The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/13/156737801/the-cost-of-free-doughnuts-70-years-of-regret

by leoh • 6 years ago

397 304 6 years ago

sosuke• 6 years ago

I think this is the first time I thought TSNM; Too Short, Need More

NPR’s headline is misleading—the problem was not free doughnuts, it was charging (briefly) for doughnuts. In any case, fascinating; thanks for posting.

adventured• 6 years ago

It's not misleading. Free doughnuts were part of the problem. The British soldiers were upset that they had to pay for their snacks while the American soldiers were receiving theirs for free, and it caused tensions. The free doughnuts helped to cause that imbalance and tension, which led to charging for the snacks.

birdyrooster• 6 years ago

In that case, the British charging for donuts was part of the problem too.

dmckeon• 6 years ago

One wonders what the alternative-history narrative would be if the US had offered to pay the Brits for their soldiers’ snacks? Perhaps the common UK complaint about US soldiers in WWII would have been: overpaid, oversexed, overweight, and over here. :-)

Chris20482• 6 years ago

Maybe British soldiers being upset was only half of the situation: Maybe American soldiers in turn felt better to have such a benefit over British soldiers?

torgard2• 6 years ago

As an aside, I am really, really surprised and happy to see a plain-text website available, if you decline cookies. That's a neat approach.

Etheryte• 6 years ago

As someone who has turned nearly all cookies off, I appreciate (and use) the plaintext site as well, but there's really no actual reason why they couldn't serve the regular site without cookies all the same.

torgard2• 6 years ago

there's really no actual reason why they couldn't serve the regular site without cookies all the same.

Well, handling it may be difficult on the frontend, depending on implementation. May very well be easier to just serve it as plaintext.

MauranKilom• 6 years ago

I don't think it's GDPR compliant, but I'll take it over some other obnoxious "solutions" out there.

alexjm• 6 years ago

NPR has a full text-only version of their site. Here's this article there:

https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=156737801

The "sId" parameter on text.npr.com matches the penultimate part of the www.npr.com URL.

vmception• 6 years ago

Is there anybody alive that holds this grudge? Even with the article from 2012, I don't know

Was this grudge instilled in children?

goatinaboat• 6 years ago

Institutional memory is a powerful thing, and forms a part of the identity of any members of an organisation with a strong culture.

mjhouse• 6 years ago

When I was in the Army, everyone hated the Red Cross, although the reasons shifted depending on who you ask. I've never heard about the doughnuts before. Most commonly, other soldiers claimed that they sold donated blood, although how true that is, I don't know.

bigtones• 6 years ago

Yes, The Red Cross and almost all blood donor clinics sell their blood for hundreds of percent in markup. NPR also had a good series on that too: https://www.npr.org/2011/06/10/136931615/blood-bones-and-org...

Loughla• 6 years ago

Grandpa is 97 this year. He still refuses to support the red cross, because they charged for coffee and donuts in WW2 Guam.

He still talks about it like it was a personal attack. I grew up thinking the Red Cross was a for-profit war-profiteering leach of an organization.

afterburner2• 6 years ago

He still talks about it like it was a personal attack

Not surprising, otherwise he wouldn't hold the grudge for so long.

Many climate change deniers feel like even implying they're a (tiny) part of the (systemic) problem is a personal attack, hence their shitty attitude about science.

dws• 6 years ago

Until reading the backstory a few years back, I had this grudge. I picked it up from my late father, who was a Lieutenant in the Marines in the late 50's. He'd picked it up, with the admonition that "the Marines never forget" from one of his grizzled old Sergeants, who had been charged for coffee by the Red Cross after the war and never forgave them.

mter• 6 years ago

Was this grudge instilled in children?

Oddly enough, probably yes. The military is a family business, something like 80% of servicemembers have a family member who served. So grandpa bitches about that time back in 1944 when he had to pay for donuts, and you make sure all your buddies know about it.

jankotek2• 6 years ago

The problem isn't the price

Price was absolutely the problem. Soldiers were paid about $600 year. Not much for a job where you risk your life and dont have much of personal freedom or comfort.

Free food was part of benefits. Charging soldiers for it seems ludicrous, they can not just leave, and go to nearest cafe.

ThrowawayR2• 6 years ago

"Free food was part of benefits"

The Red Cross is a civilian organization that is not part of the army and was not, as far as I know, obligated to provide free donuts or coffee.

jankotek2• 6 years ago

Army asked for it, anyway politics are irrelevant to feelings.

Pay was $50 a month, doughnut was 2 cents, that is like 1% paycut.

chrisseaton• 6 years ago

I think you're misunderstanding. The Red Cross isn't the catering organisation of the Army. It's just a private organisation.

tytso• 6 years ago

The US Army leadership asked the Red Cross to start charging. The problem was the Red Cross was only giving free donuts to US soldiers, and this was causing the other nations' soliders fighting on the Allied side to be upset. Apparently their civilian population wasn't as generous as the US supports of the Red Cross. So getting rid of the free donuts was to avoid "dissension in the ranks".

Why couldn't the Red Cross just give free Doughnuts to everyone? I'm not sure; maybe because they collected the money for "support our troops", and supporting the Brits might have been considered a violation of the terms for which the monies were donated.

andai• 6 years ago

See also: monkey grape experiment

https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2014/02/27/283348422/that-...

I heard a related story (I'll add source if I find it) where monkeys received 2 grapes every day. This was increased to 3 grapes per day for one week. When they returned to the normal 2 grapes per day, the monkeys threw poo at the experimenters.

jrootabega• 6 years ago

Grapes ARE rich in fiber

blakesterz2• 6 years ago

I witnessed something like this when I worked at a Six Flags amusement park (wasn't 6F at the time) that had a decent size water park. They did exit surveys every night, asking as many people as they could if things were ok, and one year they also asked people "Would you pay extra for the water park", it was free as part of admission. So they wanted to know if people would pay extra. People said yes. Something like 90% of people said yes. So, of course, the bosses all thought "hey we can make some extra money and people won't mind!"

So fast forward to the next year, they charged the same for people to get in and something like $10 to get into the water park. Something like 101% of people were ANGRY. Not just a little angry, VERY angry. It was a HUGE change that people didn't expect. There were VERY few people that paid. I can't remember if they made it free that year or waited until the next.

RandallBrown2• 6 years ago

A park in Indiana, Holiday World, did something sorta the opposite.

They figured out how much the average guest paid for drinks, then raised the ticket prices that much but made all drinks free in the park.

It was a huge success. People expect ticket prices to go up occasionally and they expect to be gouged for drinks. By getting "free" drinks, it felt like a huge value. (At least for me when I visited.) I bet it made food sales increase too, because now people wouldn't have to pay for a drink too.

