I actually thought the 10k price tag was extremely reasonable based on the article write up. Yes it's beyond most personal users - but that is not out of the reach of even a small group of people (be it education, maker spaces, or small business). I would have expected an extra 0 on the price tag.
Anecdata: I found this device interesting when I first saw it announced. I kinda want one. I think I saw it at a $250 price point, and it was already out of my ballpark. If I was buying it for business use, it'd be justifiable at higher.
For personal use, you already priced me out, so who cares? For hobbyists outside of the Silicon Valley-tier of salary, you've already priced most home buyers out, I could spend $300 on TinyPilot, or I could spend $300 on an entirely new server.
Agreed. Given it's a nascent product with few users/retailers and low barrier to entry (there are at least a dozen similar scan-code-for-punch-card apps), it sounds like a pure talent buy. And $10MM sounds high if that is truly the case.
I think the price also reflects though that they don't actually need to sell this to anyone, it's already paid for itself in improving internal process. The people it's mainly aimed at using campfire, I'd imagine would pay for it whether it was 99 cents or $10 if it is useful in improving business process.
I was thinking in terms of B2C economics... $99 for 300 MAU would be crazy for a consumer startup product. $99 for 300 internal business users is completely different.
I'm sure they justify it with a pile of evidence that people are willing to pay that much. Folks here are probably just not the target market (would just use OBS and hack together whatever, or be confused about what value having our face on top of our slides would even have...).
I don't know about the price but you are not wrong. A lot of naysayers just don't know how to use it well enough in their workflow. This is definitely the future of the industry though.
I don't see a clear market segmentation. Is it for 10 users or 10,000?
Five bucks per person-month doesn't make sense in either market. It's $5 too much for people building their business on Drive and Evernote. It's too little for 10,000 screen organizations...they know you will go broke. And then there's an asterisk on the free plan and another deal for students, so I'm left wondering if it's worth figuring out the value proposition before I think about learning how to use it.
If it was an enterprise product, it might make sense but that's not live fast. die young, and leave a good looking corpse business strategy compatible. Students probably don't need mobile task updates for group projects. In the middle, though, there are good user stories and price points. $400 per month for up to 20 users...that sounds like a way to qualify businesses and reduce the number of sales.
And if you can't make the bottom line $5000 per year better for 2000 companies, then it's time to throw in the towel.
How many people are really able to spend that kind of money on Fusion 360? Fair enough if you are one of the lucky few with thousands of pounds worth of CNC equipment in your garage.
I'm afraid this will be one of those clever MBA stories where someone comes in and looks at the number of personal users and thinks, gosh damn, if only we could monetise half of them at $800 we'd be rolling in it.
I guess they are lucky that people can't just do what they did with Photoshop in the 90s; yay for the cloud.
I had the same negative reaction to the price, but that's as a hobbyist/explorer. Given the number of people launching products that sit on top of ChatGPT, I understand the high price point, as much as any pre-trained large language model can be said to 'understand' something.
It is expensive, but you're being overly critical I think. There are a lot of paid tools in the $1500 - $5000 range just for a single user and some cost even more for deployment. If it had cost $10k I would call it insane, but $3,600 isn't too crazy.
They are targeting a niche who is likely more willing to pay for this than average internet user. I only ever see long twitter threads from VCs, developer advocates, CEOs, startup people who spend $$$ on productivity software to optimize their life, etc.
It's fine if it is $100 from 10 customers than $5 from 1000.
The next tier is 25 users for $2500. So it went from $1 per user to $100 per user.
JIRA is, by its nature, a multi-user software. The $10 for 10 users is clearly engineered to get small teams to commit to using it and then squeeze them when they grow.
That is a reasonable strategy for what is a product for companies i.e. enterprise software.
It wouldn't work for a product that is primarily for people who are paying from their own pocket, like, I assume, everyone here that expressed the want for a self-hosted version.
I don't agree that $90/user/month is unreasonable in every context. Yeah it's probably too much for consumers but honestly the consumer need for this tool seems pretty niche to me. It's also probably too much for large enterprises where you'd have a lot of people who want the tool, but they're probably going to either build it themselves or pay $$$$ for big lame ETL tools.
For mid-sized companies though that could be a bargain. I worked on a data migration project at a company with <100 people and <5 engineers where we had to hack together our own data-diff tools and this would have been a bargain.
It also seems like it’s atypical to offer $10K. Maybe the whole thing is an atypical situation and we should trust the article vs. our well-honed software engineer intuition?
This is right on. When I saw the pricing I had major sticker shock but after looking at this post and seeing the homepage it seems like certain organizations might find value in it.
However it's clear we are years and years of development away from this actually being relevant over conventional tools. It really seems like were just giving money to Microsoft for developing what will ultimately just be internal patents going towards consumer or business facing products in the nearer term.
For non-technical purchasers, it makes sense to price by the value the organisation will get out of the tool. However for tools that technical users are involved in you have to fight against the "I could build this myself" factor.
There are lots of tools that are basically CRUD apps, or maybe CRUD with a chat interface in this case, which are fundamentally straightforward to build a first-pass version of. I'm sure the product here is far better than a first-pass version, but it's an uphill battle to justify that when the pricing is on the value to the user, rather than based on the cost to build.
Another complicating factor for this market in particular is that there are often two types of users: regular and infrequent. In my experience tools like this would be used heavily by the engineering team, but there was value in having everyone in the org have access to the tool. There may be 10x the number of non-engineers, but they're often worth 1/10th or less to have on the platform. Each person isn't worth having by themselves but having everyone there is worth something. Nickel-and-diming customers on the basis of lots of users who rarely use the platform isn't great.
Edit: also, don't have a pricing page with no pricing on it.
reply