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Comment by phlux | Hacker News Reader

Wow, maybe I really dont understand how these things should be priced - but you effectively need to pay $99 a month if the only additional feature from FREE you want is to have a custom domain.

Also WTF is "high availability" if it is NOT available to free/$99 customers?

Rather, what is NOT HA to those users.

Personally - I think you need a custom domain addon to the free that is affordable to individuals.

EDIT: Maybe calling it HA for the enterprise customers is poor wording. I think if you state "SLA" to enterprise - that is language they understand and it doesnt make it look like you're implying that other users have no HA options.

It makes it sound like your advertising a single-point-of-failure architecture directly.

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"Custom domain" is an obvious customer segmentation knob. Why should they sacrifice it? How serious about hosting an app is someone who expects to pay less than, say, $1000 a year to host it? It costs money to support customers, and, as many people have noticed before, the customers who pay less often cost more to support.

Strongly recommend not adding a cheap-o option for people to get just custom domains. Don't kid yourself. Either people are going to find the service valuable enough to pay for, or your business isn't going to be sustainable. You don't make it more sustainable by taking pennies from (likely) pathological customers.

Sorry, but for somebody testing a new product in the market, $100 a month is just too much for such a trivial feature (the custom domain). Heroku charge $5/month for custom domains. Its all about the positioning, but this pricing tells me they aren't interested in the emerging, bootstrapped companies, which there are a ton.

Hi Ryan, we think at $99/month the pro account is great value for a small business. You get unlimited custom domains, ssl, scaling and premium support.

And if you really can't afford it, get in touch about your project, we'll probably give it to you for free anyway.

Friendly advice: get better at saying "no".

Thanks - we call HN the "no-no zone" :) The rest of the World is different.

HN is demonstrably pathological about pricing; 80% of the readers here assume they could build whatever you built in a weekend (look back to the original Stack Overflow threads).

Use this to your advantage. If you can stay on-message about your pricing and value-prop on HN, you'll have no trouble doing it with people who actually pay money for computery things. Make a game out of it.

When you say "if you ask we'll probably just give you this for free", what you may accidentally be communicating is, "I'm not secure in how much this product is worth". You make one potentially pathological low-value customer marginally happier, but subtly degrade your valuation with the entire rest of the community.

Believe me I feel your pain. I don't care that much about PaaS products, but I'm in the process of launching a new product and going out to customers about pricing. It's hard to put price tags on things! Wow is it hard! I have a total admiration for people who can hustle this stuff.

I can build Stack Overflow in a weekend.

Prove it ;-) I expect a post on Monday with Show HN my StackOverflow clone.

Ah, the irony was lost on -2 people :-)

>HN is demonstrably pathological about pricing; 80% of the readers here assume they could build whatever you built in a weekend

This is so true! For EffectCheck [1], when I see three segments of people:

1. People who refuse to believe that the technology works, because every person is a unique flower that overcomes 40 years of psychological research. Even linking these people to studies [2,3] that are happening all the time simply will not convince them that it may work.

2. Developers who want to use it for free. They post things like "it's too bad this isn't publicly available, I'd love to check my emails with EffectCheck." I have been through the motions with these people, and it usually ends with them being willing to pay somewhere in the < $10/mo range for unlimited access.

3. People who appreciate the technology and contact us to see if we can help address their business needs.

The gap between people in the first two groups and those in the third group is huge. People who are comfortable with B2B sales simply do not blink an eye at our prices, because they know they're more than fair. On top of that, we're a full service agency, and when we tell them our hourly rate for customization they find that reasonable as well.

Engineers and scientists are not necessarily naturally adept business people. Those that are may become some of the best (Larry and Sergei). Those that are not will waste their time complaining about pricing rather than assessing the true value.

When Conan O'Brian got screwed by NBC and Jay Leno on the Tonight Show, he made an appeal [4] to his viewers: "Please do not be cynical... It doesn't lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they would get. But if you work really hard and you're kind, amazing things will happen."

[1] http://effectcheck.com

[2] Paper on media priming: http://www.elearning.jku.at/drupal/files/images/page_white_a...

[3] Blog post with link to a UC Berkeley study: http://blog.effectcheck.com/2011/06/22/climate-change-messag...

[4] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isfHFfI81xU

Sounds like there are only two segments, people who think it's a cool toy to run their emails through and people who have businesses to run and see how it can help them refine their message.

It's not about the person as a person, it's about what they see themselves using it for.

Yes, but the problem is that "Show HN"'s have two contexts: "maybe you want to use this", and, "offer me advice about my new offering". On the latter, HN's aversion to paying money for goods and services harms its utilities to companies offering premium goods and services.

I agree, except for the fact that I think it's more about HN having no use for some premium goods and services and saying "I could think of some cool side-projects to use this in if it cost $10/mo" rather than "I have no use for this, but I think it is reasonably priced for its target market".

All things considered, $99/mo is nothing for a business that wants to make money out of its infrastructure. The way HN approaches DotCloud is "man, I could use this for my side-projects if it weren't so business-oriented". Most people here just aren't its target market.

