[danpalmer]

Basecamp is also the same price. SaaS pricing is all made up. If you're a high-margin SaaS company the idea of spending $40k/yr for this seems... fine. If you're a small business, or you operate on retail margins, you'd laugh them out of the room, and rightly so as there are great tools at far better prices.

The idea of every service charging $15-30 per user per month is a myth perpetuated by companies who themselves have that budget to spend out of their VC funding.

[colechristensen]

SaaS pricing is so weird because for so many things because the cost to run per user is almost zero, but then the company is spending tens or hundreds of millions of dollars developing the software.

Evernote once had a valuation of nearly 2 billion, and like 400 employees.

I replaced it with Obsidian which gives me more value and it was mostly just made by two people, now they list 9 employees, one of whom is the office cat.

Each company for me was just syncing some text and maybe a few larger things like PDFs. The actual cost of that is pennies per year.

[imranhou]

Postman is one example - imagine spending 30 bucks a month on a tool that lets you call APIs.

[ndndjdjdn]

I am of the opinion that curl is better simply because you are already in the command line. You can use vim fzf or bash with it. Also curl will be the same on the day you die.

[danpalmer]

Not only this, but it's worse for the fact that it's in a web browser, vs just being a native app that could be sold once, or at least with a yearly subscription for maintenance at 1/10th of the cost.

The problem is that they realised they could make more money by trying to lock companies into a proprietary API definition platform – they want the design, testing, QA, documentation, etc, all to happen in Postman.

[rty32]

I mean, locking users into your platform is one of the most common ways companies make money and keep making money. And that works.

If you want an obvious example, look at Apple.

[danpalmer]

I guess my point here is that being closed is directly against the goals of the technology. Apple's lock-in is either a side effect or potentially even beneficial to their goal of providing a good phone/computer/whatever, whereas commercial lock-in is fairly clearly opposed to creating an API ecosystem that is usable across a range of technologies/consumers/etc.

[bearjaws]

Especially when Bruno exists. The idea that people are hosting their entire API knowledge base in a third party server instead of their git repo...

https://github.com/usebruno/bruno

[rtpg]

Only $15-$30 per user! What a deal!

Somebody hasn't experienced Salesforce pricing

[prmoustache]

SaaS pricing is based on how captive the customers can be.

I am not a fan of Atlassian products, but what retains them the most aren't the qualities of the products themselves nowadays, but the integration and plugin ecosystem + the difficulty of exporting the data. Nearly every tool has an integration for either jira, bitbucket, confluence, or all of them. And you would usually dismiss any tool that doesn't have them if you are an Atlassian customer already. Once you have set that up but decide you are paying too much for it, good luck good luck telling your users they will surely lose data/formatting/integrations when migrating to some other tool. This + having to train people to use another tool while companies usually take for granted that their users won't get lost in Jira (which really isn't true).

Ultimately it becomes more of a tax than a price.