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Comment by kalid | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to channel my inner patio11:

* Charge whole numbers, not 4.95. No need for the confusion. Makes the service look cheap.

* Double or triple the price (to $10-15/month). $5 vs $10 is nothing to the average dev, but it halves the number of people you need to get to ramen profitable.

* Have an expensive pro plan ($99 - $299/month). With email support, etc. If nothing else, it makes the less expensive plans more attractive.

* Don't "delete" the free scripts. "Archive" them after 7 days [it's a 7-day free trial] and you can get them all back when you upgrade to pro. If someone wants to "abuse" the system by recreating their scripts every 7 days, fine.

99% of devs will be more familiar with javascript than Lua, so I'd greatly encourage supporting that.

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I am in agreement about the inclusion of JS. It's a much more widespread and accessible language. However, I disagree on the price suggestion. $15 is a non-trivial amount and, it seems as though this service offers a slight convenience, not any sort of major, unique or ground-breaking functionality. I might pay $5 for this– or, maybe not– but I almost certainly won't pay $15 for such a service. (I might be in the minority as to how much I'd be willing to spend for this, especially considering I'm in dire financial straits. Despite that, I still feel as though $15 would exceed the amount of value that most people could reasonably wring from this service.)

I genuinely dislike their pricing model. I'm of the belief that, if one elects to offer a free tier, that tier should be usable in the real world. I should be able to write something that makes use of that service. This one-week "time bomb" precludes any real application of the service, and effectively makes this tier a trial. I agree that deleting the scripts is a bad idea, and is likely to produce a few indignant developers who forgot to either subscribe or re-create their scripts.

* We'd be happy to be proven wrong, but we believe $4.95 converts better than $5.

* We'd be happy to charge more. We have nothing to go on yet but intuition, and we think $5 is the right amount.

* This is intriguing, but I think we need to find the right value to provide in order to offer something like that.

* This is actually what we do.

Yeah, but are you testing those beliefs?

Do you have some suggestions for how to test them?

A/B testing. Try something like coupon codes or just two different plans that are presented as "basic plan" (or whatever. Some get plan 1A, some 1B.

What you want to avoid with this sort of AB testing is the same person seeing multiple prices. The easiest, decently close approximation is just to split the page served by geocoded IP. The regions should be split randomly up-front.

Also don't underestimate the value of the more expensive plan to making your $4.95 plan look cheap. A simple answer to what could be premium is contained in your terms: Make the $99/month plan suitable for use in a production environment, as web middleware or a backend, etc by relaxing restrictions and having some sort of SLA.

One way to test it is merely to offer larger tiers, in addition to your $5 plan. You may be surprised by your customers' behavior.

$4.95 converts better than $5.

We think $5 is the right amount.

* No prob :). The beauty of the web is experimentation. Use VisualWebsiteOptimizer.com and run some quick A/B tests with two pricing tables [one at 4.95, another with $5].

* Test that assumption too :). Have table 1 with free/$5, table 2 with "Free trial", $10, $199 [pro]. Track "conversion revenue" not raw conversions.

* Large customers want to know they can get help if they need it, not be stuck in the same email queue as the $5/month hobbyists :). That peace of mind is worth a few hundred a month.

* I see -- your wording on the hover tip says "deleted" (in bold) so easy to misconstrue :). If you said "archived (and reactivated when you upgrade)" I'd feel a lot more comfortable. In my head I thought "Oh, they're deleting my scripts? So I have to decide on day 6 if I want to upgrade?".

patio11's site is full of good advice for this type of thing (http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/09/21/ramit-sethi-and-patrick-...).

I want you guys to charge more so you are more sustainable, and therefore I can rely on you [if you go away after a year, I have to painfully migrate away to a new provider, which isn't worth the $5/month price savings. An hour of a programmer's time spent in migration, and it'd be much more, is much more expensive than the service].

I currently pay $5 per month for a vps with unlimited traffic on which I run a node js server. I might possibly pay 5$ for this service, but certainly no more for applications that aren't going to have >10k users.

Which VPS provider is this?

vpscheap.net They have plans starting from 2$ a month, but I need more RAM than that plan has. I think that $60 per year is exactly right for what I need, and they will let you pay a year up front if you want - it would make an excellent Christmas present for anyone geekily inclined.

[I think they have a referrer program and if you tell them that kybernetikos@gmail.com recommended it to you I get something, in case you're feeling generous.]

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