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Comment by hugs | Hacker News Reader

It's hard to stay in business selling something for $0. Meanwhile, there are companies with more money than $Deity that look at $10K as a rounding error compared to their high-end engineer's salary. So Altium follows the money. As a huge open-source nerd, I used to think something like $10K for Altium was a borderline crime. Now I sell robots for the same amount. (And people in the industry still say I'm charging too little.) Long story long, if you think $10K is too much for something, you're not their target market. (And as long as there are viable open-source alternatives, I don't have a problem with that.)

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$10k is kind of a crime for individuals. For businesses, absolutely, high prices for critical tools with support contracts is a no brainer. I just about coughed up a lung when I heard how much my company pays for 2 floating licenses of specialized engineering software (six figures per year). But in terms of ROI, it's easy to justify.

Your robot could easily sell at 20-30k. If you add some kind of calibration/support service to guarantee whatever operating parameters, you could charge a subscription on top of that. Test equipment is normally fairly expensive and specialized, and no one who runs tests in a commercial environment wants to be in a situation where they are their own checks/balances. So even though they could easily build/maintain test equipment themselves, companies will avoid it if possible. It's why businesses will buy the $5k name brand multimeters, test probes, etc instead of the $200 no name one with the same specs.

I used to work at a small company where the most expensive licence was $10k. One of our big customers basically asked us to make a more expensive licence so they could give us more money to try and make sure we didn't go away.

Right but small company making two-sided boards with a few dozen chips don't need the 80% of extra features it comes with.

With that kind of licensing it just makes possible future users go to competition.

Wait what kind of robotics? After ChatGPT, that's the next big thing.

It's in my bio, but I after my "internet fame" with Selenium and Appium, I now make physical robots that do the same thing: tap buttons on phone screens for end-to-end testing. (There are lots of little reasons why a physical robot would be preferable over an emulator or a USB-tethered device, but perhaps, that's another thread for another day...)

Oh I was hoping it was secret TidyBot competitor. I've always dreamed of building a phone screen tester, and then you could sell it as a cloud bare metal cellphone

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