Wow, I'm impressed how grumpy one can seem in a few short sentences. Take an upvote for that alone.
GP has a certain - admittedly orthogonal - point. At what point does "just two coffees per month" translate into "too many coffees traded for services"?
If it's relevant, a fairly high-end black coffee made from medium-roasted in-house coffee beans - which I strongly enjoy - costs me $1.70 in my local economy.
So this costs me 5x coffees, or a work-week of coffee. And I'm a pretty well-paid foreigner living in a strange land.
If I were to take a charitable reading of the GP - with no expertise in economics on my side - I'd say they were pointing out that you are potentially losing a 65+% of your market for whom $9 is not "a couple of coffees".
That's not an indictment - maybe you don't care! Maybe 100x customers @ $9 = $900/month and the service pays for itself.
I am a big fan of what I think is Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) / Pay What You Can (PWYC), even though I see it pretty rarely.
I guess it depends on whether you want to provide your product/service to as many people it can benefit at once, versus the minimum number of people who can support your costs with a profit.
Neither position is inherently "wrong"/"privileged", they just seem to have different incentives and/or target markets.
The voice of a potential target market that is being excluded seems valuable to me - even if the revenue increase might be negligible per-user, perhaps it's worth considering the volume of potential users in that market :shrug:
(To re-iterate that I'm trying not to pick a side here: maybe it's not - maybe the business model is to target affluent consumers. That doesn't make criticism of the exclusionary nature of this approach "privileged", however, in my view. YMMV)
If I'll be accused of being grumpy for calling out some couch quarterback for bringing irrelevant arguments to squash down some developer's hopes and dreams, then so be it. You have to be really full of yourself to criticize someone's launch on HN so harshly. This community is famous for sharing kind feedback, with a few notable exceptions that now live in infamy (eg: Dropbox). A good question to ask yourself would be - "how did my Show HN post compare to this one?" If you haven't made one yet, then be extra kind and humble.
This is akin to having a hissy fit over marketing speak. It's like seeing a red car in a commercial but don't like red cars. Doesn't mean the product isn't targeting you. Just ignore it.
GP has a certain - admittedly orthogonal - point. At what point does "just two coffees per month" translate into "too many coffees traded for services"?
If it's relevant, a fairly high-end black coffee made from medium-roasted in-house coffee beans - which I strongly enjoy - costs me $1.70 in my local economy.
So this costs me 5x coffees, or a work-week of coffee. And I'm a pretty well-paid foreigner living in a strange land.
If I were to take a charitable reading of the GP - with no expertise in economics on my side - I'd say they were pointing out that you are potentially losing a 65+% of your market for whom $9 is not "a couple of coffees".
That's not an indictment - maybe you don't care! Maybe 100x customers @ $9 = $900/month and the service pays for itself.
I am a big fan of what I think is Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) / Pay What You Can (PWYC), even though I see it pretty rarely.
I guess it depends on whether you want to provide your product/service to as many people it can benefit at once, versus the minimum number of people who can support your costs with a profit.
Neither position is inherently "wrong"/"privileged", they just seem to have different incentives and/or target markets.
The voice of a potential target market that is being excluded seems valuable to me - even if the revenue increase might be negligible per-user, perhaps it's worth considering the volume of potential users in that market :shrug:
(To re-iterate that I'm trying not to pick a side here: maybe it's not - maybe the business model is to target affluent consumers. That doesn't make criticism of the exclusionary nature of this approach "privileged", however, in my view. YMMV)
(Edit: minor emphasis)