Agreed. But also beware of customers who want to pay one-time fees for ongoing-need products, or to rephrase it; Ignore all pricing feedback you get from Hackernews.
On HN you're mostly talking to a niche of people who are both a) consumers and b) spend all day in code, not end-user tools.
Consumers, as a rule of thumb, mostly consume, and irrationally value their time at $0. They don't build things like companies do, so don't perceive any monetary value in doing something more efficiently via software like a company would. They'll waste hours of their life to save $5, because what would they be doing otherwise? Scrolling Instagram or watching YouTube, so who cares.
Coders, as a rule of thumb, mostly code, and irrationally value the code of other people at $0. In the back of their mind they always believe they can "code up a better replacement in a weekend." Even though this is 99.99% of the time not true.
So the intersection of these two groups could be the worst software market on earth.
Every seller has to think critically themselves about how to structure pricing in a way that accounts for user benefit, market alignment, and OpEx.
I recommend going through the BMG book process to be sure all of the big areas are considered. [0]
> Coders, as a rule of thumb, mostly code, and irrationally value the code of other people at $0. In the back of their mind they always believe they can "code up a better replacement in a weekend." Even though this is 99.99% of the time not true.
This comes across as reductive stereotyping lacking in nuance and denying individual abilities of real humans who may also happen to have other hustle skills like sales, advertising, and marketing. Please don't do this.
I think it’s worth calling out how easy and common it is for software engineers to casually dismiss software they didn’t write themselves. If I had a nickel for every time I’ve seen someone casually hand wave away a mountain of complexity I would be a rich man.
On HN you're mostly talking to a niche of people who are both a) consumers and b) spend all day in code, not end-user tools.
Consumers, as a rule of thumb, mostly consume, and irrationally value their time at $0. They don't build things like companies do, so don't perceive any monetary value in doing something more efficiently via software like a company would. They'll waste hours of their life to save $5, because what would they be doing otherwise? Scrolling Instagram or watching YouTube, so who cares.
Coders, as a rule of thumb, mostly code, and irrationally value the code of other people at $0. In the back of their mind they always believe they can "code up a better replacement in a weekend." Even though this is 99.99% of the time not true.
So the intersection of these two groups could be the worst software market on earth.