> Anyway, here’s the moral of my story: there needn’t be so much conflict between ethics and profits. Carefully consider your constraints, and use design thinking to make the world a better (and possibly uglier) place.
I really hope the author the best, they seem to be working on trying to figure out some way to monetize their project without doing anything evil. Which is a rare and admirable attempt. But the moral of the story here seems very contingent on whether or not their plan works out, right? And I think it is not a very sure thing.
This is btw. a phenomenon I often see in creative people: Just because you thought long and hard about topic X while doing your work doesn't mean topic X is well preseved in the final result of your work (outside of your own memories).
The harsh truth is that only if the final result says what you wanted to say in terms of that topic, your considerations and reflection on that topic "count".
I am not saying that it is all about the result, because how many corpses you produced on your way there still makes a difference — but yeah in the end you will be judged by the final result.
> Not to toot my own horn, but I am very good at making things uglier.
> To work with my natural skillset, I focused on aesthetic downgrades over aesthetic upgrades. I call this “frugly pricing”, AKA “cosmetic crippleware“.
> It’s simple: I plaster the word “free” everywhere until consumers pay for a license. I’m not the first to do this, and I certainly won’t be the last.
From the title and other comments I was imagining that the UI itself was made uglier in the frugly version.
But it sounds like the only difference is that it has these messages.
Which reminds me more of being nagware than being cosmetically crippled.
One thing I noticed about having different tiers and free options: government institutions will be required to acquire whatever the cheapest version, even if they have tons of money and your product directly supports their mission/goals. So if you want to have government customers, realize that their duty to taxpayers may prevent them from purchasing if you have a free version.
I work for a government institution and this is simply not true. We're required to get the option that best meets our requirements, and we define the requirements. Cost is one of the metrics we're required to use, but it's not the only metric.
For example, we typically want SSO and the ability to send a data file of users automatically. Those are both typically enterprise features.
Furthermore, I've yet to see a free tier product that doesn't explicitly or implicitly exclude business and government institutions from using the services.
This doesn't necessarily apply to OP's product, but institutions also want regulatory compliance. For example, your premium version can use NIST-approved cipher suites, while the free version "limits" itself to the likes of chacha20 and x25519 (both secure standards as far as we know, just non-NIST!)
That's a rather clever form of bureaucratic ju jitsu. It probably works on "enterprise" users as well, particularly ones that are government contractors.
I wonder what other variants are possible... perhaps something around ISO 9000 certification?
That wouod be the first time the government took the cheapest option available. Agencies writing their requirements takes care of those low-tier, cheap, COTS options very efficiently.
They are quite often required to take the cheapest option available, but governments are often also very limited in how they can negotiate those options and in what counts as "available" for them. There are entire industries dedicated to ensure that "the cheapest option available" is very expensive.
Sure, they have to take (oversimplified) the cheapest option that meets requirements. And that bit is crucial, because no purchase I was involved in, on the buying or selling side, commercial or governmental, was simple enough to not have special requirements way beyond the "freemium" tier of some SaaS product. Reasons:
- user count
- tool integration
- compliance
- support
- processes
- any kind of other things
And yes, this is toyed constantly when it comes to public purchases of everything to assure the preferred supplier wins a bid and still makes money on his low ball offer.
I make a tool that is widely used to help people with reading issues, including those that are caused by traumatic brain injuries/strokes. We have been contacted by government-run hospitals and other government-run entities that want to avail themselves of our self-serve pricing ($1.99/mo), which we keep very low in order to ensure that most people who can afford a computer can afford our software.
However, these entities wish to have us comb through dozens of pages of legal agreements and review even more laws/regulations that they are subject to. When we tell them that they have to pay institutional pricing if they want require contract review, they balk and say that they cannot pay any more than the price on the website, which is for self-service. I understand that they want to pay the lowest price possible, but they need to respect that different customer types (with different contractual review needs) are fundamentally buying different products/services.
You can fix this with licensing, as many products do inversely: they have a free educational / nonprofit / noncommercial version (e.g. many CAD programs in the past) and if you don't fall in the carveouts, you must pay $$$$$.
Also some forms of libraries and game engines ask that you pay $X per year if you earn more than $Y per year, including the reviled changes to the Unity license, as does Apple given the app store have a lower tier theoretically for smaller businesses.
I've done this in the past for people - same product, but "Certified HIPAA Compliant" or what have you, even when the base level is already HIPAA compliant. But we won't sign a BAA for you unless you cough up or demonstrate need.
You can do this with this kind of tool by offering a tier for private citizens, and a tier for governmental agencies. Or even rebrand with a separate tool: GovCloud, for example.
> they have a free educational / nonprofit / noncommercial version (e.g. many CAD programs in the past) and if you don't fall in the carveouts, you must pay $$$$$.
> Also some forms of libraries and game engines ask that you pay $X per year if you earn more than $Y per year, including the reviled changes to the Unity license, as does Apple given the app store have a lower tier theoretically for smaller businesses
Is it common for companies to try to find workarounds to stay on lower tiers (e.g. signing up on a personal email but using it for company work), especially when you can't verify which tier they should be on? I've rarely seen pricing tiers like this in smaller SaaS products for example and I'm curious how well they'd work.
I've had product ideas where I'd be happy to give it away for free to people that can't afford it but then I can't see a simple way to check this. You see "email us to use for free if you can't afford it" sometimes.
The $1.99/mo is presumably per user; how many users are said hospitals/institutions paying for? I'd have assumed they'd be looking for a _discount_ on the website price tbh.
In the context of assistive technologies used to people recovering from TBIs, our tool is very inexpensive.
