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| ▲ | joecool1029 an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | > And so few actually deliver $10/mo worth of value. If 1password and Fastmail Funny you mention Fastmail. I was happy most of the past decade until this week. I just had my email blown up by their new Paddle billing system with a ton of billing invoices since they decided it was no longer ok that I pay them a lump sump every 2 years, and that I must go onto monthly now. Initially I thought they were hacked but nope, just terrible communication. I emailed them a few days ago and they only confirmed that Paddle is their merchant of record and they have been migrating accounts over slowly. Tonight the CEO sent out a blast saying resellers need to be on monthly billing with their new system at new pricing. Sorry Fastmail, I paid for 2 years back in October (I think this is my 3rd cycle with them). If you want me on monthly billing then you will wait until October 2027. That is a ‘you’ problem not a ‘me’ problem if you undersold the subscription this cycle. | |
| ▲ | carlosjobim 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > that's the standard of value other SaaS companies have to beat and very few do. Of course it isn't. Just because some products or services are great value, doesn't make other products bad value. They can be anything from good value, to average value to low value. And products / services are of course not comparable just because they are subscription based, or used on a digital device. Gas has a fantastic value, one liter can transport me and my things a long way in short time. So does that mean that I can never buy a bottle of wine or some coffee outside of my home? They are after all liquids, and neither coffee nor wine can compare with the great value of gas. | | |
| ▲ | throwup238 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Just because some products or services are great value, doesn't make other products bad value. Sorry, but no. If they're worse value than my email and password providers which my digital life revolves around and who only charge me $5/mo each, then yes those products are a bad value. I pay $3,000/yr for Altium, $200/mo for Claude Max, $60+/mo for ad-free streaming, and begrudgingly $50/mo for Adobe so I'm not against paying thousands a year in nice fat profit margins if they provide actual value, like a shit ton of GPU compute time or a well made piece of professional software. "Value" here is obviously subjective relative to the beholder, but IMO the vast majority of SaaS I look at are hardly worth two bucks a month, let alone tens. | | |
| ▲ | fragmede 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > If they're worse value than my... password providers... who only charge me $5/mo In that case, people who run Bitwarden for free are screwed. In fact, looking at how much I use the web browser Chrome, and how much I get out of that, and the fact that I pay $0 to Google to use it (inb4 I'm the product because I'm not paying for it), paying money for anything digital is terrible value! What you've discovered is that prices are all made up. If we think about how to price a product, say a chair, from first principles, you'd take the cost of the raw materials, the time it takes you to turn those raw materials into the finished product, add a %age profit on top, and call it a day. In the real world though, that's not how pricing things works. You have a product, which costs $X in raw materials, and then you just... make up a number, $Y. Hopefully, $Y is much greater than $X, and you're able to make a great living off selling your chairs. Maybe you're called Eames and people will pay you $5,500 for your chair/lounger, maybe you're Office Depot and sell them for $129. Maybe you're not very good at chairs, so they're not level and then you can't give them away, not even to your friends. Life is not an optimization problem. You can optimize for value, but then you'll find yourself in Walmart at 1am realizing that the 3-pack is cheaper per-roll than the 30-pack that night for some reason, and getting angry over that. | |
| ▲ | carlosjobim 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Then you cannot ever buy a cup of coffee, because it's also very bad value compared to Fastmail. Or a beer. > The vast majority of SaaS I look at are hardly worth two bucks a month, let alone tens. Then why are you looking at them, | | |
| ▲ | throwup238 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I don’t buy cups of coffee unless it’s on vacation, brewed by a great barista with years of experience. Instead I have a $600 roaster, a $100 burr grinder, and a $10 Turkish coffee pot that have produced many thousands of good cups of coffee over more than a decade. Including the cost of bulk beans, I probably spend about as much on my caffeine addiction as 1password and Fastmail combined. Seems like a decent value to me? I think your value system is completely broken if you think I can’t have a beer just because they cost more than fastmail. Some beers are better value than others but I enjoy having a beer. I don’t enjoy logging into some overpriced SaaS to do something that Claude can do for me now instead. > Then why are you looking at them, How can I evaluate their value if I don’t even look at them? |
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