I'm not sure you get it. You're not paying for the custom domain. Try thinking of it this way: the "Free" account is actually a "Trial" account, with the key limitation that you can't use custom domains with it. The real account costs $99/mo.

You might be right about what the pricing communicates. As a bootstrapper, I do object to the notion that $1200/yr is an untenable expense. I expect that number is less than what Patrick "5 hours a week" McKenzie spent on hosting while still a Japanese salaryman.

But: you're probably right that this pricing says, "if you can't afford to cough up $1k for your hosting, we're not a good fit for you". And I think that's probably a very very smart move. This is a low margin, support-intensive sector. A startup entering it should probably not make things harder for themselves than they need to.

No, I get it. As you said, the pricing probably says that this is not for startups on a tight budget. If I am looking to test an idea with little downsize risk, I probably choose something else over DotCloud simply because of the price. Later, when I want the supposed scalability, then DotCloud is the choice. Is the free "trial" account a time-limited account (as with Squarespace), or something more similar to Heroku?

See, Heroku is the elephant in the room. Initially, I saw DotCloud as the Heroku for Django (and other platforms), but the pricing, and how you describe it, says otherwise. There unfortunately appears to be some market confusion, as they seem to be targeting a different market segment than many people thought. The challenge is for DotCloud to educate the market that they aren't necessarily a Heroku-type service, but something else that justifies a $99/month price.

$99/mo sounds inexpensive for hosting. It's tricky to apples-apples this with Heroku because Heroku has fine-grained pricing, but it looks cheaper than e.g. EngineYard.

But sure, maybe $99 is too high for real hosting. My only argument is that there shouldn't be a super-cheap option for running the "Free" account with a custom domain.

@tptacek, maybe the free account should instead be a limited-time trial. I don't see the point in offering a free account if its not to up-sell them incrementally. IMO, those attracted to permanent free accounts are unlikely to move up to $99.

Presumably the sole purpose of the Free tier is for people to be able to take their own sweet time figuring out how the platform works and how to bring up their apps on it.

BCC started on $4 a month GoDaddy hosting (static web pages are cheap), but my Slicehost bill as a salaryman quickly exceeded my rent.

Total agreement regarding segmentation, by the way. This is why it costs nothing to have me write an email and five figures to copy that email into a PowerPoint. I do not do this because PPT is hard; I do it because if you need a PPT from me you're a Serious Business and I charge to match.

I wish I could "Show HN" the new Matasano offering, but, no f'ing way am I talking to HN about what appsec costs. It's annoying but there are simply two worlds: the world where people pay money for solutions to business problems, and HN, where code is valued in potential-Usenix-submissions-per-100kloc.

Please do anyway.

It's self-reinforcing, isn't it? I'm never going to have that conversation on HN, so all HN sees are the radically underpriced offerings and the hapless few people who stumble into quoting real prices here and getting slammed for it, which chases more people away from talking about what things cost, and on and on.

Just noted because it's interesting to me.

Yeah... I realize you'd have to battle a big vocal segment of HN, but it would be a favor to the many lurkers who just need to hear the other side of the story.

I need the first hit on Google for my product to be HN'ers complaining about its price like I need a something something in the something.

Discussing pricing is like debating the strategy of a sports team. We are all spectators with imperfect information on multiple levels. It's still educational and healthy to honestly debate pricing strategies.

Co-founder here. Sorry if the wording confuses you.

Here's what we mean by HA: everything you deploy is natively spread out across multiple datacenters. That includes your frontend, workers and database. This is non-trivial stuff.

Not to be confused with the usual bells and whistles of every PaaS under the sun, which we also offer - in all plans. Yes, we have a "mesh" which performs health checks on all your deployments, routes around network failures, re-deploys automatically on hardware failure, etc.

Add a line-item over "HA" that every account has that brands the "bells and whistles every PaaS under the sun has", then write the "HA" feature to contrast with it.

The current wording is causing us to focus on what the lower tier lack, and doesn't highlight what they have.

For example, does it automatically load balance? Is there redundancy within the data center?

For example, is a PHP+MySQL free plan equivalent to one $20 linode, or is it replicated databases and load balanced web servers across five systems?

Right, so they need a line for "best-in-class industry standard reliability measures like X Y and Z" that all accounts have, and then below it the extra bell and whistle that you can buy for "Enterprise" accounts.

I agree, although perhaps have the custom domain thing be a smaller add-on option. I can see myself wanting to start with a custom domain for a yet-unproven product, but not paying $99. That's a huge leap from other, less expensive options. I bet a lot of potential customers if pass on them unless they fill the void/need for custom domains at a lower price point. Maybe have a $10/month custom domain option on top of the free offering?

I think by HA they mean failover, vs. compensation (SLA).

I think the average HN user gets HA means failover - but most users just take that to mean that the free service is likely to fail.

Its about the wording, it should be less WTF-inducing.

Point taken - we'll work on making this more clear.

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