[metageek]

It's potentially a lot of extra work. If your site's UI is heavy on the AJAX, a non-JS option basically means writing a completely separate UI.

Explain to an investor, "We don't have features X, Y, and Z, which our competitors have, because we were spending time maintaining the non-JS version for 2% of our user base.".

[jamesaguilar]

Also, non-Javascript Luddism may correlate with other forms of Luddism. For example, non-eCommerce Luddism or non-ads-clicking Luddism. So it might be that you're doing all that work for people who are not going to benefit your bottom line as much as the typical user.

It's something each business probably has to measure for itself, but the people saying, "I don't see what the big deal is," just aren't looking hard enough.

[wtallis]

I don't think Luddites are savvy enough to figure out how to disable JavaScript, and most of the people who disable JavaScript are probably at the opposite end of the spectrum: people who know the privacy and security risks of JavaScript, and who would rather a website be obviously broken on the first visit than have it be subversively annoying and ad-laden.

If an e-commerce site won't let me get to their product list and see prices without cookies and Javascript, I won't buy from them if there are alternatives. There's no real justification for making a simple online store 100% AJAX for even the most basic features, so the sites that do that don't get my money. (They probably don't do to well from an SEO perspective, either.)

Blogs that require cookies and JavaScript before they'll show their content are obviously more concerned with spamming me than being of use to me, so they also get closed immediately.