

They are fundamentally different products though, right?

It's partly different. Users focus on solutions, not products. The pricing model must be prepared for that. $99 per site is too expensive in a market with so many free solutions. $19 may be the possible maximum, or even less

Politely, I 100% disagree. If anything, a good dev team would be able to take Forms.md and integrate that into their AI workflow to generate powerful forms.

Then the next to logical question is, if it's a good dev team why do they need this at all?

Forms are deceptively complex. A lot goes into a really good, solid, well-tested form builder/generator.

Multi-steps, logic jumps, data-binding, tons of different form fields, localization, good design and UX, etc.

When people want a heavyweight stuff around forms including all the integrations with Zapier, Google docs, Notion, Airtable, etc, they go Tally or Typeform for $25 per/month. I see Forms.md as a an overpriced and less capable solution. For that kind of value, even with everything you enumerated, I can't expect users paying $99 for each form website. When I consult startups, I repeat guys: fast-growing AI code generators and editors will push you out of the market if you don't come strong differentiated value with free and very low-priced tagged packages (< $10).

That makes sense, and you may be 100% right about this.

But it doesn't really hurt for me to try.

Why don't every good dev team roll out their own authentications?

Because most dev teams aren't actually good dev teams.

Competing on price is an ideal strategy for making a business not worth running.

Competing with free is that strategy's gold standard...minus you getting gold.

Charging enough to make business customers confident you will probably stay in business is a necessary condition for creating the trust that is the currency of good business relationships.

Or to put it another way, any business that balks at $99 is less likely to be a good customer. Price is a way of segmenting the market by filtering out businesses that don't care if you stay in business.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com