One that drives sales in the retail sector. “Do I have to be online in order to accept scans/payments/etc?”. If I’m a small business owner and want to scan my stock, I have to pay for the privilege, when my USB scanner works without internet and costs me $160. I really don’t think this will fly at the price/subscription they are selling it for. Especially when there’s cheaper/free options available. [1]
I'm not sure I understand the value proposition. Supporting abandoned scanners is great, but $40 for essentially a driver seems rather steep. That's half the cost of a brand new scanner that will work with whatever software I want.
I have built 3-4 warehouse scanning applications using a range of bluetooth hardware and BYOD and zebra scanners.
From my exp, this product misses the mark for 2 reasons.
1) internet access for license checking. Every warehouse I encountered had enough dead zones to warrant offline first.
2) Pricing seems a bit high. Maybe the target demographic is clients with hundreds of scanners, but this solution wouldn't make sense for small-mid size businesses. Zebra scanners will continue to work and scan barcodes 6 years from now.
Transparency on "enterprise" costs would be nice. If i had a ballpark for price for maybe device breakpoints, id consider inquiring. But as it stands, i would advocate for hardware products and quickly move on.
I'm working with someone making software in that range. They target retailers, saving them easily hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. The idea behind the pricing was to make it seem like they are naive for charging so little.
I really don't like pricing levels that aren't just per user, but per test. That encourages thriftiness at a level where you shouldn't be thrifty.
Never mind that I'd be seriously worried that a lot of these small time players are out of business the next year and I'll end up with useless tests (of course this is better if the software itself is just helping recording tests and it all ends up as Selenium scripts in some human-readable language).
I'd like to preface this with the fact that I have next to zero experience about the topic of pricing/charging for such service's, so what I say might sound naïve, but…
Is it really that expensive, though? I mean I can see it being expensive if you use it inside a product you offer for free, but if it's a commercial product, I imagine the pricing isn't that much especially if you consider that using your own infrastructure for this type of machine learning and image scanning would be much much more expensive.
Ok, if you are a company that doesn't have any machines in the office that are always online, I'll buy it. I was about to wonder "where did you find such a workplace...", but I failed to take into consideration non-technical companies.
(That said, again: it isn't $10/month, it is $2/user, and the /user price increases with more users. Even for my relatively tiny company, it would be more than $10/month.)
It mainly offers privacy, I'd assume. Besides, target customers may be commercial intelligence agencies, those who can conduct "detective" work for commercial companies. It sometimes implies discrediting a competitor's work, enquiring about their products, etc. It's plain gray-zone job, but there are thousands of employees in this domain.
To be clear, this would be peanuts to my company. But it's super expensive for what it is especially because they have a free service that does the same thing right next to it.
Sounds like they have a lot of high-tech labor costs for a fundamentally low-tech, low-margin business. They were all over my LinkedIn a year or two ago.
$1,000 per employee is the most bogus request I've ever heard in my life. Even if the concept were patentable, I'd say a reasonable demand would be $1 per Internet-capable scanner sold.
The patent trolls should really read Joel Spolsky's guide on pricing enterprise software. Saving $200,000 is worth hiring some lawyers to fuck you up. Saving $75 isn't.
The problem there is that the person/group conducting the test (presumably security team of a 500 person org) doesn't know if it will cost 500 x PerClickRate, or 5 x PerClickRate.. They don't yet know the stupidity of their users. Variable pricing like that can be a deal breaker for a small company.
Im not surprised though - the cost is prohibitive. And even if they provide a free tool for 2 years, what kind of bill do you expect.
I believe this market is ripe for disruption. A clone, very differentiated by focus would certainly eat away and bring more aligned pricing. Right now, Segment are literally the only folks who do what they do. They do it well, but its not affordable to bootstrapped startups.
I stand corrected on this, but what I’d argue is it’s not an affordable solution for medium-sized companies and non-profits who don’t swim in cash. It could be that our example is unusual (big non-profit), but when we evaluated GG the pricing left a sour taste..
More specifically, none of the paid security products we use cost nearly as much, and those products do much more than just detecting secrets. So from that standpoint, the pricing just seems outrageous. It’s pretty clearly aimed at big enterprises that can afford it and are vulnerable to FUD (while the “hobbyist” pricing is just free advertising). I don’t blame them for finding a way to make big money, but this business model is not what we’d pick.
[1] https://github.com/maslick/koder
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