They typically are looking to cover dozens, not hundreds/thousands of users. If that were the case we could offer a discount on ongoing usage, as long as they covered the one-time cost of contract review.
Aren't they just lying to you? No law prevents you from setting terms and prices for different sets of features and services nor forbids them from paying market price.
They aren't paying above market they are simply being billed for the actual terms and features they are demanding.
I don't know if they're strictly lying, but they sure aren't recognizing that going through all their legal documents requires thousands of dollars of contract review.
Wellcome to the world of B2B. Or any purchase involving larger ammounts of money. Buying real estate without having a lawyer reading the sales contract is just stupid.
And usually those fees are close to negliable, should be considered in pricing as part of the overhead and are simply cost of doing business.
Good news, if you are already at the point your customer provided paper worl to be reviewed, you are pretty advanced in the sales process with a decent chance of making the sale.
It doesn't have to be about law, the person in charge of purchasing the service may be bound by rules internal to their administration, such as "you have to pick the cheapest option that fills the requirements".
>No law prevents you from setting terms and prices for different sets of features and services nor forbids them from paying market price.
There are laws (in some places) that prevent you from charging the government more for a product than you charge another customer. So you'd really want another SKU for a higher price tier to make it definitively a separate product rather then just telling them they'll need to pay more if they ask for something.
Who'd have thought real-world B2B sales require more than a credit card and a subscription link? Like, contracts, paper work, audits and lawyers? This is outrageous!
I worked in the Danish public sector for a decade and we didn’t really adhere to this. That being said, the more pricing tiers you have and the more complicated it is to buy your product the less likely we will even try it.
Aside from that your biggest competition is always going to be when “included” services does what you do as part of a package deal. Ten-fifteen years ago it wouldn’t have been weird to see an organisation using whatever was the equivalent to Microsoft Teams at the day, we used a couple I think one was called Jabra or something along those lines. Today you just aren’t very likely to see things like Zoom or Slack in the public sector because when you get Microsoft Teams as part of your deal anyway, then it’s really hard to justify paying for something similar.
This is also part of why Microsoft bought so heavily into OpenAI… they know that almost no one in enterprise is going to be buying anything but their AI when it’s part of their “package deal”. Even in the company where I work now, which is transitioning from startup to enterprise you see this. We now only use Enterprise Co-pilot (well in the dev department we still use gpt 3.5) but the company as a whole only uses (and pays for) co-pilot because it’s “free” for everyone on the sort of license we buy through our current third party Microsoft license vendor.
I mostly use it to make AI images of cats or ducks performing various functions for internal presentations.
That's the one point MS figured much better than others: How to bundle software, from Windows to Office, in their liscensing and product bundles. From a certain company size onwards, those bundles simply beat the patch work approach of individual software solutions.
The problem with this approach is that you will sour your customers on your app with your intentionally bad UX - they won't want to upgrade from the 'bad' version to the good one.
Interesting idea but I think one huge factor for cosmetics in games is status. Other people see, what cosmetics you have and this encourages people to show off expensive stuff. This does not apply to a personal UI.
And what about people judging the app on the first look? Good design can interest people in checking out what the site is actually about in the first place.
Can you provide more information on this (what works, what doesn't)? I'm thinking of adding something like this to a nonprofit's website to help fund their mission.
It works if you help people pick the best bank for their needs with a lot of useful information. It doesn't work when you promote a VPN at the start of a YouTube video about cats.
In other words, genuinely helpful recommendations, not half-assed ads.
In general, services with recurring payments pay much higher commissions than single purchases.
Most affiliate deals are brokered through affiliate platforms. If you know your industry well enough and your own website is popular enough, you can broker your own deals with people that otherwise don't have a program.
I think the growth before profits mentality of SV startups has been cargo culted way too far. Free to play games demonstrate an alternative model (pushing customers to spend via service rate limits, cosmetics and limited time deals) that is more honest in my opinion, since the value proposition is right there for the user to see, and it lets you monetize without degrading the experience for the average user (as long as you know how to manage your whales).
Is there some dynamic equivalent of document.querySelectorAll("section") JS-based DOM filtering, that listens to websites building new UI elements through dynamic loading and applies the filter on newly added (or modified?) DOM elements (much like how CSS rules automatically cascade when HTML elements are added and removed)?
What is wrong with just making the product paid? How can there be any kind of ethical dilemma for the author? Charge a fair price for the app and that's it. Freeloaders do not have to be considered. Paying people for their work is a matter of respect.
It sounds like the point of it is to try and get people to pay, if they can and if they want to, without compromising the product experience.
They _want_ to give this away for free, but also want to be able to cover the costs. Getting rid of the "ugly" doesn't really take money away from them if you were never going to pay in the first place.
so it's a variation of the overall idea of nagware
I believe the real problem is larger than computers and technology. capitalism just doesn't play well with digital assets which have effectively 0 distribution costs
The term Crippleware is ablest and we should probably stop using it.
That said, I like the frugly approach. The cosmetic upgrade approach in Fortnite the author mentioned is also implemented in a new game I've been playing called The Finals. It is nice not to have winning behind a paywall.
There's nothing wrong with the term, it succinctly conveys the limited functionality of this software.
Words aren't sentient and as such they cannot be ableist, only people can. It's perfectly clear that the author didn't intend to offend, demean, or discriminate against any disabled person with their choice of words, they were merely writing about their own software.
I really hope the author the best, they seem to be working on trying to figure out some way to monetize their project without doing anything evil. Which is a rare and admirable attempt. But the moral of the story here seems very contingent on whether or not their plan works out, right? And I think it is not a very sure thing.