[remote_phone]

Companies need to make money. People need to be paid good wages. I hate how people complain about paying for things that are useful for them. Most people expect things for free or very cheap and I blame the Apple App Store for that. Everyone expects their software to be free or $0.99 nowadays. Even $3.99 is considered too expensive. All this is doing is creating deflation in our industry. Software should be expensive. We don’t need unions, we need to change people’s expectations on how much software costs and not drive down prices to $0.

[awwstn]

I agree with you. I subscribe to @Patio11's philosophy of "charge more".

But, I think there's a massive amount of opacity and sneakiness in SaaS pricing. If you read Postman's announcement post yesterday, you easily could've walked away expecting just a 50% price increase when in reality you may have been getting bumped from $8/user/mo. to $24/user/mo. because of the new rate limits.

Companies should charge more, but they should defend the merits of those decisions, not try to slip them under the rug.

Edit: also, I'm not sure your claim that software is getting less expensive holds up. I can say for sure that business software has significantly outpaced inflation in its price increases, but our research on this didn't cover consumer: https://capiche.com/e/software-inflation-rate

[Edmond]

The problem products like Postman and others (Elastic et al) are having is one of "have your cake and eat it too".

For the past decade a number products rode the free software love boat, the gambit was to get organic community love and free marketing and hope that it somehow translates into VC endorsed financial rewards. This does not seem to be working out as expected.

[satyrnein]

Of course we should drive down prices to $0, that's practically the definition of progress. Our whole value proposition is the ability to offer more for less.

People should use Postman if the premium price is worth it to them over Insomnia, Postwoman, etc, not out of some sense of obligation. A business full of expensive developers is not a charity.

[xwowsersx]

> Software should be expensive.

Why? Shouldn't the price of software be determined by the equilibrium of supply and demand? Or are you suggesting there's far more demand than supply?

[themagician]

It’s a hard realization for many that software will become like any other industry and that software jobs are just as at risk as others to automation and late stage capitalism.

You always think of yourself as the exception, until it comes for you.

[ttul]

Software developers should realize that as their salaries increase (and I'm not even talking about FAANG), companies that are selling SaaS and software solutions have to charge more in order to continue doing the fine work of developing stuff.

At the same time, investors are demanding that their portfolio companies begin to take profits after years of blasting away money in favor of growth-at-all-costs.

In my SaaS company, we have also increased prices and changed product packaging to generate greater profits in the past year. Customers hate it, but if they could see inside the company, they would see as I do that the changes are necessary to remain in business.

[fxleach]

"...years of blasting away money in favor of growth-at-all-costs" - Maybe those companies should go under?

[jjeaff]

They should go under rather than just raise prices? Seems logical to try raising prices first.

[fxleach]

Agreed, just funny how the commenter says they're blasting away money for years in one sentence but then seems to try and justify the price increase in the next.

[josephorjoe]

"Customers hate it, but" <-- remember that for the company post mortem.

[fxleach]

No one is complaining that Postman isn't free for business. Take another look at the article. In summation: "So, for more money, you get fewer users, API calls, documentation views, custom domains, and integrations."

[maxsilver]

> I hate how people complain about paying for things that are useful for them. . Software should be expensive. We don’t need unions, we need to change people’s expectations on how much software costs and not drive down prices to $0.

Hard disagree with absolutely all of this.

All people need unions, literally every human on earth deserves a union. If you work for anyone, anywhere, doing anything, you deserve a union. Any employee without a union is in an inherently unfair position, and is being taken advantage of.

Software should be cheap. Software should be as low cost as possible, without committing some sort of evil (sacrificing quality or working conditions or polluting, etc).

And a major goal of all humanity should be to drive the cost of all things as close to $0 as possible, without hurting anyone or doing anything unethical. We should be intentionally aiming for zero scarcity in all things, that's what progress is.

Making software some sort of expensive luxury that only certain people can afford is terrible, and that logic being applied to everything (from housing, to education, to healthcare and more) is the biggest problem in society today.

[satyrnein]

I mostly agree and wrote a similar sibling comment. However, I'm still trying to grasp your comments regarding unions.

Would that mean that nobody can have individual salary negotiations? Your colleagues can vote that you have to strike? Are VPs and Directors in the same union with line level employees, or what are the "sides"?

I've never worked in a union environment, so this might be an unintentional caricature.

[jka]

Software doesn't have to be written by companies - see: GNU/Linux, vim, Python, VLC, Jitsi... and the list could continue for a long time.

People do have non-financial motivations for developing software (accessibility improvements, creating community value, solving their own personal challenges or problems).

If you think this trend is going to change, I'd suspect (but can't guarantee of course) that you might be mistaken. Costs are going to continue to reduce, and software is going to continue to be easier to build, distribute and replicate; meanwhile new generations of developers will continue to expand the pool of participants in our software communities.

There are huge parts of the world now coming online which will simply not want (or be able) to pay the kind of salaries or fees that enterprises and software developers have been accustomed to receiving for their services.

Is it unreasonable to expect good software for low cost (or even free) if we have ample people, motivation, and ability to produce it, and if we enjoy a worldwide net benefit from it as a result?

The way I'd rephrase the situation is: how are investors and enterprise incumbents going to adjust if this trend continues, and what's a good way to ensure that as an individual you can participate and thrive in a world if this continues to happen.

A hint/suggestion from my biased opinion is that social safety nets are important, and nations that provide those for their communities will free up developers and resources to build the software and services that everyone really needs, rather than having developers spend their time on (yes high-paid, yes comfortable -- but broadly beneficial towards executives-and-investor class rather than community or nation) work.

[endorphone]

The belief that software should be free long precedes any app stores ("I paid $N for the computer, why should I have to pay for the software‽‽‽"). It's especially weird to peg the blame on the Apple App Store given that it has managed to get people to spend billions on flippant stuff they would never have paid a penny for.

In the pre-app store days it was incredibly difficult to make a business selling software if you weren't one of the very large players.

Having said that, to address-

"Companies need to make money. People need to be paid good wages"

-this would be fair retort if it was a new service charging {X}. If it isn't, the counter-argument is that they were undercharging to prevent competitors from making money / paying good wages.

I'm neither here nor there on this, but it certainly isn't a moral thing that you're holding it as. People are annoyed that they're going to have to pay more for less. Eh.

[awinder]

I mean you’re right, companies need to make money, but it’s not the users fault. The play postman made (and a lot of other companies) was that they could make up for low profit margins with high/increasing user growth indefinitely. That’s how you get high valuations with low current profit. When companies have to quickly & drastically make large pricing changes, they’re implicitly telling you that the state of affairs at that company is that they need to make money now on current users.

Companies have obligations to build real businesses & products that are based on realistic & solid plans from day 1. And they need to adjust those plans when things change, but by building a real company from day 1, those changes should be realistic and measured.