Comment by slightwinder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by slightwinder | Hacker News Reader

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People have not endless money, so they have to calculate the value and final cost of everything. And subscriptions are very, very low on the value-calculation, because it's a recurring cost which will grow over time, which means it's risky.

Additionally, people usually buy something for the value it has now, or a promised value which might materialize in the future and they consider realistic. So, if your tool has a legit reason for a subscription, people might pay for it. This means, server-costs on your side, which are realistic for the demanded price. Or a roadmap of fancy features which are actively worked on.

But paying for something regularly, where there are no ongoing costs on the sellers side, and no foreseeable positive changes in the value of the tool...this makes it really hard to reason about the cost&benefits. I mean, the tool will not change, the value is static, why pay for it again and again and again? This is like Walmart asking for a subscription for silverware..

Thank you for your patient explanation! A very valuable perspective —- people are not willing to continuously pay for something static that doesn't get updated. Actually, I have plans to develop some features that require a server, but as you mentioned, perhaps I should put the blueprint in the README or on the homepage to make users feel it's worth continuously paying for.

Can I conduct a small survey? I previously considered offering a feature to store users' JSON in the cloud, but I didn't see the need since there's GitHub Gist, and you can always use that, so I didn't implement it. From your perspective, would you need such a feature?

> I previously considered offering a feature to store users' JSON in the cloud,

I'm not sure how this would work well with the privacy-aspect and everything running locally, even if you upload them encrypted. And storage is cheap these days.

> From your perspective, would you need such a feature?

Personally, no. As a developer, I have many tools which need access to my data. And I also have many other files outside of JSON. So I need to have centralized place which all my software can equally easy access. So I don't really see the value in one specialized tool with specialized storage for me.

Maybe, people working mobile or in teams might have some value for this, but this is a very specialized group of customers. And I would think they will prefer something like Dropbox, Google Drive or OneDrive for sharing files. Maybe integrating this has more value for your customers. But then again, this is probably not an ongoing cost for you which would justify a subscription.

As you have processing as a selling-point, maybe you should try this and offer automatic remote-processing. People use tools like Zapier, IFTTT and Node-red for automating web- and service-related tasks or for business logic. Maybe you can find a special corner in terms of ability, price and/or simplicity, which is not covered well enough by the big tools. Some companies are really crazy with paying for hyper-specialized services just to let some laymen do their stuff.

Good idea. I've received a lot of feedback from the community with people hoping for some AI integration features. I am seriously considering this. Also, in terms of product positioning, if I do offer cloud storage, I don't intend to view JSON For You simply as a place to store files, but rather as a remote configuration management solution. Thank you once again, you're truly a deep thinker.

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