This is not intended to be a justification for why I don't want to pay for this service, it's intended as honest feedback about the shock I had seeing the price, and why I think it might be, in the hope that it helps the team iterate their offering.
This price feels wrong, and I think part of it is the pricing of the other similar sorts of service we use for our app, and that I suspect others use.
Ultimately this service and the others are about improving reliability and quality in some sense, so while different markets I think they are comparable as teams can opt to focus on quality in different areas.
- CI, we pay $100-200 for this, and it obviously consumes a lot of compute resources and needs to regularly. Price feels ~reasonable.
- Crash reporting, we pay <$100 for this. It scales with user base, and while low cost per user this does feel like it has some scale to it. It's also essentially user-facing, so very high uptime requirements.
- Code coverage, $5. It's basically a few database records behind an API with a special interface. Feels like it's worth very little, but fantastic price, worth it. Also coverage is similar metric to app size – a small change is probably ok, but long term trends are an issue, so in a way it provides a similar type of value.
- And then we come to this. $500. The analysis is a complex bit of code I'm sure, and the company should be able to charge for that, but there isn't compute, (significant) storage, or high SLAs as a necessary part of the product. It feels "wrong" next to these other services.
I think all of these feelings roughly boil down to intuition around the cost of goods sold (COGS). Logic that has already been written has a low COGS, and while that doesn't mean it should be free at all, it does make it hard to justify over being, say, a standalone piece of software that one buys once. Perhaps a way to circumvent this is to go hard on the constant evolution of the platform as Apple changes their technologies.
Maybe this is all from the viewpoint of someone who would likely be on the free plan! And so maybe this is a non-issue, but we'd happily pay for this, it just feels like it's a $50/mo service not a $500/mo one.
This price feels wrong, and I think part of it is the pricing of the other similar sorts of service we use for our app, and that I suspect others use.
Ultimately this service and the others are about improving reliability and quality in some sense, so while different markets I think they are comparable as teams can opt to focus on quality in different areas.
- CI, we pay $100-200 for this, and it obviously consumes a lot of compute resources and needs to regularly. Price feels ~reasonable.
- Crash reporting, we pay <$100 for this. It scales with user base, and while low cost per user this does feel like it has some scale to it. It's also essentially user-facing, so very high uptime requirements.
- Code coverage, $5. It's basically a few database records behind an API with a special interface. Feels like it's worth very little, but fantastic price, worth it. Also coverage is similar metric to app size – a small change is probably ok, but long term trends are an issue, so in a way it provides a similar type of value.
- And then we come to this. $500. The analysis is a complex bit of code I'm sure, and the company should be able to charge for that, but there isn't compute, (significant) storage, or high SLAs as a necessary part of the product. It feels "wrong" next to these other services.
I think all of these feelings roughly boil down to intuition around the cost of goods sold (COGS). Logic that has already been written has a low COGS, and while that doesn't mean it should be free at all, it does make it hard to justify over being, say, a standalone piece of software that one buys once. Perhaps a way to circumvent this is to go hard on the constant evolution of the platform as Apple changes their technologies.
Maybe this is all from the viewpoint of someone who would likely be on the free plan! And so maybe this is a non-issue, but we'd happily pay for this, it just feels like it's a $50/mo service not a $500/mo one.