Comment by Wowfunhappy
12 hours ago
Of course, those are all great reasons to make a website. But this website was for a woman's psychology practice. I don't imagine she made it for fun or to express her creativity. The purpose of a psychology practice's website is to tell people about your psychology practice, so they will either sign up ($) or find information they need more easily (higher satisfaction → $).
If OP's mother runs a donation-funded pro-bono psychology practice then you can translate the dollar signs to units of happiness or whatever (which I would imagine is her real goal regardless).
This person is spending her time to create the website (with ChatGPT's help). How much is that time worth? Of course when it's your business hourly pay is tricky, but I imagine she values her time highly enough that $20 is not worth very much of it.
You're pretty much right about the reasons.
But as for the "value of her time", despite having to wait due to the rate limits for free users, this was probably still less time consuming for her than paying someone else to make the website.
She basically just did maybe half a dozen (probably less) sessions of less than 15 minutes each. This was a very a low-priority thing for her and did it between other things and after hours, so it didn't really use up time she was likely to use productively anyway.
If she had dealt with a web designer, she would probably have used up more of her time with several back-and-forth interactions with them, which also probably would have had to be done during business hours. Chances are that ChatGPT was better at intuiting what she wanted in a case like this and gave her quicker feedback loops despite the waiting for more "free tokens".
Would $20 have been worth spending on this? Absolutely. But the scope and priority were so minimal that the hassle of doing the once-off sub was more for her than just doing little bits between other stuff. If it wasn't available for free we would have used my Claude sub or she would have just paid.
I know an accountant, who has a respectable amount of customers and enough income to live comfortably. Their company has a website which only provides a logo, address and contact information, in a 23 line HTML file, complete with all the white space.
If their company can do well with this website, her psychology practice can do as well.
Some of the best services I got was from professionals with no or mundane online presence. Instead, their abilities and expertise moved them to the top in their respective fields, and the whole community knows how and when to reach them.
So, maybe a shiny website is not a hard-requirement for a good psychology practice, IDK.
So, the thing is, maybe this was her way to explore new things and decompress while doing some mundane thing from her perspective for free. Sometimes it's not that $20 which you can pay without any negative side-effects, but the desire to see how far the thing goes without the token, or just because you don't feel any urgency to do the task, so that $20 looks like an unnecessary waste.
I have been in both places.
Yes, presumably that's why she did not update the website for 20 years!
If once she's decided to update the website—surely it's worth more then $20 at that point? Otherwise, she probably shouldn't be spending any time on it herself either, given the opportunity cost.
Obviously she decided otherwise, I just find it kind of surprising.
Like, in general, I'm always kind of surprised at what people are and aren't willing to pay for. People will suffer through horrible full screen ads in mobile games instead of paying $5 one time to turn them off. And they'll do this on a phone that costs $1,000+. I don't know their financial situation, but I would buy a cheaper phone and get rid of the ads...
From what I have seen, people's perspective on value lies on a very wide spectrum. My mom won't buy a YouTube premium subscription, because she said she likes the ads. It's a kind of discovery platform for her. It's not that I share the same perspective, but I respect her about that.
I know people who won't subscribe to a service, but go through great pains to get the thing the service offers (another brand, similar yet inferior service, etc.).
For example, if an application I use has ads (i.e. a game), and it needs a subscription to remove these ads, I'll simply won't install it, or get the paid version of it from the start. For me, playing a game with no end and paying monthly to "hide" advertisements doesn't worth it.
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>If once she's decided to update the website—surely it's worth more then $20 at that point?
the problem here really, from both sides of the argument, is the assumption that humans are rational economic actors.
One side assumes that it is not worth 20 dollars to update the site quickly thus she does not do it, but really for that to be true (given costs of psychologists sessions etc.) then it would not even be worth updating the site, or paying for the site hosting or the domain at all.
The other side assumes that given that she is updating the site it must be worth paying 20 dollars to do so quickly and asks why she does not, given that it is worth updating the site.
If humans are rational economic actors she should be updating her professional site because it has some professional benefit to her that she is aware of, but this creates the two problems stated above.
This problem, and the examples you give, are resolved by understanding that humans are not really rational economic actors and the reason that she is updating the site and not paying the extra 20 dollars at the same time cannot be resolved to a non-contradictory answer.
We are at best, partially rational economic actors. Rational-like.
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> but I imagine she values her time highly enough that $20 is not worth very much
Did you notice that this is completely unrelated to the idea that the $20 would turn a profit for the business?
It's just the argument "$20 isn't very much money, so why not spend it?".
In this case, because spending it was more hassle than any time she would have saved by doing so. If she had no choice, then spending it would not have been an issue.