[RicDan]

I've always wanted to know: Are people actually interested in more granular pricing options? I.e. give me 10x more tokens but miss me with that image generation, or give me more bandwith but still only one domain. It feels like nowadays 80% of stuff in pricing packages isn't really used by people paying for it, but they can't opt out of it...

[grues-dinner]

I would be except that the feeling seems to be that you get screwed either way:

* Tiers (aka new car model): something is always strategically left out of the otherwise "ideal" tier to force you up a level, even though you won't use most of the other options. Sometimes the "nearly there" tier is artificially expensive to drive you to the higher tier - the same trick as a medium coffee being only fractionally cheaper than the large. Sometimes there's a ratchet where you can upgrade but a downgrade is a huge hassle and/or penalised.

* A la carte (aka the car/dishwasher spares model): every option feels expensive and you feel like you're being nickel-and-dimed and you know the marginal cost of providing that option was small

* Top-up (aka the phone minutes model): top ups are obscenely expensive and are either a punishment for being "cheap" (i.e. prudent) or act as a threat to push you up a tier in the first place

Add a few special offers, points, cost sinks and lock-ins (especially where hardware is involved), rewards and all that crap here and there to muddy it up to prevent a clear comparison being made. I basically assume all subscriptions are doing some kind of mind-games or scam with every little aspect of the pricing.

Not that a fair price can't be any of the above options. The vendor has to cover the overheads somewhere!

[ethan_smith]

Research suggests consumers actually prefer fewer choices - the "paradox of choice" shows that highly granular pricing often increases decision paralysis and cart abandonment rather than improving conversion rates.

[sangeeth96]

I too think that has some weight to it, but there's no reason we can't have both.

Before the LLM boom, I wouldn't have thought twice about having fine-grained options, but since then, every SaaS company on the face of the planet has forcibly bundled ChatGPT and its ilk and jacked up prices — LLM crap I don't use and don't plan to use in its current state.

Similarly, many might wanna go initially with a simple option but later, based on their usage, whittle it down to the few that are relevant, save money in the process, and commit to the company.

[nilamo]

Adobe's subscription is so bad for this.

Want a single product? It's only available for annual subscriptions for hundreds of dollars, with huge cancellation fees (the rest of the year). But it comes with a dozen or so products you'll never download lol

[Swizec]

> Are people actually interested in more granular pricing options?

Yes. Welcome to the world of committed contracts, call-us pricing, and “partnerships. At many-zeroes scale every cent is negotiated to the point that you’ll get different pricing based on the hour of the day that you make the API call.

[bookofjoe]

Still waiting for micropayments after 50 years...