[mananaysiempre]

> We’ll keep prosumer entry points around mainly because I think Colin will go nuclear if I suggest otherwise

So that kind of thinking is why every second thing I’d like to hobby-use is priced as a free trial with one missing crucial feature, then $300/mo. It might be rational even, but I’d expect the actual utility does have a negative term for I’m going to hate your service with a fiery passion (and probably also you) if you do this. (Cf recent discussion on customer “support” chatbots.)

> let’s boil it down to a simple intuition: people getting more value out of Tarsnap should pay more for it

That’s basically the definition of a discriminating monopolist and what gets you airline-style inscrutable pricing and the SSO tax, isn’t it? Again, screw that noise. I can’t really motivate this well, but to a first approximation I (a) dislike seeing pricing disconnected from costs; (b) cannot resist the urge to minmax thus cannot help disliking people who make it more difficult than it absolutely needs to be. Note that this does not contradict TFA’s conclusions, unlike the previous point, and another argument in it is actually very close to (b); it’s this specific argument for the conclusion that I’m disagreeing with.

> You know how every ToS ever has the “You are not allowed to use $SERVICE for illegal purposes” despite there being no convenient way to enforce that in computer code?

Yes I do, and I feel basically the same way about that as I do about stupid laws everybody tacitly agrees not to enforce: it erodes the whole edifice of a law/bureaucracy-based Enlightenment society. If you’ve put it in writing and not planning to sue over violations, you’re lying to me.

[edanm]

> So that kind of thinking is why every second thing I’d like to hobby-use is priced as a free trial with one missing crucial feature, then $300/mo.

You seem to be under the impression that if people didn't charge so much money, you'd have stuff cheaper. That's not true - what would actually happen is you'd just have less stuff, because people wouldn't build them in the first place.

If someone can afford to create software and run it while charging far less than it's worth for your benefit, then wonderful, but it boggles my mind that you somehow think people owe you this service. Do you also expect people to go into their office and tell their boss "actually, I don't need such a high salary, go ahead and lower it"?

> That’s basically the definition of a discriminating monopolist and what gets you airline-style inscrutable pricing and the SSO tax, isn’t it?

You think it's discrimination to ask people who use more of a service to pay more? You think if an enterprise is using something for business purposes it's not ok to ask them to pay more for something than if a user is using it for hobby purposes?

> If you’ve put it in writing and not planning to sue over violations, you’re lying to me.

That seems both unworkable and kind of ridiculous. You're basically advocating for a "zero context" policy around contracts, in which people don't have any choice whether to sue someone. Even if it's a minor violation that isn't worth it to sue over, or a violation that they decide is ok for them in that context. Why would that be better than the alternative?

[rcxdude]

>You think it's discrimination to ask people who use more of a service to pay more?

The point is "enterprise" plans are generally much more expensive relative to the use of the service or the extra feature (the most common extra features like SSO and auditing are generally cheap to provide, both in terms of resource usage and cost to implement and support). So while they may use the service more they wind up paying proportionally much more for it (the assumption being that theu are getting much more value from the core features). This is price discrimination, whether monopolistic or not (which is absolutely rife in B2B products). I'm not going to comment on the morality of it, but it can be very frustrating if you don't fit into the buckets the pricing structure assumes (the other thing that is common in B2B that pisses me off is "call us for a quote". Generally a lot of tools seem to have an overinflated sense of how much value they are providing me, but I am a little unusual in that I use a lot of different tools but not heavily, being a generalist in a small startup)

[cdogl]

This is why AWS took over the world. It’s the opposite: WYSIWYG vis a vis pricing. I’m not sure why so few other developer oriented SaaS services follow their lead.

[rcxdude]

It is convenient but AWS does employ another common tactic: the easily accessible prices are the highest ones. If you're a customer of any significant size you are being screwed if you are not negotiating a discount (IMO cloud is extremely expensive anyway, so if you have very high duty cycle usage you would be better off using something other than cloud).

[mananaysiempre]

>> That’s basically the definition of a discriminating monopolist and what gets you airline-style inscrutable pricing and the SSO tax, isn’t it?

> You think it's discrimination to ask people who use more of a service to pay more?

Terminology confusion. In microeconomics, a “discriminating monopolist” is one who engages in “price discrimination”, that is to say providing the same service to everybody but charging each customer as much as they are willing to pay for it. This has nothing to do with the social justice usage of “discrimination” (except in the broadest sense of discriminating one kind of thing from another and acting on the result).

> You think if an enterprise is using something for business purposes it's not ok to ask them to pay more for something than if a user is using it for hobby purposes?

Insofar as they receive the same service (no or the same SLA, etc), or even insofar as the markup for the latter case is disproportionate to the actual costs, I think it is bullshit to do it. How much bullshit is acceptable, both in life and in selling technical services, is to be decided (certainly a nonzero amount), but at the very least I think it should cost the service provider some measure of trust and thus create a preference towards providers that don’t do it.

In the case described, all of this is not that huge; my strong reaction was mainly to TFA going from “fair” pricing to price discrimination.

>> If you’ve put it in writing and not planning to sue over violations, you’re lying to me.

> You're basically advocating for a "zero context" policy around contracts, in which people don't have any choice whether to sue someone.