Not sure if they're still doing that, but at the time they also had free sunscreen all over the park. It's an amazing little park.

graywh• 6 years ago

They are still doing both.

save_ferris• 6 years ago

Ive been saying for years that airlines should do this. Add the price of an alcoholic beverage to everyone's ticket and then give those who want one a "free" drink. I never understood why they opted to go with ruthless cuts and declining customer experience.

klmadfejno2• 6 years ago

By what metric was it a success? Drinks, even non alcoholic ones, have phenomenal margins, and if you're stuck in a theme park or sports stadium, for hours, you basically have to purchase one. I'm a bit surprised this makes financial sense unless they really went for it.

For similar reasons, restaurants are hurting extra hard right now because people don't order drinks as often with delivery or takeout.

LukeShu2• 6 years ago

Growing up in Indiana: I don't remember much about different theme parks, but I remember that I'd always end the day dehydrated and thirsty--but not at Holiday World. And regardless of the actual amount of money, as a kid it removed friction from getting a drink, I didn't have to go ask my parents for money. (Just drink for free from the water fountain! Sure, maybe as an adult, but it's definitely easier for kid-me to drink a yummy sugary beverage than water.) And that contributed to having a better time there.

And so we went to Holiday World way more often than King's Island, which was almost an hour closer to us (maybe Holiday World was just a better park too, maybe not--like I said, I don't actually remember much about various parks).

blibble• 6 years ago

they save on the staff selling drinks too, at Holiday World the drinks dispensers are littered around the park in the same way water fountains are at others

(except six flags where they'll try and gouge you there too)

afterburner2• 6 years ago

Was there something wrong with the way the exit survey was asked/written? Because that is remarkable.

Was maybe part of the issue that people leaving when the exit survey was being run (at "night") not representative of the visitors as a whole?

asdff• 6 years ago

Past elections have told us exit polling is a load of horseshit. These are useless metrics.

blakesterz2• 6 years ago

Great questions, I wondered how they got it so wrong, I still wonder how they got it so wrong. It never occurred to me it may have been time of day they asked the questions.

clairity• 6 years ago

this is a well-known issue in market research, and survey design in particular. stated preferences are nearly useless in understanding customer segments and behavior. respondents have hundreds of different reasons for not answering with their true preferences (in this case, to not to pay more/separately).

instead, you want to reveal preferences using techniques like conjoint analysis (not always feasible), which better simulates the actual choices respondents might make in real situations.

mjevans• 6 years ago

It could have also been expectations.

The people reading a poorly written survey might have thought that the park wanted to SPLIT the fee structure.

  * Same $$ Both Parks
  * Fraction, One Park

There are so many ways it could have been taken incorrectly, even the context of the other questions matters too.

jokit• 6 years ago

TANSTAAFL

ChrisMarshallNY3• 6 years ago

TANSTAAFD

Remember when ATMs were free?

hammock• 6 years ago

Once you lower the price of a product, you can never raise it again.

I heard that on/around HN at some point and I haven't seen it proven wrong yet. There's a reason why chip bags get smaller, why new versions that seem identical to the old come out, why Tommy Hilfiger will never be a prestige brand again. And it's because customers don't tolerate raising prices.

jasonlotito• 6 years ago

That's not true. In the past, we raised the price of our physical products. It never put a dent in our sales. The question is what are you selling, and who are you selling it to. Also, there is a difference between selling a service or selling a product.

But no, we raise the price of our products, and never saw any issue from it.

weej• 6 years ago

But did you lower the price then raise it? That's the key differentiator in the customer/retailer relationship that I believe the parent comment made.

Retric5• 6 years ago

Cars are a major counter example. Over time the Honda Accord, Honda Civic, and Honda Fit all started at about the same size but the current Accord and Civic have grown significantly larger and thus more expensive. The idea is to let brands grow up with people, so someone who bought a civic at 30 can likely afford a slightly nicer civic at 35, and also needs an incentive to upgrade.

A few well received wine brands for example have had very rapid price increases. However, it’s more common to increase prices a little faster than inflation which quickly adds up, see Disneyland for example. What brands can’t do is lower cost and quality then try and quickly add it back.

PS: In 1964 Disneyland charged 25c/day for parking per day or about 2.08$ in today’s money. Except they currently charge 25$/day for parking.

jagged-chisel• 6 years ago

I don't think your car example holds up. Sure, Honda has brands they call "Accord" and "Civic", but a 2019 Accord is different from a 2014 Accord. I don't think anyone would tolerate a rise in prices on a 2014 Accord manufactured year after year: if Honda never changed the car and continued calling it "2014 Honda Accord", I don't think they could raise its price.

I'm a little closer to accepting your premise with Disney. However, it's not "parking" you're paying for; it's "parking at Disney" and Disney continually makes changes to its product offering. Further, neither "parking at Disney" nor "tickets for Disney" are a regular, periodic purchase.

symmitchry• 6 years ago

Coincidentally, I was thinking of Kia as a great counter example. Admittedly I don't know much, but haven't they started offering much nicer cars over time, as the brand as grown?

MattGaiser• 6 years ago

You don't generally buy cars frequently enough to know the price offhand.

The price also gets bundled in with all sorts of options, 50 different configurations, different financing rates and terms, etc.

battery_cowboy2• 6 years ago

The size wasn't because of marketing or anything, it's because of the higher crash standards.

jedberg4• 6 years ago

Disneyland isn't a great example to use for pricing, because it is a fixed resource. Demand goes up simply because population is increasing and so is their reach. They don't really need to improve the quality of the park at all.

In fact, I'd say they are still undercharging. The park will still fill up on peak days. They have been trying to fix this by increasing the prices of passes and decreasing the days they allow you in. But it's not working (current situation not withstanding).

Disneyland is a fixed resource, so it doesn't really apply to pricing discussions of resources that can be variable, like SaaS products.

danso2• 6 years ago

This made me think of living in New York, during the $1-pizza-slice boom during the 2008 recession, and I was curious how those places were doing in more recent years. Looks like 2 Bros. Pizza (as of 2018) was still sticking to a dollar, but other places may not have:

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/evk75k/the-slow-death-of-...

It’s a beautiful system, but it’s quickly vanishing from the city’s food landscape right from under our noses. The spots that used to churn out this style of pizza, many of which still have the awnings over them marking them as $1 slice establishments, are giving way to outside forces and silently raising prices to $1.25, $1.50, and even two dollars per slice.

_jal• 6 years ago

A slice in NYC tends to match the cost of a subway ride.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza_Principle

qppo• 6 years ago

Sure you can. Prices fluctuate all the time.

Your customers don't like being swindled. And oftentimes, when a price jumps, they feel swindled. I think the consumer's swindle perception factor is more dependent on the second derivative of the price history than the first.

ellard• 6 years ago

Reduce the quality/quantity of the existing product to keep the same price over time. Release another similar 'product', possibly under a different product name and/or brand with the original quality/quantity but at a higher price.

Spivak• 6 years ago

The crucial part a lot of businesses miss is have some breadcrumbs for your most loyal customers to follow so you don’t lose them with the quality drop.

