Hacker News Reader

Comment by ra | Hacker News Reader

I think it's a GREAT idea.

Now, this might just be me, and I don't want to sound negative, or take anything away from the effort you've obviously put into making this really good, but ...

For $120 / year I think, hmm I could probably build something that does this (just for me) in an hour, and it'd be fun!

However at $10 per YEAR, I would think it's a steal and jump at it. Not suggesting you should drop your pants on price, but that's my view on it.

I think charging for a CNAME is a good strategy.

View on HN

You've got to be kidding me. $10 a year may as well be nothing. I wouldn't do anything for anybody for $10/year. I probably couldn't even be bothered invoicing you.

You're right that it's a very simple product, though. $5 a month with a 20% discount for $50/yr sounds fair to me.

I like it though. Your textbook well executed MVP. The price might need some tweaks but hey, it's a product. Well done Jonas.

The point isn't if it's worth it to the developer to charge you that much. It's an automated billing process. The point is that the price point is low enough that people won't think twice about paying it. In this case, more than 5 times as many as would go for $50/year.

Thanks for the kind words! The pricing is obviously geared towards agencies, not freelancers. We'll see how it pans out, your feedback is greatly appreciated!

"You've got to be kidding me. $10 a year may as well be nothing. I wouldn't do anything for anybody for $10/year."

That makes no sense in the context of selling 0's and 1's where the marginal cost is close to zero.

What you should ask yourself is this: would you rather sell one hundred subscription at $120 per year or ten thousands subscription at $10 per year? I'm not saying these are the numbers that GP would have but you must take this into account.

Another way to put it: quite some people are very happy sitting on hundreds of thousands --if not millions-- of dollars selling games on the iPhone at less than $5 a pop.

Another comparison point: there are desktop apps way more complex than the webapp we're talking about here that can bought (not a subscription, but bought) when there are bundle sales at way less than $10. Once again, the problem is trivial: would you rather make zero sales to that target demographic (people buying apps bundles) or would you rather sell a few thousands license for you app at, say, $5?

Basically the two concepts that you don't understand are: a) economy of scale and b) it's all 0's and 1's.

"I probably couldn't even be bothered invoicing you."

That just shows how lame and inefficient your invoice and tax filling process is. (btw I can help: no latter than yesterday when the tools of the trade were posted here there were apps taking care of automated invoicing and tax fillings)

You seem to have missed the fact that this is a service. It's a SAAS targeted at businesses. The economics have little to do with iphone apps and desktop software. And complexity of software has no relation whatsoever to its utility.

Running a service is expensive. First you have customer acquisition, which is not magical and free as you seem to believe, then you have servers to run, email services to pay, security updates, new features, server admin, customer support .. unless you are running at an amazing scale you just cannot do that for $10/year.

> would you rather sell one hundred subscription at $120 per year or ten thousands subscription at $10 per year

Where on earth are you getting these numbers from? You don't automatically get 100x the sales if you drop the price. This is just pure fantasy IMO. More likely he is going to get 100 sales either way, because he might manage to get his product in front of 100 people for whom the problem solving value exceeds the cost, and who has a $10/yr problem?

Fact is this a product targeted at businesses. The type of people who are actually interested in paying money for someone to solve their problem do not care about the difference between $10 and $100. Do you save them $101 worth of time? Then sold! If anything I would be suspicious of a low price like $10/yr because I know it's not viable.

Selling it for $10 a year would be the same as saying, "This is a worthless toy. It isn't really worth your time to look at, much less to think about integrating."

My advice for would-be owners, never price your item based on how quickly a developer could build it. Price it based on how much pain you can solve your customer.

In this case, I would push the "so easy to integrate before you need to spend five times the cost on the first problem and still have to build or integrate it". Of course, I wouldn't make it sound that awkward. ;)

Why make this a pay monthly thing? You should offer a block of uses on a pay-as-you-go scheme, like 20 uses for $10.

I have to agree, at $120 a year I could build it. I don't think you'll be able to charge more then $10 a year.

Build, deploy, host and maintain for an hour per year? I think that might be a bit optimistic.

Certainly for an agency to do this will cost them more than an hour of developer time. $120 per year is a steal, OP should add different pricing brackets to capture more value from bigger agencies.

what sort of "agency" are you talking about? a web development agency?

I 100% agree this would take more than an hour to develop with a nice UI, and there's some ongoing maintenance, but it's still pretty low numbers. And there's still arguments for a DIY approach - for instance, Aa DIY approach means you can improve/iterate/integrate at your own pace.

Yes, a web development agency, though really any profitable business that could use this.

Each hour you spend improving/interating/integrating your DIY app is an hour of developer time that you can't bill for.

You'd easily spend over an hour per year on a DIY app. Agencies charge at least $120 per hour so the choice between building yourself or paying someone else to do it is a no-brainer.

At the enterprise level $500 is the amount employees can generally spend themselves without getting approval, so there should really be a plan at that level of pricing too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com