[kybernetyk]

This. It's the "developers trying to sell products to other developers" conundrum. You know the development workflow. You came up with a great tool to increase productivity for developers. You set a low price of $50. And yet no one is going to buy it because "lol I could do this in a weekend".

Developers are cheap bastards (I'm still fighting over whether I should shell our $99 for Panic's Nova editor or not - even though it would be the perfect fit for my editing needs. But I'm a cheap bastard and VIM is good enough so...)

I guess "indiehackers" aren't much different. Only maybe they have less disposable income that old fart developers?

[throw10920]

Developers are also the kind of people who will refuse to pay money for or use proprietary software on principle - regardless of price! I constantly see people on HN suggesting (often highly immature) open-source alternatives to free or reasonably-priced proprietary software for no other reason than the fact that it's open-source.

Just like being an author, it's hard to make a living writing (books : software) unless you're either very skilled+lucky (Brandon Sanderson : Jetbrains) or sell to companies (HR/marketing position at a company : either making B2B software or working for a software company yourself).

[lallysingh]

Proprietary software risks lock in. Most developers experience the pain of that eventually.

You can use that stuff safely if you can survive losing it and continue reasonably (e.g., switch to Emacs or Jenkins). If you can't, it's a huge risk.

[throw10920]

> Proprietary software risks lock in.

This has nothing to do with proprietary software. Sublime Text, for instance, is proprietary software, but there is zero lock-in because it operates on plain text files. This argument is invalid.

[hahajk]

Furthermore, getting new software approved at a big corp can already be a hassle. But at all the places I've worked, seeking approvals for and opening up a funding line to pay for a license increases the hassle 10x.

[throw10920]

This has nothing to do with selling to individual developer-users.

[andrew_]

> Developers are cheap bastards

Am a developer and can confirm. I am a cheap bastard.

[emadabdulrahim]

This made me chuckle.

[lallysingh]

Developers underestimate how much work it takes to build things. For large stuff like IDEs, developers buy them and pay good money.

But yeah many developers look at prices badly. Will it save you more time/effort than the price? That's the threshold. Not some abstract idea of "worth the money."

[8n4vidtmkvmk]

ya.. a lot of these things are no brainers when you do the math. let's say i believe myself to be worth $100/hr and the software costs $50. can i build this in 30 minutes? hmm, i might be able to set up an empty project in 30 minutes.

[nmfisher]

I actually totally disagree with this. Developer tools are probably one of the easier segments to tackle because technical people 1) like trying new things and 2) often have company credit cards that don’t have to justify expenses.

[tlarkworthy]

Having worked in a successful developer tool (Firebase) this is utter nonsense. Developers are super cheap. People are ringing their hands over the 10 dollar per month copilot price for the world beat ai to help you code for Christ' sake.

[giardini]

... wringing their hands...

[adversaryIdiot]

yeah, and i plan on cancling my co-pilot subscription after the free trial

[giardini]

I'm not gonna do it! Someone else, please!8-))

[vlaskovits]

Uh......

Dev tools is one of the hardest segments to tackle.

Developers are notoriously cheap and every one of your developer-customers (falsely) assumes they could build a better version of your product over the weekend.

Developers will always compare your fully-featured, supported product to a shitbag OSS "free" alternative they found on GitHub (abandoned by some dude who tried to build a clone to a real product over the weekend and then discovered that is actually not possible...)

Developers will take great pains to overstate the case for building internal tools as it gives them more control and embededness in an organization.

Selling to developers is not for the faint of heart -- and ironically, takes MORE* sales skill than, say, selling marketing automation tools to marketers. No sales/marketer will say to you on a sales call:

"You know, I could build that if I wanted to...."

First-time entrepreneurs who happen to be developers often attack devtools because that is all they know.

*This is a weird self-esteem insecurity tic.

[mrbuttons454]

Nova is fantastic, btw

[kybernetyk]

I know. But their "$99 then $49/year" price is somehow off putting to me. Now I know this is stupid. Because before this model was en vogue I bought a lot of software (Omnifocus for example, or 1Password) and I bought paid upgrades every time there were some available. But this "you just pay $49/year to get upgrades" is somehow psychologically completely different for me. I know it's pretty much the same - but the subscription-feeling of it is off putting. Can't really explain it - just a dumb me thing I guess.

[jamie_ca]

Honestly, I think Agenda [1] had a brilliant take on this - a free version with baseline features, and a continual improvement of "Pro" features. Pay for it once, get all the current pro features plus whatever they release as pro in the next year. Then your feature set freezes at that level, and whenever you feel like they've added something worth the pro price point, you pay for the catch-up and another year.

They get to maintain one version of the app, with a reasonable number of feature flags, and users get to pay when something adds value.

[1] https://agenda.com/