Don’t advertise it, just put it on your website where someone might be able to find it on Google.

david4222• 6 years ago

Ice cream containers always go down in size. Then they go up again advertising 30% more.

WalterBright10• 6 years ago

My father said when he was a boy there was the "nickel bar" of chocolate. The size of the bar went up and down with chocolate prices, but the bar was always a nickel.

hadlock3• 6 years ago

There's a reason why .. Tommy Hilfiger will never be a prestige brand again. And it's because customers don't tolerate raising prices.

Tommy Hilfiger used to sell high end ($1000+) foul weather gear stuff for offshore (ocean) yacht racing in the 1980s. Briefly in the 1990s they were the preppy kid's branding of choice. Everyone bought at least five branded tshirts at JC Pennys or whatever at the mall each year along with Gap and Mossimo and Nautica. They are now the premium brand at Ross dress for less.

timwaagh• 6 years ago

Well i dont know about Tommy H but in general a lot of designer brands raised their prices in recent years.

blululu• 6 years ago

Interestingly enough I used to work at a company where the one any only benefit was occasional doughnuts on Friday (we did not get health insurance/dental/vision/retirement). And honestly we would all be pissed on the days when Doughnut Friday was cancelled.

dependsontheq• 6 years ago

The US is such a weird place.

Forge36• 6 years ago

My company did this once a month on new hire day. It was cancelled and people were very angry. This was a few years before i started. 10 years later people are still angry, and some never had that benefit!

WrtCdEvrydy• 6 years ago

It's like the monkey banana thing.

conradfr• 6 years ago

Reminds me of this story I read a long time ago on HN and which is on topic for this thread.

https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...

edit: I see it has already been posted.

catlas3r• 6 years ago

Ask any tech worker in an office about the free snack selection. My coworkers get genuinely outraged when we trade out one brand of prepackaged nuts for another, or when their preferred soda goes out of rotation. Never mind they all make six figures and could easily purchase whatever snacks they wanted. The cost of the employee time spent complaining every time something changes here easily outweighs the cost of the entire snack program.

danso2• 6 years ago

I didn't listen to the audio version of the posted link, but it's 5 minutes long and seems to be an excerpt of this 20 minute episode of Planet Money:

https://www.npr.org/2020/01/08/794592539/episode-386-the-cos...

Transcript: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/794592539

dperfect2• 6 years ago

It's true - charging for something that was once free can be risky, but it isn't always bad as some might believe. I have great respect for businesses that charge for a service that provides real value - even if it was once free. Often times (especially in the startup world), companies start out offering a free product (operating at a loss) to gain market share. It's not often the best strategy, but in some markets it's one of the few ways to break in and gain traction. Obviously, you can't sustain operating a business that way forever, so you eventually have to make up for it somehow.

Unfortunately, a lot of tech companies have (perhaps unintentionally) conditioned consumers to expect software to be free. The terrible consequence is that in response to that pressure, many companies choose ethically-questionable ways to make money when they need to, rather than simply charging a fair and honest price for their product (this includes selling users' data, overwhelming the user experience with ads, in-app purchase shenanigans, etc). Paying fair prices for things we use isn't the most appealing idea in the world, but (in my opinion) we probably need more of it, not less.

MaxBarraclough4• 6 years ago

A similar thing happens in the podcasting space.

It's a pity it's still quite inconvenient to make micropayments. If I could make a single click to pay a penny for access to a single article, I imagine I'd do so frequently.

_bxg12• 6 years ago

This is what the Brave browser is attempting to do, with mixed success

criddell• 6 years ago

Google Contributor is one attempt to pay creators and it's not terrible. The big downside is that even though ads are blocked, Google is still tracking you.

It would be nice if there was somebody other than Google running the program.

1123581321• 6 years ago

You would need to pay quite a bit more to make this viable for most publications. The ballpark formula is the issue price divided by the number of articles the average reader wants to read enough to pay anything. For example, a WSJ is $4, so if readers wanted to read ten articles, they should charge 40-50 cents for them.

A more realistic price might be $1-2/article since the median reader won’t be that interested. Pricing schemes that increase the total reading cost on a log curve can be imagined.

Of course we dream of a micropayments system fluid enough that people start consuming 10-100x the content so the price per piece can go down accordingly, but that is unlikely since there isn’t that much free time. A first mover might accumulate a lot of new readers, but that would eventually even out.

cshenoy• 6 years ago

I'm pretty sure this is what Blendle[0] is doing - pay per article. I've been using it for a year and ended up subscribing to a few of the publications.

0. https://blendle.com

_bxg12• 6 years ago

I also don't think many tech companies would be mistaken for "something like Mom". There's a fundamental thing about creature-comforts like food and coffee that would make this situation more emotional.

ProAm• 6 years ago

Unfortunately, a lot of tech companies have (perhaps unintentionally) conditioned consumers to expect software to be free

I think Apple started this movement with the App Store and the .99 cent app. I think it coincided with the shift from on-prem software to cloud, but that really shifted what people can charge for software. We've seen a bit of a shift back the last ~5 years maybe? But I still think it the App store started the current epoch.

WalterBright10• 6 years ago

It was the internet that made software free, starting with the browser, and continuing with the adoption of Linux with its free tools.

throwaway3999• 6 years ago

There's a common theme on HN that it's all the fault of consumers for wanting free stuff. The truth is, budgets are limited, and if you start charging for stuff you will soon find out how much consumers actually value it - with respect with other stuff they can buy. I'm not talking about the average HN user making six figures in a cushy software job - of course you'd pay for a product like Gmail. But think about most people who don't care that much about technology, to whom it's just a tool and not an art, a craft or a hobby. Do you really think your product is that valuable? Do you really think people are willing to buy your content - enough that you can stay afloat?

It's not that consumers want free stuff, it's just that most people do not have extra money laying around.

I'll also add that "charging a fair price" has never deterred companies from engaging in unethical and privacy-violating practices in addition to taking your money. See: Microsoft, Amazon, etc.

dperfect2• 6 years ago

I'm not faulting consumers for wanting free stuff. If anything, it's a symptom of companies (and investors) putting too much value in vanity metrics and expecting that it will be easy to transition to revenue.

I've seen it first-hand: startups intentionally forgoing revenue so they can be measured by the stick of imaginary future profits correlated with their free product's success. Then when investors finally do start asking to see real returns, it's a scramble to find something that doesn't involve charging their current user base (because of course no one wants to pay for something that has been free previously). That's when the "creative" money-making ideas start getting real consideration.

In effect, those actions end up communicating to the public that software is free when it really isn't. It gives the impression that there isn't a cost associated with developing and maintaining software, when really it might just be funded temporarily by investors with deep pockets and high expectations, or supported by other revenue sources that the end user would not agree to in full transparency.

wpietri3• 6 years ago

I'm sure that's much of it. But some people just really like free stuff. I used to volunteer at a conference series with a $5k price tag. Many of the attendees were wealthy. But when we put out free stuff on the giveaway table, even stuff they could easily buy, a lot of those rich people were very grabby.

leetcrew• 6 years ago

I imagine people probably would pay for gmail if they didn't get a free account through their ISP. it wasn't too long ago that email was either a paid service or bundled with an internet connection.

