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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this the road to expensive bloated products full of feature that few people need?

I know I get annoyed when some well designed tool adds a ton of features that don't really make it any better for me, and becomes more expensive in the process. Heck, it often becomes worse overall because all of those extra features make it slow and buggy.

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If you are adding features for features' sake, then you are not adding value. Bloated products result when you add features without understanding their value to the customer base you serve.

Of course, it could be that you serve such a diverse customer base that adding in "valuable" features creates bloat as a side-effect (Hi Microsoft Excel!), but for a SaaS app that is less than 3-5 years old, I think you'd be hard pressed to fit in this category.

I think you're less likely, but some people really do just need dead-simple things priced as cheaply as possible, so it's not necessarily a wrong decision, at least for some customers in some markets, to offer them something cheap and bare-bones and not really innovate much beyond the initial offering. I think that may be my favorite category of SaaS, something that does one thing with barely any options, and charges me barely any money to do it, but keeps up the service and a stable API reliably, and periodically drops prices as their own costs drop.

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