Comment by rrosen326 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rrosen326 | Hacker News Reader

Since I know you are figuring this all out, here’s some pricing feedback for you:

I’m a weekender - building a desktop app (OS X & Win) for individuals and small businesses. I hope it turns into a real business some day, but as experience would show, it probably won’t.

On the low end, $24/month is way too much for me. I would find it offensive to pay $24/month for a licensing solution, when I pay $0 for python, flask, electron, NPM, Vue, and the myriad other technologies I rely on heavily. (Note, I don’t think it is offensive - but I feel it.)

My gut feel on pricing - don’t try to squeeze money from a stone. Give away the low end. You won’t make much money there anyway and you will almost certainly turn off many potential users and proponents. Get them hooked. Let them promote for you. Don’t let them find an alternative. Then, when they start making money, you start making money.

If I have a viable business going I will have a totally different feel on how I would see this expenditure.

2 cents for you.

Appreciate the feedback. (Seriously, helps a lot!) What would be a price point that works for you? I definitely think there's room for a smaller plan, so I'd love to hear your thoughts. I've done smaller custom plans in the past for makers who are just getting started with an app (or in the process of building one) with a low active user limit. But in the end, $288/yr is not that much for something that helps you make money--especially considering that you'll likely have to spend money to make money as an app developer. And lastly, I don't think comparing a product to open source is the right thing to do--especially considering that you have to host Flask, distribute Electron, etc., all which cost money.

$288/yr is not that much for something that helps you make money

Whether it's a lot or not depends entirely on how much you're making. For someone who has a $500/year side project $288 is half your revenue. For someone who has a $50,000/year side project $288 is trivial. If you're marketing to people who haven't yet launched then most of your customers are in the first group - and that makes your product sound quite expensive.

If I had the need for your product I'd be much more likely to use it if the cost was something like $1/user/month, capped at $30/month.

Appreciate that hosting isn't free, but having some sort of $0 plan would greatly drive adoption, at fairly little cost. I personally would be unlikely to launch a product that cost me a monthly fee just to run, even with zero paying users. Once I have paying users, I become a lot more willing to pay you. You could consider something like the following plan: Testing. $0/mo, 50 users, no support.

It'll be more effective marketing than anything else you could reasonably buy, and unless you have serious architectural/scaling issues shouldn't be too expensive for you.

I agree. I think that the pricing is fair for when you have paying customers on the system (at least for my business model), but the 7 day trial isn't really enough time to do a proof of concept to see if Keygen would work for me. I know most companies will extend your free trial if you ask nicely, but ugh. I should have a free option available until I get to Prod.

If you want an extended trial, I'm all for hooking you up with one that lasts until you launch (or whatever is needed for you). Though not something I want to do by default at the moment, simply due to the fact that free users usually require more support than paid users.

There are two issues, for me. Firstly, a monthly price in dollars can be annoying for very small projects, as it's quite possible there will be a relatively large flat currency conversion fee from a bank. Paying that once hurts less than twelve times, even if it's not all that much money.

Secondly, I agree that it's far too much money for a weekender level. Bear in mind that most weekender projects will be using free tiers at various providers. This could easily swamp all other outgoings combined.

If you really do want to capture the weekender market I'd probably suggest cutting the cost to 1/3 of current and billing annually.

At $5/month I'd probably grudgingly do it. At $10 I'd deliberate and postpone, and it's unclear which side I'd land on.

If I sell 200 licenses for my desktop app in one year at $10/pop, that's $2,000 in my pocket.

Your license server costs $288/year. I'll need to continue using it as long as my software is in use—lets say 5 years. The service will cost me $1440 over that period.

Over that period, I'd be paying you 72% of my gross revenue.

If I only sold 100, then it would cost me $440 more than I made on licenses.

If I sold to the plan's max of 1000, your service would cost me 14% of my gross revenue ($1440 of my $10,000 gross) over that five years.

A pricing scheme that closer resembles $x/license (forever) is something I would be more interested in.

I can't speak for the founder of this company, but I would assume their product goes more toward the yearly/monthly recurring software licenses, not for a one-time purchases.

One way around this "limitation" is to store somewhere in the machine that it was activated already, and then you can cancel your service at keygen.sh. Then if you make your sales all in a single month, you only pay $24 (or roughly 1%).

Appreciate your feedback. I'm not at all married to the current pricing, and I believe there's room for a smaller plan so that I can support developers who aren't making a lot with their app or are in the process of building it. I'll look into it. :)

But is it too much?

Think about the time savings. If it saves you more than 10 hours of development and maintenance time, pays for itself, even if you don't have a single customer.

How many pointless purchases do we all make each month? I buy 2-3 domains per month for ideas. 90% of them just sit there.

I have 4 droplets at digital ocean just sitting there and 1 actually being used. Its the opportunity cost of losing them.

That is why God/IRS invented write-offs. If you use it, great, if not, well at least it's pre-tax!

You can justify it, of course. But when comparing it to other free things out there, eg letsencrypt or as OP said npm for package management or editors like vscode and you still have to take into consideration that some integration time is still needed then keygen.sh feels very very expensive.

I get the argument, I really do. I was young once, and would reinvent any and every wheel I could just to not pay for anything! But at a certain point everyone grows up and starts to value their time more than a few dollars (typically when you get a family started).

I find that developers are especially prone to this even with salaries that are typically 50% or more higher than their national averages (500%+ in India). With all this extra disposable income, we should be spending it supporting other developers and using the tools that they make to make OUR lives easier!

These are all fair points, as is the one about not comparing a product with an open source project.

But my DO droplet, which runs all my websites, costs $10/month. All the other incredible stuff I use costs 0.

Also, recurring costs add up over time. A long term commitment to a company has unknown ramifications. My income from a new project is 0.

Now that I've been forced to think about it, I probably wouldn't pay $5/month - because (as has happened to me in the past with services I relied on), the price could easily get jacked up. And then I'm committed, or have to back out some code and implementation.

Long term external commitments with companies of unproven track record and uncertain costs make me nervous.

My new plan is to see if I can solve this reasonably well myself (at much higher development costs) and only use keygen or something like it if I really have to.

Which, btw, is exactly the thought process you don't want your pricing to instigate.

Hey, just an update! I shipped a new value-based pricing model today (https://keygen.sh/pricing) after getting feedback from HN as well as others. Would love to hear your thoughts!

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