I don't get the vibe that HN thinks the current state of affairs is completely the fault of the customers. it's a two way street. companies offer free services either at a loss or supported by ads or data mining. once people have a free option, it takes a lot of value add to get them to actually pay for a competing solution.

jt2190• 6 years ago

(2012)

WalterBright10• 6 years ago

My head says people should pay for things, my heart says soldiers ought to get free coffee and doughnuts.

WalterBright10• 6 years ago

Pricing things can be strange.

Back in the old Zortech days, we included full library source for free with the compiler. Library source wasn't even available for other compilers. Nobody particularly cared that we did that, and it was never mentioned in compiler reviews in the press. One day, Borland decided to package partial (not including floating point) library source for their compiler as a separate product. The press went ape over it with headline articles about how great this was. (Philippe Kahn was a marketing genius.) Naturally, we at Zortech found this annoying.

What we did was separate out the free library source into a separate package, and put a price on it. When people called up to buy the compiler, we'd ask "do you want the library source package, too, for an additional $XX?" They almost always said yes. So we made an extra $XX on each sale, leveraging the expectations Borland had set in the market.

Of course, these days expectations have changed again. We give D all away for free.

marktangotango2• 6 years ago

A looong time ago I worked at a comic book store and the owner had a table of freebies at the front of the store. The distributors were always sending marketing material with cool artwork, so instead of throwing it in the trash when it piled up, he figured why not give it away?

No one touched it. Then he started packaging it into $5 “grab bags”. That crap was gone in a week. The lesson? “You can’t give shit away, but put a price on it and it’ll sell”.

Maybe that says more about comic book store patrons than pricing, I’m not sure.

krustyburger2• 6 years ago

Not being able to see the contents, customers probably assumed there was something more valuable in there than promotional items. I doubt many of them bought more than one grab bag.

I think Diamond (the distributor) frowns on stores selling items that were meant to be given away for free. To be honest, the owner doesn’t sound like the most reputable guy.

xyzzy_plugh• 6 years ago

Recently I was moving and had some furniture ("junk") to dispose of. Calling a company to come get it was really expensive considering the stuff was effectively worthless. Posting it on Craigslist for free was useless -- no one wants your crap fo free.

Posting a Craigslist ad for $20 for an otherwise free couch? Gone the next day.

It's bizarre that this works, but boy, does it work.

tonyedgecombe3• 6 years ago

People do value things by what they pay. I saw this when I was consulting, pushing up my prices resulted in more respect and better treatment.

fennecfoxen• 6 years ago

Oh wow, Zortech. I learned C in seventh grade on an ancient 486DX2 with the Zortech compiler (from a bunch of floppies which I got from the father of a kid in my carpool). Hacking analog clocks with the Zortech graphics library, writing my own linked list hash table for a color-coded version of “dir”...

ezoe3• 6 years ago

That's hilarious. I wonder D's adoption and share was changed now if it was free back then. It might be used instead of Go or Rust today.

WalterBright10• 6 years ago

I do wish I'd come up with D in the 1980's.

013a3• 6 years ago

I can call out one example of a poorly executed price raise: Apollo Engine (https://www.apollographql.com/pricing)

There was a time when they charged for data points/performance traces ingested into the system. At our scale, we were paying around $100/month. We were prepared to scale that to their, I think it was, $550/month plan when our usage got that high.

They relatively recently changed their structure to charge per registered user. This would have raised our bill to around $1500/month at our current scale, to get all of of the stakeholders in there.

This is a cost incongruent with the value we were getting out of it. Even a ~$500/month price tag does not correlate with the value received, at our scale. It would one day (its a great product), but not today. So, today, we have two employees who have access to that, keeping our spend the same.

Here's the key component of this pricing change though: They will, no longer, be able to grow revenue with us. A pricing change forced us to make organizational changes. Those organizational changes mean that fewer people are seeing any value the product could deliver. When fewer people see the value, then the product has fewer advocates within the organization; its fungible utility will eventually be rolled into a competing product we already pay for, like Datadog, even if the experience is worse, because when we discuss Engine its always prefaced with "Oh, I think Dave in ops uses that, no one else does".

tomjakubowski• 6 years ago

In general for SaaS, does it make sense to let customers choose between two (or more) pricing models, depending on their needs? Does this cause too much complication for the business? Curious why I haven't noticed schemes like this, other than at "enterprise" tiers where the customer is paying a lot for something closer to a custom solution and prices are negotiated.

013a3• 6 years ago

I don't know about that. I suspect, generally speaking, per-user billing does not work for the vast majority of SaaS. It can really only work well in communication tools, where (1) most organizations receive a lot of value, (2) there's a network effect in play, and (3) expenses incurred by the provider generally correlate with the number of users. Slack. Jira. Notion. Etc.

For an APM tool like Apollo, only one of these requirements is true. It does provide a lot of value. But, there's no network effect, and their expenses do not correlate with users on the platform. That last point is the craziest one; being long-time users of Meteor and Apollo, I've always questioned the technical and executive leadership behind the Meteor Development Group (now Apollo), and they've done nothing in recent history to give faith that its a well-ran organization.

Retool (https://retool.com/) is another weird one. Amazing, amazing product. Truly transformative; what they're building there is unreal. There's a very light network effect in play, and usage may correlate better with users-in-app than it would with Apollo Engine, but charging per-user still feels weird. For them, I feel some form of bucket'ed plans, which allot X users, Y "applications", plus gated feature sets like SAML and Audit Logging, would make more sense. But, what do I know.

TAForObvReasons• 6 years ago

It makes sense for the pricing to be aligned with what the users perceive as their usage/value. In any other shape, customers can and will adjust their usage or switch to something else.

When you start selling per-seat licenses, everyone is incentivized to reshape usage so that only one seat is needed. That one seat is used by a team member who becomes the internal expert on the service, while everyone else turns to him or her for help

monadic23• 6 years ago

I am quite curious why business plans themselves are not generally subject to a/b testing....

pc86• 6 years ago

Sometimes it makes to have a super complicated pricing algorithm so (usually very technical) users can tweak exactly what they do and don't want. Remember the early Heroku pricing page?

99% of the time if your pricing page doesn't have a list of prices along the top, that will be a nonstarter for a non-technical business oriented person.

bryanrasmussen• 6 years ago

I think the current thinking is that you should keep your price down to 3 levels (but the same model) to keep it in one easy to read line on your landing page / price page so that potential customers will not be confused.

If you give them multiple models and ways to do things then they will have to think over what is right for them, and someone thinking over it might decide not to go with you.

On the one hand I can see the point, I hate to think too much over things. But I also hate how often products don't have a reasonable model for my use case.

ooobit2• 6 years ago

From an SE/SO professional, can I rant here for a moment?

