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Comment by jermaustin1 | Hacker News Reader

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!

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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.

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