Open-source is great. One time purchase price is great for products that don't require maintenance. Subscription pricing is perfectly valid for online services that are not open-source.
Free? Free is the worst. I don't get any trust that the service will stay around, it can completely change along the way to "paid", and I don't get to keep anything in that case.
Free like in Netlify where you end'up paying hundreds of dollars/month for a static side hosted on a cdn. Free means: settle in, bring everything you have over here, come on, we will discuss pricing later on when you're stuck in my bubble.
Not doing it any more since I migrated to Firebase. avg of 700 visitors/day to a Gatsby blog coupled with forms that send about 10 email/day that was it yes.
This is such a nothing statement. How is that different from setting a price list on their website? They hope people will pay them doesn't mean they will
Because the speculative version is much less trustworthy - and because this kind of service is prone to data lock-in, trust in pricing/profit-models is particularly important.
Consider this: for an existing service with lots of data to back up its pricing, a price list can be treated as an effective guarantee of what the service will continue to cost into the long-term. The company knows that the pricing model is profitable - and therefore, raising prices won't be worth the massive customer outcry.
For a new company, a price list is speculative. There is no way to do accurate long-term extrapolation of profitability. If the prices turn out to be too low to sustain the business, they will have to be raised - and while there will be an outcry, the business will simply have no alternative.
And since it's really hard to migrate all your data/workflows/integrations/etc. away from the service you first decide on, you're incentivised to never join a new service - because the price instability might come back to bite you, let alone if the company itself doesn't collapse later.
we hope to get you dependent upon our product, and in the meantime come up with something we hope you'll be willing to pay for is not the most confidence inducing of business plans. Also, if the current plans are "free forever" have no caps on users or much of anything else and are good enough to use until they actually finish off the things worth paying for then how many folks are actually going to be inclined to pay for them?
if it's NOT good enough as-is then why bother using it in the first place?
This just means that what used to be free will end up costing money when whatever new features they think they can charge for won't get enough users to cover their costs.
This is especially true if the free plan is more than enough for most users. Which, if you're positioning yourself as a Jira alternative -- most users won't need in-depth AI planning for sprints.
AFAICT they're not, and I think that's the point of GP's criticism. If it were FOSS you would have the option of figuring out the hosting and migration story yourself if the company goes under.
Without that you have to rely on them surviving if you want to use their platform long term.
We're a few months away from introducing Tara premium, which includes access controls for teams and user level permissions (ie contributor, etc), and is based on simple subscription based pricing. It's pretty much what our users have asked for, and we're continuing to listen to their feedback.
That being said, our entire ethos is to have a functional free forever plan, where users can manage their tasks and run their sprints, without worrying about hitting a 10 user limit, limited-time trials or task limits. We're avid supporters of open source, and we believe closed source software should have wider availability. So much of B2B software is behind paywalls, demos and short trials, hence our approach.
Open-source is great. One time purchase price is great for products that don't require maintenance. Subscription pricing is perfectly valid for online services that are not open-source.
Free? Free is the worst. I don't get any trust that the service will stay around, it can completely change along the way to "paid", and I don't get to keep anything in that case.