Marketing and Product rag on Sales a lot for discounting. Nevermind the fact that we own the touchpoints with an account, so it only makes sense that we'd know what any individual account needs. I've had this issue with Marketing and Product professionals since I started in Sales, and even more-so when I took over Sales Enablement and Sales Ops.

For one, pricing is a big deal, but value is bigger. I could sell you on that $1500/user easily by giving you a work product that factors the product roadmap, your business roadmap, and makes a compelling ROI case for you. I'm willing to give you those 8-11 hours.

But we both know it'll be wasted. Because in 90 days, Marketing will push a discount campaign that conflicts with preexisting agreements, and thereby throws all of that work product up in the air. We'd have to go back to square one and recalculate everything to see if a deal even exists. Or Product decides to drop the roadmap, delay a feature, realign to attempt to capture more of a saturated market.

You know who sets pricing? Pricing experts. And maybe, just maybe, if they spent five minutes on a discovery call with you, they'd understand why you bring up discounts, why I would rather give you the discount, and why both of us walk away knowing we missed an opportunity for quality relationship-building.

I tried this once with an account. We locked their pricing down, pushed a work product out justifying our use case. The account came back and requested we drop the discount, that they saw the additional upfront cost (nearly $40k+) as an investment in our roadmap that could return utility for them sooner rather than later. We made it six months post-close before Marketing and Product decided to completely drop the current roadmap and work on something else. I had to issue more than $22k back to that account, and we got forced into RFP by the parent org, which we lost and subsequently lost all business from them, domestic and international.

So. Thank you for airing your perspective. And just know that people like me have stormed in and out of meetings, and still do, trying to stop this BS.

gav2• 6 years ago

I've been on both sides so I understand your perspective.

Everyone wants to sell on _value_ and in an ideal world you could go up the food chain and say, "hey, if we spend $10,000 on this, we save $100,000 in employee hours". That should be the easiest decision in the world, especially if you could come back in a year and figure out it was really $105,000.

However budgeting in just about any organization I've been involved in doesn't work like that. You ask for $10,000 and there's no budget for it. Even if there is, there's no guarantee that next year you're not going to have to "tighten belts" and "sharpen pencils".

user599446110• 6 years ago

Was the product work discussed and planned with the product management and the developers? Did they understand what the client wanted? Did you follow up and liaise between product development and client during all this time?

To be fair one $22k customer is not much for a SaaS business with many or large customers. It does not justify spending months of work on a "feature" unless other customers also need it.

More importantly. Do you follow up on the feature and put product development in touch with the client to make it happen? It's always easy for sale to discuss whatever directly with the client and swear it's coming next, but what the client wants is super blurry (at best). Nobody can work on a task they do not understand, especially 3 months later when there is some (planned) time to work on it, so it's simply dropped. Thus is the cycle of how things are promised and cancelled.

travisjungroth4• 6 years ago

Never sell your roadmap. $50k isn’t worth one of the few advantages startups have: agility. It’s also distracting. You get to have these fun hypothetical conversations instead of talking about the product you have. Sell what’s on the truck.

danielrhodes• 6 years ago

This is an important point. A lot of companies do great revenue by selling seats, but that model is obviously not always applicable. In this case, you're pointing out that the marginal utility of a product like Apollo Engine is not driven by the number of users, but by the usage. In other products, say Box or Dropbox, the marginal utility is in how many people in an org you can get using the product, not in how much you use.

xchaotic• 6 years ago

Your argument makes sense but not Dropbox pricing then. Their business pricing costs are per user. If they become more entrenched and valuable the more people use them, then extra users should be free, initially? (And maybe just charge for storage)

oaw-bct-ar-bamf• 6 years ago

Different product at my dayjob came to mind.

The license costs ~18.000€ per year. Luckily it‘s a free floating license that can be reserved by the user. So it can be fully utilised and a wider pool of users sees the benefit and the great value add of the product.

Per user licensing with that pricetag would not have gotten managerial consent

0xy2• 6 years ago

Their enterprise pricing is disgustingly grandiose. At our relatively small scale (just a few tens of millions of requests per month) they wanted five figures a month after the price change.

Nope. We'll just roll our own solution.

Whichever sales and marketing guy is responsible for that atrocious pricing will ultimately be responsible for the product failing. I don't know who's going to pay those absurd prices.

013a3• 6 years ago

That is crazy when APM is such a saturated market. Granted, there aren't a ton of GraphQL-focused APM tools that are automatically aware of field resolution times and such, but GraphQL makes it a cinch to support; if a company like Datadog came in and added it to their already existing APM suite, Engine would be finished. Datadog APM is expensive, but it's generally interesting beyond GraphQL, and its not five figures expensive at this scale.

tmpz22• 6 years ago

disgustingly grandiose

Just like GraphQL itself.

unnouinceput4• 6 years ago

I have a similar story. Year is 2014 and client was using a very specific payment processor because the client was part of UK government and credit card processing was to be done using only that processor - you know, politics and stuff when dealing with government.

So the payment processor, after absorbing a good chunk of this organization became a behemoth, with a lot of political power and overnight they decided to charge additional license fees if you are throwing more then 5 connections/second from same IP to be processed.

Of course the client was upset and asked me if there is a solution before shelling what was possible more then a few million pounds (GBP, not the weight) per year in those fees. My solution? Made them just increase their pool of IP addresses from internet provider and additionally made an intermediate proxy which had the job to gather user requests and spread them to up of 4 requests/second to said processor. When waiting for your card to be processed usually the end user doesn't mind waiting extra 10 seconds, seconds that gave my proxy plenty of time to balance the requests. AFAIK it works without hiccups to this day. And of course, client only thanked me like government thanks to medics in COVID nowadays, all talk and no extra dime (apart from what we agreed upon). Oh well, I take pride in a job well done.

bobbylarrybobby• 6 years ago

It's a rare client who pays more than the agreed-upon price.

hajimemash• 6 years ago

Would the right move have been to see the value you could give to the client, and charge more at that point for an additional service to capture some of this value?

jiux• 6 years ago

Did you ever reach out to the Apollo team to express this concern?

tixocloud• 6 years ago

How easy would it be to estimate costs based on something like data points/performance traces? On the one hand, it makes total economic sense to align pricing against utility but I’ve also heard for larger enterprises, something that lets them price things out for the future helps with cost management.

gnopgnip• 6 years ago

The corollary to this is a lot of businesses don't care about $1500 a month, or $10k+ a month, or rather they see an appropriate amount of value, or they value not having to switch. It makes more sense for Apollo to focus on this business. And that is especially true if they have a product that is approaching a commodity.

karaterobot• 6 years ago

I didn't know about the Red Cross and its donuts. The example I've always used for this is helping a friend move.

If the friend asks "hey, will you help me move? I'm buying pizza and beer afterwards!" I will more than likely say yes, even though I can buy my own pizza and beer.

