Comment by ethbr1
3 days ago
> It's a clear signal that the marketing/financial teams have taken over the businesses
Or that they're targeting the mass retail market, where people are technically ignorant, and "unlimited" is required to compete.
And statistically-speaking, is viable as long as a company keeps its users to a normal distribution.
> And statistically-speaking, is viable as long as a company keeps its users to a normal distribution.
Doing a bait-and-switch on a percentage of your paying customers, no matter how small the percentage is, may be "viable" for the company, but it's a hostile experience for those users, and companies deserve to be called out for it.
On the other hand, subsidizing high-usage customers with low-usage customers is pretty generous to the high-usage customers, and there's no pricing model that doesn't suck a little.
Pricing tiers suck if your usage needs are at the bottom of a tier, or you need exactly one premium feature but not more. A la carte pricing is always at least a bit steep, since there's no minimum charge/bulk discount (consider a gym or museum's "day pass") so they have to charge you the full one-time costs every time in case that's your only time.
Base cost + extra per usage might be the best overall, but because nobody has solved micro transactions, the usage fees have to be pretty steep too. And frankly, everyone hates being metered - it means you have to think about pricing every time you go to use something.
Is there an example of a consumer facing SaaS that's been able to handle the "unlimited" in a way you'd consider positive?
US cellular data plans? Where it's throttled after soft cap?
Although I will say it's been nice to have them give more transparency around their actual soft cap numbers.
That’s an example of where unlimited can work (because the limit is a number of hours of degraded service which is quantifiable).
Storage was already a hairy beast with the original setup, and it would be much better if they had defined limits you could at least know about (and pay for).
You can only do it during growth phases or if there’s complimentary products with margin. The story I was told about Office 365 was the when they were using spinning disk, exchange was IOPS-bound, so they had lots of high volume, low iops storage to offer for SharePoint. Google has a similar story, although neither are really unlimited, but approaching unlimited with for large customers.
Once growth slows, churn eats much of the organic growth and you need to spend money on marketing.
Google and Youtube, especially Youtube.
YouTube is constantly reencoding videos to save space at the expense of older content looking like mud, so arguably even they're having their struggles.
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Google does not have unlimited. I had to pay to increase my storage.
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Telegram?
>and "unlimited" is required to compete.
And there speaks marketing.
Or they're selling their product to a market where the purchaser doesn't understand how much they would need to pay if they were paying by the gigabyte (or even how to check how much they would need). Telling those people they don't need to worry about that "detail" is a key selling point. Backblaze has a product for people who understand the limitations of their consumer product and don't find them acceptable: B2, which is priced by the gigabyte.
>doesn't understand how much they would need to pay...how to check how much they would need...
...even nearly any frame of reference for anything storage related, much less gigabytes
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> Or that they're targeting the mass retail market, where people are technically ignorant, and "unlimited" is required to compete.
So… Marketing has taken over, just as parent comment said. Got it.