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Comment by chadash | Hacker News Reader

I'm old enough to remember buying software in cardboard boxes at Bestbuy.

> I don't know how to respond to this point, it's a bit of a strawman.

Why is it a strawman? I can sell you software for $100 once or I can sell it to you for $10/month. I don't think anyone is suggesting that I'm gonna sell it for $10 once though.

In particular, Desert Ant is saying their software is free for 100k active devices per SDK. That's likely a lot more users than most peoples' side projects. Given that, I'm guessing that $50k (even annually) is not a crazy number (yes, obviously $50k is not what a consumer would ever pay).

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50k annually for a static set of weights is actually crazy, though.

As in - I make software for a living and they can fuck off. Produce the item. Sell the item at a cost you find reasonable. Convince me to buy it again with an upgrade that's worth buying.

Period.

There's no "service" happening here. If anything, the proposed cost model just makes me incredibly unlikely to engage at all, because it means they're going to insist on trying to track my users (a thing I don't like doing...) with whatever bloatware they shove into their "sdk".

They're not selling it to you/it doesn't come out of your salary?

They're selling it to your employer. You're literally not even the customer for this product. There's no need to get angry that they're charging enterprise/vendor rates for a product.

And it's free for up to 100k devices. If you are running anything on 100k devices you should be able to afford $0.50/device and. If you aren't then why do you care? It's still a very customer-permissive and flexible business model so I cannot understand why this is upsetting or offensive

they literally would be selling it to me.

I deploy browser extensions to millions of devices, and small local models that I can run in that space are incredibly appealing.

But the "per user" model is just especially difficult to justify here, and comes with a TON of fucking downsides like usage tracking, feature availability, and product structure (ex - is a trial user a user? how long? etc...)

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And it's not even like they're justifying it with model download support or caching... they shove it entirely onto hugging face, or have you self serve.

As their literal target audience - I'd rather buy the weights for a fixed price (even a high one), and not let them influence my product design decisions with saas style pricing.

It's a strawman because it only makes sense if the one off up front cost is $50k, which wasn't the argument I was making. If the one-off up front cost is $20, then your point makes no sense - your boss would have no issue.

An alternative would be instead of 1 of charging over 100k users $50k, charge every user a one off $20.

I guess it's hard to discuss alternative billing methods without knowing what need to be recuperated.

Thanks for the response, appreciated. Again, sorry for the sassyness.

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