If they instead say "hey, will you help me move? I'll pay you $21.58 for your time," I'd probably bristle. Even though that might be the equivalent price of a few slices of pizza and a beer, the category has changed from showing appreciation to placing an actual value on my time, at which point working all day for $21.58 stops making sense.

Zenbit_UX• 6 years ago

You got weird friends, no one's ever had to ask or bribe me, I would just offer to help.

In turn I'd also be uncomfortable asking others to do manual labor for me, if they didn't offer when I said I was moving I wouldn't ask. Buying them supper after would be a given, no bribe required.

ashtonkem• 6 years ago

“I’ll buy you pizza for helping me move” is an extremely common social interaction, to the point of being a trope. It’s not a bribe, it’s an acknowledgement that helping somebody move is a huge amount of work and some token of appreciation is wise.

GP doesn’t have weird friends.

ncallaway• 6 years ago

I think you've badly missed the point.

If you take issue with an analogy, try one that fits your experiences better.

You offer to help, and then your friend says: "awesome, afterwards I'll buy you pizza and beer" vs "awesome, afterwards I'll pay you $21.58".

The order of offering vs asking for help wasn't at issue in the analogy.

andrewflnr• 6 years ago

Buying them supper after would be a given, no bribe required.

I think this is actually kind of the point. By offering to provide pizza, you're casually confirming that you're still operating in the paradigm where friends help each other out without looking too closely at the balance sheet, as opposed to offering nothing (awkward) or paying them (turning it into a transaction).

jrs95• 6 years ago

I think the idea is partly "I could use some help with this, but I'll get some food and drinks and we'll try to hang out and have a good time even though the work part sucks"

SirSavary• 6 years ago

I've always interpreted it as a "reason" to hang out, or a politeness thing. It also makes it clear that your buddy doesn't plan to shoo you out of their new apartment once you're done the job.

imperialdrive• 6 years ago

Weird friends are great. Everyone secretly appreciates special handling. Little bribes make the world go round. It's quite an art getting someone to help without them eventually feeling a tiny hint of being taken advantage of, and vice versa.

hijp• 6 years ago

Yeah for me the hangout with the pizza and beer is the real reward!

boulos• 6 years ago

In behavioral economics that’s sometimes referred to as “social norms versus market norms” [first useful link, 1].

The example given (I think it’s via Ariely) is that you wouldn’t pay your friend to have cooked you dinner. This is the same thing: there’s social contract value in helping your friend out, and they’re showing appreciation with a token. In fact, if you friend offers you more money than the pizza and beer, you are likely to be insulted by the lowball offer, since you now evaluate the suggestion in terms of work for hire via market norms.

Social norms are so powerful though, that even if the friend offers you higher than your market rate, it’s still not worth it to take it, as it would shift your relationship (with lifetime value X) from a social one to a commercial one. Usually when people say “humans are irrational” they should be saying “people have complex utility / reward functions”!

[1] https://www.behavioraleconomics.com/resources/introduction-b...

TaylorAlexander4• 6 years ago

Interesting comment!

I have this relatively unconventional theory that, if we use automation just right and make the cost of food production, delivery, and preparation low enough, and also do so where ownership of the machinery is distributed throughout society, that we could make it a social norm to give anyone who needs it free food. All in a voluntary system. We just need to make the actual cost of the whole supply chain low enough that people don't care about giving away a bit for free. Like in the extreme case how cafes give out free wifi because the marginal cost of delivering wifi to one more person is so low. I could imagine shops having a "free food" option made using some low cost proteins and fiber and prepared using some cheap robot. And then they would charge for hand made food or something, using the free food as a loss leader.

So my theory is that those robots need to be made as cheaply as possible. And that makes me think they need to be open source so anyone capable of manufacturing them can compete to supply them. Like how 3D printers got so cheap once the patents expired. They went from $30k to $300 in 20 years.

The real trick is sustaining robotics businesses that can pay engineering talent to produce open source robotics. Prusa Research has succeeded here with their 3D printers, and I am hoping I am able to reproduce that success with the farming robot I am working on now. But we aren't certain we will make it open source. It depends on how we can sustain funding. I think it's very possible though and I'm committed to it.

I think it's extremely interesting that Prusa Research can give all of their IP away and coexist in the market with clones at less than 1/2 the price. Users understand that the first party product is higher quality, and those that can afford it still buy from Prusa. There seems to be room in that market for both Prusa and the many clones. I wonder if we can reproduce this success with automation in other areas.

traes2• 6 years ago

I mean, the pizza and beer offer also presumably includes spending time hanging out with your friend, the value of which cannot be equated with money.

mormegil• 6 years ago

Also, there is this case of a daycare center which started to collect fines for late child pickups. The result? The rate of late pickups increased. Picking the child late stopped being a shameful thing to do, causing the poor worker to wait for you, it started being a normal paid service you could use every time you wanted. https://freakonomics.com/2013/10/23/what-makes-people-do-wha...

tripzilch• 6 years ago

Even more interesting, and relevant to this discussion, was that the rate didn't decrease again (within the measured time frame) after the fine was removed again! (from the paper linked in your article)

DoreenMichele2• 6 years ago

You make me think of some study that concluded "Pay enough (market rate) or pay nothing." People who will do volunteer work for an organization because they believe in the mission will walk away and cuss you if you offer them 5 cents an hour for the same work because it's all you can afford to pay.

lifeformed• 6 years ago

Where does a few slices of pizza and a beer cost $21?

MetallicCloud• 6 years ago

They said beer, not a beer. In Australia, the cheapest 6 pack you can buy is about $22.

manuel_w• 6 years ago

It is interesting to me how much free givaways people get in America.

In Austria (and maybe some other parts of Europe, not sure), not only that free refills are unheard of, you even get charged for ketchup sauce at McDonalds. (The minimal allowed food quality is higher, though, so there might be economic reasons on top of, I believe, primarily societal reasons.)

It is charged somewhere around 40 to 50 Eurocent per 25ml.

frakkingcylons• 6 years ago

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that if fast food places charged for condiments or soda refills in America, customers would become violent with employees.

A customer shot employees at a McDonald's because the customer wasn't allowed to dine in the restaurant: https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-05-07/police...

greedo2• 6 years ago

When I worked at McDonalds during college, we implemented a surcharge for people wanting extra sauce for McNuggets. It was like $.25 each. If you bought a 6 pack you got 2 things of sauce. A 9 pack came with 3, and a 20 pack came with 5. So really, you got a lot of sauce included.

But people were pissed. It was only a small portion of customers who even asked for more than the include packages, but they were hot about it.

