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0 pointshinkley5y ago0 comments

But that subsidy shows up as higher prices for people who want to switch to a paying account.

So the question I think is: is it cheaper for the customer to upgrade to a paid account or switch to another provider that only has paid accounts?

There are a lot of Dark Patterns around this. I'm not sure we should be supporting that behavior. Objectively, it's better for me to have a paid account at a place that charges $10 a year to entry level customers.

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setr5y ago· 1 in thread

especially for subscription services, I have the feeling that the jump from $0 to $10 /mo is far, far higher than the jump from $10 to $50 /mo, and the difference between $0->$10 $0->$50 is fairly low, in terms of how people approach payments. Ofc, I have nothing legitimate to back this up.

But if I'm correct, and that people are more payment-adverse than they cost-conscious, for online subs, then it's generally correct to follow the subsidy-model rather than anything else. Subsidization is anyways far superior to the advert-model -- though it can be abused when taken to the extreme, e.g. gaming whales + gambling mechanics, but in a corp-to-corp setting I'm not seeing to much risk there. The other side of it is that enforces monopolistic structures -- essentially forcing global market share by leveraging your enterprise weight -- which is more concerning to me but seems to be generally inevitable (gov intervention is really the only thing stopping monopolies from existing, because really by all right its a perfectly valid market strategy)

I'm assuming I'm correct because companies keep implementing/switching to this model (and this is the best reasoning I can think of), but maybe its just part of a non-intelligent fashion trend (signalling difference from LEGACY software model to MODERN)

hinkleyOP5y ago

The payment averse bit is some learned helplessness due to a codependent relationship.

Some people in the business world see money as a form of control and they like it. It doesn't matter if you want $10 or $5 million. They get to decide if you get it.

I don't think open source would have gotten as far as it has if not for this misbehavior. "Hey I'm using this new tool." "Well I'm not going to pay for it [so no]." "Oh that's okay, it doesn't cost anything, seeya." "..."

We shouldn't have to submarine things into a company and then say, "we have been getting for free then we have to pay money or you have to explain to all of these stakeholders why we have to take their toys away". It's extortion, and we are debased by having to do it.

I don't know that I have a solution, I just think that pretending it isn't happening makes us accessories or at least enablers.

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