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Comment by jagthedrummer | Hacker News Reader

Think about the price in comparison to hiring a design consultant to generate these reports for you. If they charge you or your agency $50/hour, it takes them an hour to design a report, and you're producing 10 documents/month, that's $500/month.

If you're happy working in Adobe / Word yourself, that's awesome! I built Remarq as a tool to help freelancers and consultants generate high-quality, beautifully designed reports and proposals _without_ needing to invest in a designer for them.

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The right comparison would be: how much do you need to pay a designer to produce a latex template. After that, it's only a matter of running pandoc.

If you're comfortable managing that kind of tool chain, then yeah, that's a good comparison. Many people would prefer to focus on creating the content of the document rather than installing and configuring software.

What toolchain? You run a command-line program. Installing pandoc isn't terribly hard (I just did it on this particular Mac in about a couple minutes).

I think you're exaggerating the difficulty of your competition. :)

Lemme guess, you're a developer/sysadmin/techie type? :)

This is a tool for people who don't want to be anywhere near a command line.

Wouldn't such people use Word or Pages rather than markdown though?

Then they can pay some geeky kid in pizza and beer to spend the hour or less it would take that kid to get the supposedly-elaborate toolchain setup (to the point of "drag and drop this text that looks like what you type into the Reddit onto this thingy and it'll spit out a pretty document") and it would still be phenomenally cheaper than what you're charging while being significantly more valuable in the long run.

Also, if you know any designers capable of producing a LaTeX template, please put me in touch!

Touché :)

I've recommended the software to my consultant wife (since her company would be paying), but I'm cheap.

How does the pricing work if I want to do revisions to a document? Say it goes through a lot of editing, does each export count towards the maximum number allowed?

If not, what's to prevent users from doing entirely new documents under the guise of "edits" to an old document?

Thanks for the recommendation!

Nope, edits do not count towards the total. You can make as many revisions as you want to a given document. At this point there's nothing to stop someone from doing exactly what you describe. I'm mainly counting on attracting customers that value their time enough that they'd find it silly to expend time and effort gaming that particular system.

You could also prevent editing the main title, once you pick it, it's set in stone (or limit the edits to a small Levenshtein ball). That way you can do as many corrections to the document as you wish, but it's much harder to cheat the system.

Add me to the list thinking this looks a bit pricey, though I do understand the value, and am usually one to value my time pretty highly.

I think my main reservation is the monthly plans, perhaps because I'm not your target market and really don't put reports together that often. (though on another note, I do put bids / proposals together quite often, so maybe that's another angle)

In any case, I think having a plan that is pay-per-use (no monthly, $50 a report) would make me consider this next time I have a document to put together. I'm probably a different class of customer than your demographic though.

In any case, neat product, congrats on the launch!

Thanks! The per document pricing is an interesting angle. I'll definitely give it some thought.

I speak for no one but myself - I'm sure many will pay those prices :)

On a separate note... Every so often (once every 3/4 months) I have occasion to use litmus.com to test an email template for a freelance gig. They only do monthly plans too - plans which I'll never be able to justify paying. I'd be happy to pay a one-off fee every time I needed it but they won't offer that pricing model, the end result being I cycle trial accounts through my many email addresses and they miss out on revenue.

It doesn't sit well with me because their sole factor of production (like yours, I imagine) is CPU time which is pretty well commoditised nowadays, so offering anything more complicated than a single unit of the product immediately tells me that artificial barriers have been created with the sole purpose of extracting "extra" money from me. It kinda grinds my gears.

Hmm... I hadn't considered that view before, but I can see where you're coming from. The intention (for me) definitely isn't to extract extra money. Rather I'm hoping to provide something that provides enough value that it's a core part of my customers workflow, and worth using every month. I honestly hadn't given much (any?) thought to trying to do one-off documents until you suggested it. I'll definitely be mulling it over.

Right, but is anyone honestly hiring a design consultant for each and every report they generate? Remarq would make sense if that were the case, but it's far more likely that one would hire the designer to produce a template, then use that template until it's no longer in style. That will end up being phenomenally cheaper than what's being offered here.

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