When I first started, we didn't even give free refills of soda or coffee. And I remember, we had this group of senior citizens who came in every morning as a group to just drink coffee and BS. Well, the tax rate in CA changed one day, bumping the price of a cup of joe up a penny. You'd think we had stolen their Social Security checks. They were outraged. Trust me, you do not want a pissed off senior citizen yelling at you when you're 16.

theferalrobot• 6 years ago

Even public restrooms are free in the States - not sure how that hasn’t caught on more

hadlock3• 6 years ago

Free condiments etc are free in the suburbs but urban/urbifying places will typically restrict you to X packets per Y possibly as a cost cutting measure. I would guess that the packets cost $0.10 or more each. 10 ketchup packets might cost the restaurant as much as the profit margin on a medium fries.

Soda refills are almost free, the cup costs more than the soda, so besides avoiding an obesity epidemic, the customer satisfaction of giving free refills is probably worth it. Also it probably costs more to pay someone $15/hr to just fill sodas, when you can get the customers to self-service for free.

postit• 6 years ago

Meetup folks can learn a lesion or two from this.

papito• 6 years ago

If you have a service where the free deal was too good to be true, then it works. I am not salty at the New York Times. I pay for the subscription and it is well worth it.

Also, now I want a coffee and a doughnut, goddamn it. Is Dunkin still open in quarantine?

elliekelly• 6 years ago

They’re open and oddly enough they’re currently doing a “Free Donut Friday” promotion...

djrogers• 6 years ago

Sounds particularly relevant given the recent Wink pivot that's being called 'ransomware'.

DoreenMichele2• 6 years ago

This is something I have thought a whole lot about. I blog and I want that information freely available, but I also need an income. I don't have a problem with the fact that people on HN actively find ways around paywalls which I think people on HN tend to find surprising because I spend so much time criticizing the idea that "You people want good writing and you want it all for free, so you basically expect writers to be slave labor for you."

What I'm saying is that this is not an easy problem to solve because in any business, some of the things you provide will be provided for free. For example, businesses that serve food have bathrooms available for free.

In busy downtown areas or areas with a lot of homelessness, you will see local establishments with signs saying the bathroom is for customers only and some even have security codes so you can't just walk in off the street and head to the bathroom. But they don't charge for use of the bathroom.

If you are a small shop, figuring out what to do for free and what to do for pay is a thorny issue because time is money and it's easy to end up in a situation where you are de facto slave labor.

For some businesses on the internet, your members who are there because it is free can be part of the value you are bringing to the table and if you try to charge and you drive those people away, you may kill the business because now your paying customers have no reason to pay you. The membership base was part of your value position and you've just thrown the baby out with the bath water.

So before you go acting like businesses who give stuff away for free are somehow nefarious actors, stop and realize that successful businesses have to pursue models that are viable and those models have real world factors. This is not just something decision makers at companies can arbitrarily decide willy nilly. You need to be taking the landscape of your marketplace into account when trying to figure out what piece of your product is the piece you charge for or monetize and what piece is something you give away for free.

Historically, TV was free to viewers. You just needed to own a TV, but subscription channels came later. It got monetized with advertising and having a large audience helped you monetize it. That large audience was valuable to your advertisers, so giving it away for free to viewers was part of how you made your money.

So this model wasn't born with the internet. It existed before the internet. And there are valid arguments to be made concerning things like "If you aren't paying for it, you are the product, not the customer" and lots of different angles to look at such questions.

But at the end of the day, there is no free lunch. You somehow need to pay the bills. And sometimes the method that actually works effectively isn't as straight forward as "Well, just charge people for using the darn thing." Sometimes that doesn't work at all and in other cases it may work, but will limit your growth. Sometimes giving part of it away for free is how you grow to the point of being able to make serious money.

ChuckMcM4• 6 years ago

This is a good cautionary tale and one I've seen played out in the tech industry with food. Even in the 80's it wasn't uncommon for a tech company to have a "beer bust" on Friday's where drinks and snacks were served as a social gathering for employees at the end of the work week. It was a turning point in employee relations when the VP of HR at Sun cancelled the weekly beer bust. Similarly at Google when they decided to scale back the legendary "mini-kitchens" full of snacks, "healthy alternatives" that were slowly pared down.

One sociologist I read wrote, and I'm paraphrasing, "Sharing food with another is an action of great significance. Evolutionary, the sharing of food by hunter gatherers was more significant than sex in establishing a mutually bonding relationship." They went on to discuss the importance that meals played in our history and why we "throw a feast" to welcome heroes, and the Jesus' "big reveal" happened at a meal.

The main point was that when you share food with someone you trigger a very ancient and well established mechanism. Conversely, when you stop sharing food with someone, you signal their ancient brain "I don't trust you any more, we aren't friends."

Now whether or not that thought/emotion comes to the surface, it's very clear that the for many people the change from "sharing food with you" to "not sharing food with you" changes how they see their relationship with you. What is perhaps worse is that the damage is instant and irreversible. Even if you start sharing again, the people you stopped sharing with, even temporarily[1], will no longer feel the same trust that they felt before.

At tech companies those people leave and eventually you have all employees who only remember the current system and so you're at a new "normal."

Bottom line, taking away "free" food is waaaay more impactful on company morale/relationships than you would ever imagine unless you had researched it. Thus, it happens over and over again. And even though I know a company is just trying to make me like it by giving me free food, I can't keep myself from being positively effected by it. That response is buried somewhere deep inside my head that doesn't allow for excision.

[1] Yes, there are ways to temporarily stop and not disconnect but that involves messaging before one stops sharing to both provide the external reason for the change and the conditions on which the change would revert back to sharing.

hhmc• 6 years ago

Your comment about the hidden impact of cancelling snacks reminds me of this article: https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...

ChuckMcM4• 6 years ago

Yup, and to Steve's point "The sodas were just the wake-up call.", it was more than a wake up call. As the paper explained, to stop sharing food with someone forces them to re-evaluate their relationship to you. They can't help it, it's thousands of years of behavioral training that kicks in and says, "This person no longer likes/trusts me, what should I do now?"

refurb• 6 years ago

I immediately thought of company perks as another good example of this.

I can remember when my company was trying to spend less, so they took away an employee perk. Now this employee perk was kind of ridiculous (no other company paid for it) and it wasn't that popular (a few people used it).

However, when they took it away? Holy crap were people pissed.

This is one of the big lessons for me early in my career. Before you do something, ask yourself if you're prepared to do it forever. Sometimes it doesn't matter, but sometimes it does and you'll be better off if you never do it in the first place versus doing it and then taking it away.

ja272• 6 years ago

We went through this. When 2008 hit the company stopped providing free sodas and bottled water for our office of only about 30 people. I was damn close to just buying them myself but it was crazy how upset a few people making moderately insane amounts of money would get over not getting a $1/day benefit.

listenallyall4• 6 years ago

Keep in mind that, according to your post, it was the VP of HR, not Finance, that shut it down. Sun didn't end the outings for financial reasons -- the HR dept decided, unfortunately, that it was legally prudent to stop serving alcohol and to end the encouragement of socializing between employees.

