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Comment by jayrot | Hacker News Reader

I agree that IFTTT isn't useful enough for me to warrant the cost (I need another monthly subscription like a need an arrow in the knee).

That said, it seems they did handle it in a much classier way than Wink who really pissed people off when they moved to a subscription model. Likewise, that was a good nudge for a lot of people to move off the "easy" platform and figure out something better.

I wonder why companies don't use a boil-the-frog approach to try to avoid this "nudge". Like, if they started off by charging, say, $1 a year I'm sure everyone would stay and just go "OK". Then start increasing the price slowly until you find the sweet spot.

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> Like, if they started off by charging, say, $1 a year I'm sure everyone would stay and just go "OK". Then start increasing the price slowly until you find the sweet spot.

There's a psychology-caused pricing dead zone if the price is too low. Users assume the price of something implies its value. If the value is lower than the mental effort to decide whether or not to purchase it, most won't. In the user's mind, somethat that only costs $1 a year can't be worth the effort to decide whether to spend $1 a year on it.

And, if it's lower than the effort that unsubscribe will probably require, hard no.

There's a large gulf between users who will play nothing and users who will pay something. If you start charging you have to account for how much of the user base will leave just for there being any cost at all. If you're using Paypal or similar for transactions you lose 39 cents out of each $1 yearly transaction (and if you run your own merchant account now you have to secure credit card information). Additional customer service overhead having to deal with people's $1 yearly transactions, on top of people expecting better responsive customer service because they're paying customers now, maintaining private customer data ... the variable costs per customer would probably end up more than $1. It'd be cheaper, literally, to make it free.

Maybe $5 a year could work as a price point, and given the gulf between Pay Nothing vs Pay Something, I doubt $5 a year would've lowered the conversion enough to make $1 a year transactions worth it. Don't do credit card transactions for a dollar or less unless you're counting on it converting into a higher amount a month later.

> I wonder why companies don't use a boil-the-frog approach

Because, just like in real life, the frog will jump off way before it reaches the boiling point.

That’s like doing layoffs one by one instead of ripping off the bandaid. $1 might be ok, but if it keeps going up by $1 then it would seem like the sky is the limit.

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