Hasnain says:

Worth bookmarking again as this is chock full of timeless advice for small software businesses.

“Whoopsie! Simple error in assumptions in my Excel modeling, Tarsnap actually cost 4X what I thought it would.

By which I mean that instead of costing me $0.60 a month it actually costs me $2.40 a month.

This error is symptomatic of what Tarsnap forces every single customer to go through when looking at their pricing. It is virtually impossible to know what it actually costs. That’s a showstopper for many customers. For example, at many businesses, you need to get pre-approval for recurring costs. The form/software/business process requires that you know the exact cost in advance. “I don’t know but we’ll get billed later. It probably won’t be a lot of money.” can result in those requests not getting approved, even if the actual expense would be far, far under the business’ floor where it cared about expenses. It is far easier for many businesses to pay $100 every month (or even better, $1,500 a year — that saves them valuable brain-sweat having to type things into their computer 11 times, which might cost more than $300) than to pay a number chosen from a normal distribution with mean $5 and a standard deviation of $2.”

Posted on 2020-09-23T05:49:58+0000