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Comment by mataug | Hacker News Reader

There's a lot of good discussion on the pricing model, and I agree that its a bit too complicated even though there are no bad intentions here.

Would you consider a combination of dollar balance, and membership ?

The membership cost itself would be a simple base price like $5. Its like the cost of a Costco membership. That helps keep the lights and manage some fixed costs.

While the dollar balance is used to create documents. To offer bulk-buyer discounts, you could consider discounting cost of dollar balances, for example $100 dollar balance costs $90.

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Thanks, my intention was actually to be as customer-friendly as possible. From my perspective, the customer can walk away whenever they want (they don't even need to unsubscribe), and they have choice for expiry based on their expected usage pattern/accounting department. Obviously I'm wrong though!

Hmm, that's an interesting idea regarding the membership. I'll think about that as an option. Regarding the dollar balance, I didn't like the idea of using dollars and then discounting how much a dollar actually cost someone, since at that point you're effectively using a credit system that happens to be called dollar. But a membership where you get a base number of credits per month/year and then the ability to purchase more as needed (with bulk discounts) could work and I like it!

Thanks for the feedback and the idea of how to fix it!

I agree logically that discounting dollars will make it a credit system similar to the credit system you already have.

Practically though I think people derive comfort in familiarity, even though dollar credits / cost are unintuitive in mathematical terms, people use dollars daily, even people who don’t use USD daily know the conversion from local cut to USD. And it makes the cost look really small, for example “0.5 cents” per document seems more familiar than “1 credit” per document even though the cost might be the same.

That's true, credits do obfuscate cost which is something I don't like about them. If a dollar balance is used and the majority of transactions do correspond to $1 spent = $1 balance, then that's intuitive (as you said) since we do that all the time with all our purchases. There was a time in the 2000's in New Zealand where some mobile phone companies would let you buy like $200 credit for $40, and then pricing of call's was some high rate like $2/minute. That's something I really really want to stay away from, since at that point it's very difficult to know what anything even costs. I'll definitely take your feedback into account, thanks!

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