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Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

W...why would you turn away your biggest customers?

Because we believe that the incremental cost of supporting such customers would exceed the additional revenue it would generate.

(I guess that's a sort of trivial answer? Feel free to ask follow-up questions if you're genuinely curious about it.)

Is there a particular reason you don't think heavy users would be willing to pay heavy enough money to make themselves worth it? In my experience people who use your thing 2x heavier than normal are willing to pay more than 4x to keep using it because it's important to them in a serious way.

Usually I see startups handling this by having a "call us" pricing mode, which I have always assumed meant "We want to establish a proper business partnership with you that goes beyond being just a user"

One big issue is that we're just not a good product fit for something heavy, so I would expect most people who want more than what we'll give them for $4.95/month to eventually discover that Webscript is the wrong service for them. (For example, technology-wise, they should be using something that doesn't spin up a new Lua VM on every web request.)

We could certainly adapt Webscript to be a better product for bigger workloads, but that would be a lot of work on our side, and that product might end up just being "Heroku but with Lua," which is probably a bad product. :-)

I also doubt that your experience applies here in terms of those heavy users wanting 2x the use for 4x the price. At 4x the price, Webscript would cost close to $20 per month, and we would start to compete price-wise with shared web hosting or VM hosting solutions. I'm not sure there are really users who want something like Webscript for that price.

Ok, that makes sense then. Thanks for answering :)

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