How we Simplified our Pricing Page | Hacker News Reader

How we Simplified our Pricing Page

blog.lob.com

21 pointsbavidar12 comments

This is a great update, a few concerns I have:

1. The ever popular: logo link on your blog should go to www.lob.com

2. Is there are reason all of these values can't be loaded on the page? I don't know if this is load related, but when I change an input option, I sometimes wait for over a second for the new price to appear. There's no reason I can think of to justify this, the switch should be nearly instant.

3. For me, this is much much better than the earlier version. But for some users, a price comparison might be helpful. As a secondary click, it might be nice to offer something like the old look (or a similar price comparison page).

[Formatting edit]

I'm glad to see someone else feels the same way about logo links on blog.company.com pages. I have always been surprised they just redirect to "/" instead of the company homepage.

Does anyone know the reasoning for the trend? Is there some SEO benefit of this or is it really just oversight/becoming de facto standard?

Usually they're hosted separately (some vps and tumblr in this case). So it's just a matter of the blog using the default mapping for it's logo to the blog site. The blog is generally completely unaware it's psuedo-participating in a larger site configuration. Good from a security perspective, a bit of a hassle for admin'ing (hence this issue).

This reminds me of the Azure pricing page:

http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/?scenar...

It seems like Lob is using a similar flat UI price calculator though they don't have the quantity sliders, which is apparently an oversight as a slider seems to make sense for settings like "number of pages". Their previous pricing was 50 cents per page plus 12 cents per extra page. A 100 page document is therefore $12.38 plus shipping. Under the new pricing the same 100 page document is $96 including shipping. Presumably shipping costs scale logarithmically with number of pages as the cost to ship a 100 page document shouldn't exceed $80, to put it mildly.

I also like Azure's use of the flat selection boxes which operate as radio buttons. You get to see all the options side-by-side as opposed to Lob's site where you have to click on each dropdown to see which options are available.

So, one thing immediately comes to mind:

$0.96 for each document? If it was something like an Earnings Report for a startup's investors, that could be $80+ per report.

Does scaling never factor in, here? Bulk orders?

Edit: Got rid of a sentence that wasn't really part of their model.

You must have never experienced the prices of printing services at UPS/Staples/Kinkos... $1.20+/per page for fax, $.50+/per B&W page for printing, etc.

Maybe it's just been a few years, but I was able to get 30 BW sheets for about $8.

Ah you are correct, the B&W is much cheaper than color. My mistake.

A link to the detailed price sheet would still be appreciated by some users. If I'm trying to weigh the decision to buy matte/gloss thick/regular business cards, I don't want to have to cycle through the 4 options and mentally keep track of the relative pricing.

You could do with some kind of min-height fix to stop that annoying reload jump when changing options. Otherwise, it looks great!

Funny, I noticed that sending a color card to antarctica at $1.23 is cheaper than sending one to the US for $1.69.

Nice way to get tons of traffic to look at the pricing for your product :)

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