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by andrewguenther 1884 days ago
I'm not skeptical at all the people would pay for this. I worked on a cloud browser for seven years, there's a bunch of different market needs for this stuff. But $30-50 feels really high. We got feedback from enterprise customers that they were looking in the $5-15 range per user per month. That said, we pushed the security angle much more than performance, so the dynamics are a bit different.

Congrats on all the work here. Browser streaming isn't easy stuff!

3 comments

But $30-50 feels really high.

Pricing is a good example of something that most people are intuitively wrong about. What you think people will pay and what people actually will pay are rarely congruent, and most of the time people guess far too low. Literally every bit of advice and writing about pricing I've ever read boils down to "Charge more than what feels right; you'll be surprised at how high you can go before you lose customers."

Also, 50% of the highest-paying customers bring more than 50%of the revenue, by definition. Often much more.

Apple keeps applying this strategy since 1990s.

Tesla bootstrapped itself off $80k cars, and only now is expanding to the "reasonable" $30k market segment.

You may not need everyone jump on your service just yet, you can start with the most needing it who are moneyed. Then you expand, economies of scale kick in, and you can introduce lower and lower price tiers, and people enjoy falling prices and getting a bargain.

Puffin Browser is $2/month or $20/year for an individual. $15/month is way too high.
Enterprise might say $5-15, but someone who controls their own budget and spends all day in the browser would easily pay more. Freelancers. Bootstrappers. The same way people pay for an IDE.
I agree they would pay more, but I'm still skeptical of $30-50. As I mentioned in a comment below, why limit it to the browser? If you've got all these resources just offer a full VDI which more typically prices in this ballpark.
> If you've got all these resources just offer a full VDI which more typically prices in this ballpark.

Perhaps their solution has something specific to the browser which allows them to do it really fast and cost effective. Eg. Sending just diffs of DOM to the client.

Maybe people are “enjoying” the Web in the way they consume $30-50/mo products, as if it is some fine movies or books, justifying the price.
With a VDI, you're stuck managing windows.
That would actually be a cool service: Mighty, but for running a hosted IDE.