We went through YC with Verdn, a donation software for ecom stores to give a small proportion of revenue to e.g. plant a tree with each sale: verdn.com
For me, it's Django templates + HTMX + vanilla JS when I absolutely need it. Crazy how far you can get with just this stack. I even did a technical spike for a realtime chat app recently with this, and it honestly performs better than some bloated JS monsters.
It's partly different. Users focus on solutions, not products. The pricing model must be prepared for that. $99 per site is too expensive in a market with so many free solutions. $19 may be the possible maximum, or even less
Competing on price is an ideal strategy for making a business not worth running.
Competing with free is that strategy's gold standard...minus you getting gold.
Charging enough to make business customers confident you will probably stay in business is a necessary condition for creating the trust that is the currency of good business relationships.
Or to put it another way, any business that balks at $99 is less likely to be a good customer. Price is a way of segmenting the market by filtering out businesses that don't care if you stay in business.
Politely, I 100% disagree. If anything, a good dev team would be able to take Forms.md and integrate that into their AI workflow to generate powerful forms.
When people want a heavyweight stuff around forms including all the integrations with Zapier, Google docs, Notion, Airtable, etc, they go Tally or Typeform for $25 per/month.
I see Forms.md as a an overpriced and less capable solution. For that kind of value, even with everything you enumerated, I can't expect users paying $99 for each form website. When I consult startups, I repeat guys: fast-growing AI code generators and editors will push you out of the market if you don't come strong differentiated value with free and very low-priced tagged packages (< $10).
Slightly unrelated maybe, but I'm really hoping that the https://once.com model would take off. That would be the change I would want to see in the software world. It's more simpler to understand than governance, public interest, etc. Just pay once and own the software. I really don't think software is that deep or has many philosophical implications.
But isn't that out of sync with reality? If I have to maintain software and put in more hours but only get paid once, I have to grow and grow and grow to keep getting paid.
I'm actually developing a screen recording app for macos that's gonna be paid once, but will only have updates for a year. You can use it until apple changes APIs and whatever, but otherwise it wouldn't be a sustainable business model for me.
I think before we talk about being only paid once for software (which isn't a finished product like a brick anyway) we need to figure that out.
This was solved before subscriptions took over everything by having to pay for new major versions. You pay once and have a limited duration of updates, after that you stick with the current version or pay again for the upgrade.
The benefit of doing it this way was that the user had a choice in upgrading which aligned incentives between users and developers.
The developer had to deliver tangible improvements in order to keep payments from existing users coming. These days they change the color scheme every six months, remove features, change the UI for no dicernable reason and label the whole changelog "Various changes and bug fixes" when the product is clearly a mature product that should be in maintenance mode with no significant changes required.
Yeah the "update for a year"/major version thing is the only way it can work. But only if there are no ongoing costs. I'm working on something like that: https://easyscreencap.com/ for the very reason that I don't see that I need to pay for such a thing monthly. However: the "updates for a year" vs yearly subscription difference feels so minimal at times tbh.
And also drives user-centric innovation. If I buy your app and you release a new major version, you have to convince me to buy it again. Which means putting in features I'd need as a user, not just the ones that look good on shareholder meetings.
No I totally hear you, I don't even practice what I preach because I have a subscription-based side-project: https://forms.md
I guess I would like to see someone make the Once model work to great success. I don't know how you would deal with updates and stuff, but that's what I meant. One "simple" solution is just charging the LTV (or something that's close to it) as the one-time price.
The "once model" is just classic computing and it is alive and well. Most of the highest quality software work on the pay once model, and generally it's very affordable.
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