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by melony 1678 days ago
The only ones you alienate are penny pinching HN users.
1 comments

I hope you are being sarcastic. I’ll give two examples: about twice a year I need to (a) send something for signature digitally or (b) send something digitally to a fax number. If I can pay $2-10 for this, I will in a heartbeat and move forward. But it seems every provider wants me to sign up for a monthly plan as if these irregular needs will magically become regular. So instead I waste a ton of time driving to the library to use their fax machine or mailing a paper copy of my signature to someone. I would rather pay a premium to use something every now and then, but I won’t agree to subscribe. If these ever became more than irregular needs I would gladly subscribe to get a lower price per use.

I bet there are orders of magnitude more users like me, the sum of which would be a sizeable market. But instead every SAAS provider is focused only on regular monthly users, ignoring this shadow market. But it is a false dichotomy. Make it highly profitable but not scalable to do Pay as you Go, and then less profitable but scalable to go monthly. Do both.