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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

This is my only grumble with WuFoo; ... the only option up from the ‘free’ is the $9.95. May not seem much, but ...it’s certainly overkill...

It’s not a cheap option by any means

Funny, if you told me I could double my leads for $9.95 a month, I'd have kittens. But thankfully I expect most of Wufoo's customers are closer to me than they are to this guy. (Note: if you are developing a SAAS, please don't let yourself be persuaded to price targeting people who would complain that doubling their revenue did not justify $10 a month. Some people just don't pay money for stuff -- fix problems for the people who do.)

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Some people just don't work well with numbers, whereas if his plan was priced relative to something he valued his perception might change e.g "Double your leads for less than a couple of pints."

Right, but then you'd be telling your Serious Business Clients (TM) "Please, don't consider us an important vendor for your business, we're too busy looking for table scraps from unemployed college students who price everything in terms of beer".

If you have to rewrite your web copy to explain why $10 a month is cheap for a revenue-generating B2B application you have made a catastrophic error in your target selection.

Wasn't suggesting to you'd actually write a product schedule priced relative to beer (or anything else), but only that there are some who have difficulty connecting a figure with value delivered. This is more common than you'd think.

You've led to another interesting point however, being that $10 per month is rarely a price point at which any but the smallest of clients would consider you an important vendor. Depending on your personal definition of Serious Business Clients (TM), you will likely encounter the somewhat complementary problem of such clients failing to connect value delivered with such a low price point (even at $199).

All he needs is a single form that sends an email upon submission. It should cost him less than the equivalent of $10/month to learn how to do this himself.

That is the programmer way of looking at the world, particularly the not-paid-well-enough programmer way of looking at the world.

You would, naturally, get the submission form right the first time:

1) you know that if you use an HTML hidden element with a hard coded email address you'll be a spam proxy within 2 weeks

2) you can configure sendmail on your server of choice

3) you actually know what a server is

4) you don't freeze up when I say the words "parse the query parameters"

5) you sanitized all that untrusted input to the form before you ran it through your mailing script so that it is impossible to overload the title and then inject arbitrary mail headers to CC the message to an unbounded recipient list

Now what is your level of confidence that someone making, oh, the princely sum of $20 an hour can learn all of the above before hour number six, when starting from the point "I can't program and know nothing about email or security"?

That's true. It's easy to forget how difficult this would be without experience.

Still, $120/year to enable a single web contact form seems excessive (his isn't free b/c it has more than 10 fields). You could embed a form from Google Docs for free.

Yes, the title is misleading. Simply having a form where none existed before doubled his RFPs. No reason to think there is anything magical about WuFoo forms, although it is a good service.

A single form is free at Wufoo. Just sayin'...

Only for less than 10 fields. In his case, it's $10/month because he has more than that.

(Though, seeing his massive form makes me want to close my browser window, let alone fill it out. He might see another jump in requests if he cut the fields down to 2... and then it would indeed be free.)

I guess I should pay closer attention. But, 10 fields ought to be enough for anybody. Or something.

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