| It's funny running into this article for the first time. I've been using Tarsnap for a couple years now for our SAAS. After receiving the first month's email receipt for $0.25, I replied: saying something along the lines of "damn this is cheap! you could charge a lot more!". No reply of course. He's probably heard it a million times already. Having gained a bit more experience with pricing our own product this past year, I think it might not be as simple as "he sucks at business". Here's some potential (and highly speculative) reasons: - He may not need the money. He's got a respectable day job that pays well. - Higher prices mean less value for your users. Less value means less geek cred/love. I'd recommend Tarsnap to a fellow techie in a heartbeat. I probably wouldn't if it started at $100/mo. - Higher prices mean you sell to a different audience with more responsibility. High touch sales, support email threads with 10+ folks all demanding different things, handling exotic types of billing, etc. Many devs don't like dealing with this kind of stuff. - What if he's doing this as a lead gen for his consulting services? |
I do hear that quite a bit, but I also hear a lot of people saying that Tarsnap is too expensive. I figure that as long as I have complaints coming from both directions I'm probably somewhere close to the right price. ;-)
Sorry about not replying -- I usually do reply even to emails like that, but it's possible that I was overwhelmed with email at the time.
- Higher prices mean less value for your users. Less value means less geek cred/love. I'd recommend Tarsnap to a fellow techie in a heartbeat. I probably wouldn't if it started at $100/mo.
This is part of it -- Tarsnap wouldn't get nearly as much free advertising if its prices were higher.
- What if he's doing this as a lead gen for his consulting services?
No, I'm not doing that. In fact I do very little consulting these days.