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Appreciate you taking the time to respond. It seems like you're targeting two different markets (developers & their clients/employers), and having to construct two different product stories. Of course, what appeals to the developer market doesn't necessarily appeal to their client/employers and vice versa. I'm speaking as a freelance developer that's firmly in your target market, charging well in excess of $49/month, and delivering three static websites in the past month for clients, one being the University of Leiden. I understand very well what you're trying to solve, and pointed out the places where your product is superior. Right now, it feels like your product is heavily slanted towards developers. And it feels like that's who you're asking to pay for the service. My clients couldn't careless about API proxying, deeper Git integration, or auto-building any branch to unique deploy URLs, even if that makes sense to me as a developer. They're not going to be working with those things. They wouldn't accept me saddling a $49/month charge upon them AFTER I've delivered the project and all they want to do is run a one-off script to deploy the website for minor updates to content over the next 3-5 years. What I'm saying is, yes, Netlify makes it easier and eliminates servers for pre-rendering and form submissions. That fits the SaaS model. But I think you're missing out on another part of the market: the people willing to pay a one-off license per site for your deployment software, i.e., setup S3/CloudFront, SSL with Let's Encrypt, domain handling, a nice deployment pre-processing pipeline, preview past versions locally in browser, etc. in an automated fashion and then allow them to push updates with one command. That's what my clients want, and that's what I deliver to them. They'd be willing to pay $49, once, for that script (folded into their invoice). |
The people that pay for the $49/$349 or $1000 are typically clients with projects that are not simple "static sites". Typically these sites includes content management and requires a build to run everytime and editor triggers a change. They're often .com's for companies that always ends up needing proxying because they have legacy apps behind different URL
Other clients have in-house dev teams and run their main web application on Netlify with constant updates in different branches and pull requests, and Netlify lets them collabarote across these.
Again others just have large global presences and care about having someone to escalate to if there's a problem with a launch, any uptime, certificate, configuration issue or the like.
Those are the one that needs and use our Pro/Global/Enterprise tiers.