I put it in absolute terms myself, so I guess I deserve this a bit, but still, no, that’s not what I was trying to advocate. Note that the original article was talking about putting in a clause the service provider would not make the slightest effort to enforce or would even be completely unable to.

Consider the law example I also gave: it’s one thing to allow for some discretion from a prosecutor; it’s another for people to know that nobody was ever convicted of a crime that’s technically on the books. I understand this is a slippery slope argument and those are always suspect, but I think it’s fair to say that this kind of neglect for one piece of law does tend to spread to other parts of it, at least when people are doing it consciously and not because they’re unaware of legal arcana.

In contracts, the situation is somewhat better because the punishment is not that dire. It is also worse because usually the only explicit penalty is termination of service, so in essence you have a bunch of rules which are all nominally enforced the same way except the provider will enforce some of them and won’t enforce others, at its discretion. (Naturally, I also think that the very common arbitrary no-recourse termination clause is completely asininine. At the very least, I never feel safe to rely on a service that uses one.)

> You seem to be under the impression that if people didn't charge so much money, you'd have stuff cheaper. That's not true - what would actually happen is you'd just have less stuff, because people wouldn't build them in the first place.

You are to some extent right, of course. To some extent, though, some of my experiences with price discrimination (see above) tell me you’re also kind of wrong.

For example, I can’t recall an airline or railway that on transitioning from all refundable tickets to a split of non-refundable and refundable tickets ended up making non-refundable tickets measurably cheaper (in the long run) or pricing refundable ones in a way that’d correspond to any realistic fraction of refunds. Similarly, increasing limits on luggage never seem to make things any cheaper. That looks like price discrimination, not adjusting for costs or anything related to actual costs.

The SSO thing, as another example, looks the same to me, and even actual service operators in this forum have said that it actually is. Granted, I’ve heard horror stories about the integration and support costs, but if even a couple of operators settled on a single very strictly defined subset of SAML, OAuth or whatnot, saying it’s their way or the highway, the implementations and the integration consultants would likely come. It’s just that nobody has the incentive to, and systems remain insecure as a result.

> If someone can afford to create software and run it while charging far less than it's worth for your benefit, then wonderful, but it boggles my mind that you somehow think people owe you this service.

First off, TFA was advocating for eliminating (and settling for deemphasising) a class of service that was at the time manifestly cost-effective to operate (though could become less so after scaling up).

Second, to a degree, yeah, I’d actually be happier with a service that provides no free or severly subsidized options at all than with one that has a free option, then a huge cliff, then a heavy-profit-earner option.

If this means a world where there are no accessible services of that kind, sure, because except for very costly services such a world is unstable: at some point somebody will build an accessible alternative, as long as they are not pushed out by a subsidized free option. This applies to tech-oriented services first of all, although when the expertise gap between wanting and building is larger such situations do sometimes persist (CAD, CAT/TM, arguably photo editors).

[sokoloff]

> an airline or railway that on transitioning from all refundable tickets to a split of non-refundable and refundable tickets ended up making non-refundable tickets measurably cheaper (in the long run)

I don’t know how long is the long run for you, but Delta is right now offering RT to Vegas for $444 non-refundable and $638 refundable. I didn’t go check all the other carriers, but I definitely recall tickets with more flexibility (sometimes including refundable, other times creditable) being sold at higher prices than less flexible tickets.

As a buyer that makes sense to me; it costs money to provide flexibility; it’s worth it to some buyers but not all, so buyers can opt into the level of flexibility that matches their preferences.

[mananaysiempre]

Not what I was talking about.

Some airlines in my memory went from only having refundable tickets to having both types, and for some reason the price of the nonrefundable ones after the change ends up being about the same as the price of the (refundable) ones before that.

Also, well, I don’t know what Delta does—for some airlines, the advertising term “flexible” means some sort of option to change your flight as well as one to refund the ticket, being a tier above “refundable”—but if the buyer requesting a refund is the only possible cost, we should have roughly $444 = $638 / [1 - P(refund)], whereby P(refund) = 30%, and that feels ridiculously high. Not implausibly high (I’m used to a difference of 2x or more), but high enough that I’m dubious.

[sokoloff]

> for some reason the price of the nonrefundable ones after the change ends up being about the same as the price of the (refundable) ones before that.

Was this over a long enough period where inflation reduced the value of the nominal currency and where jet fuel prices and costs of financing their fleet could have risen significantly?

[zvorygin]

As someone who flies a lot on his own dime, inscrutable airline pricing ends up being good.

It means I can always get a seat, I just have to pay more. It means businesses subsidize mine and everyone else’s flights.

When I’m travelling the world and have to use a train system with fixed prices, I don’t like that I have to book many days in advance or else the tickets are sold out. Just raise the price! Let the rich pay double so it’s cheaper for everyone else, and anyone who _really needs_ to use the service can weigh the costs and decide to pay more.

[Aeolun]

You mean everyone who really needs the service will never get it because the rich will always pay more?

Must be nice to always have the money to pay more to get service immediately, but I don't think that's something we should strive for.

[abofh]

Every saas does this, really. You want sso or an audit trail? 10x costs! Doesn't matter that they didn't need to add code and that it's even less for the vendor to manage, you have self selected as an Enterprise, pay Enterprise pricing.

[dools]

So go through life hating people who do this and being poor because you don’t.