ChuckMcM4• 6 years ago

Yup, the unfortunately named Crawford Beverage.

travisjungroth4• 6 years ago

It’s important to remember that companies are staffed by primates.

rb808• 6 years ago

I thought the regret would be diabetes and heart disease.

viburnum• 6 years ago

Troops and cops are the most aggrieved people in the world.

drewcoo• 6 years ago

It's not about "used to be free." The Red Cross regularly shows up wherever there are people in need and charges them for things of negligible value. Years ago I was in a natural disaster where the power was out. The Salvation Army was handing out free blankets and hot meals but the Red Cross was charging for cups of coffee.

They are still like that to this day. No deep historical knowledge required.

ChrisMarshallNY3• 6 years ago

I tend to make all my stuff open-source and free. I have no intentions of ever charging for it.

I do this for a couple of reasons:

1) "Brand-building." I'm developing a "personal brand," and I do it for a similar reason as companies give away free T-shirts with their logo.

2) Lead by Example. I have a beef with the quality of most software, these days. I have decided not to whine about it.

Instead, I just write my own software the way that I think it should be written, and leave it out there. Since quality isn't really a coefficient in most developers' minds, these days, it doesn't get much attention; which is fine by me.

So...sort of "virtue signaling," but in an even more passive-aggressive way.

I also have a personal policy of making all my work public, because I am used to it, and I think that it helps me to write better software. You always vacuum before the in-laws visit.

I would never charge for my open source (MIT-Licensed) work, but I also put the source up there for the stuff I do charge for (a tiny pittance). It isn't licensed for reuse, but it's out there.

If someone hires me to write proprietary software, then I won't put it out there (unless that's what the customer wants). I did a great deal of "behind the firewall" work that is likely to never see the light of day (indeed, much of it was in products that were never even officially released).

Otherwise, I'm likely to keep putting my work out there for free; whether or not anyone else cares.

I care.

mikekchar2• 6 years ago

Free and open source licenses are really useful. Works licensed like that are worth significantly more to me that works that aren't licensed like that. Of course, charge whatever you want for your code, but I don't think you should avoid charging for code that has an MIT license. Quite the contrary!

ChrisMarshallNY3• 6 years ago

Fair 'nuff, but I'm not in this for the money.

I know that makes me a bit of an "outlier" in the tech industry, but I guess I'm a bit of a "throwback."

I enjoy sharing, and I enjoy shipping apps. It's my dream to code for free; and I'm just about there.

Writing the code I want to write, without having people deliberately spike the development process, is kind of fun.

I mention my outlook here: https://medium.com/chrismarshallny/thats-not-what-ships-are-...

BTW: I've enjoyed reading a lot of your comments. You like to write.

ryanmarsh• 6 years ago

Paying for doughnuts is not why veterans don’t like the Red Cross.

bhelkey2• 6 years ago

Oh? Then what is the reason?

leoh• 6 years ago

Reminds me of the Google situation with Reader.

willart4food• 6 years ago

"Imagine, for Thanksgiving, you go to your parents' for dinner and after a nice dinner they say, 'That's going to be $10 per person,' " Simonsohn says. "You would be upset."

LOL, my first ex-wife's mother would charge $40/person for hosting the mandatory Thanksgiving dinner, after people also contributed in the way of co-ordinated sides, fixings, beverages.

By the way, $40/person in the 90's.

And no she was not poor, and nobody in the family was flush with cash.

pkrotich• 6 years ago

my first ex-wife

Now you have me wondering how many ex-wives you got! Sorry but couldn't resist.

RickJWagner• 6 years ago

One nit-pick.

Per Wikipedia, "member stations derived 6% of their revenue from federal, state and local government funding, 10% of their revenue from CPB grants, and 14% of their revenue from universities"

NPR is most certainly not 'free'.

8bitsrule• 6 years ago

"veterans don't like the Red Cross ... he always got the same answer: the doughnuts."

For my dad it was the apples. "Shriveled and all dried out."

ja272• 6 years ago

I volunteered for the Red Cross for about 3 years in the 1990s and probably heard this two dozen times from from random people when they saw the logo.

Causality1• 6 years ago

It may be irrational, but I have a visceral hatred for people who make something free online and then take it down after they find a way to charge for it, especially if the community they were posting it on collaborated with editing, feedback, and suggestions.

paypalcust83• 6 years ago

Both of my grandfathers retired SMSgts and I have two veteran flag cases above the monitor where this was typed.

According to my late paternal grandparents, who went through WWII, Korea, and Vietnam on active duty (and arguably the wives did as well), the American Red Cross had not-so-nice aspects to it that didn't get much press.

Perhaps national governments should support apolitical, non-religious volunteer nonprofits more, but I can also understand the need for nonprofits to survive (which may often entail charging small fees). Charging people for doughnuts who don't make much money to begin with, are first-responders, active-duty military, or individuals who just went through a disaster seems kind of uncool where I come from.

It's difficult to say how good they are today without first-hand and multiple accounts of experience. The available data shows they presently spend 3.5% ($104m) on admin and 6% ($177m) on fundraising. https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summar...

As an example, Feeding America, although they pay their CEO 16% more ($100k+), is a mostly better charity on paper.

kimi• 6 years ago

I am amazed at how good the no-cookie experience is. You get a readable, basic-HTML formatted article, and nothing else. And that is - go guess? - exactly what you wanted for reading an article. +1

mirimir• 6 years ago

So npr.org won't let me read unless I agree to be tracked. Which is illegal under GDPR, I think.

But in any case, I've realized something. In the URL, just replace "https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/13/" with "https://www.wbur.org/npr/" and the damn page just loads.

So I picked another npr.org article recently posted to HN: https://www.npr.org/2020/05/06/849996451/what-hamburgs-misst...

And yes, this URL loads without challenge: https://www.wbur.org/npr/849996451/what-hamburgs-missteps-in...

So hey :)

tonyedgecombe3• 6 years ago

One of the most demotivating experiences I had as an employee was when my employer put me on a commission scheme then did everything they could to wriggle out of paying the commission. They would have been better off not offering it in the first place.

TeMPOraL• 6 years ago

Anyone remembers the drama that happened when JetBrains announced they're switching to subscription model with their IDEs? That's also a categorical change: from a product, to a service.

After a deserved backlash, they fortunately backtracked and allowed people to buy perpetual licenses. But it left a bad taste.

fulldecent2• 6 years ago

Here's the solution. And it applies to Red Cross and other related enterprise changing from free to paid.

1. Stop giving away doughnuts 2. Start selling funnel cakes

hvasilev• 6 years ago

Same is with Free Software. On one hand it is nice that you are receiving so much value for free, on the other all business models revolving around it contradict basic sales principles and are wildly unsuccessful.

So for example, I use horrible debuggers like GDB in 2020, because there is no company that is willing to put that much effort and take that much of a risk into developing a better tool debugger, since there are no profit incentives around it. You cannot really expect developers to pay for their tools in 2020 and that is both good and bad.

The Cost of Free Doughnuts: 70 Years of Regret

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