The membership fees almost pay for themselves just in preventing me from going into the store and impulse buying something on a shelf once a month.
As far as Amazon Prime, I have to believe the price of shipping is built into the products, and the membership is for other psychological and behavior control reasons.
Is part of this social network price the same thing. A cost to make it exclusive, acts as a bit of a spam filter. Then after having sunk money into it, you feel the need to make it worthwhile. I never think "ive been watching too much prime I better get my value out of netflix this month" but a communication tool might be different.
Consistently great quality + deals.
Right now they're selling a Costco-sized box of 1,500 Legos for $40.
Man, you can't just put information like this out there. I can't be trusted with this knowledge.
Based on observing Prime members I feel most people would be much better off without the subscription.
I hate paying for shipping and most of the time the items in my cart are < $25 at which point I ask myself if I really need this item. If I really need it, I go to the target/Wal-Mart near my place since they always price match. Not renewing my prime membership has been by very liberating!
Amazon $119, 5% cash back on Amazon CC, Prime Now has minimums, includes Whole Foods, has music and video included. Video is $108 by itself.
Walmart Grocery $98. (their CC is a 1 year bonus, not forever)
Costco $60-120 (120 price gets you 2% yearly cash back.)
Target Shipt $99, 5% back on Redcard, free Debit Redcard is all thats needed for free standard shipping, shipt is for same day like Now.
At the moment upgrading from 2day/nextday to same day costs around $100/year.
Netflix is in the content delivery business, for now. Hence they have to charge full price. If, and when their business model changes to become advertisement driven, you will see changes in the prices charged to end users.
Instead, I can think "oh hey I need to get a shoe horn, the heels on the uppers of the slip-ons I wear to church are getting funky" or "ah crap, I forgot to stop and get a new belt on the way home and this one is getting pretty loose on the last notch and I don't think this synthetic material is going to be happy if I punch a new hole" or "instead of driving to 6 stores hoping to find filters for my air purifier, I can buy 2 on Amazon right here on the toilet and be good for the next 2 years" and "my xlear nasal spray is about empty here at work and this heat is really drying my nose out, I'll just order another now instead of waiting until I go to the grocery Saturday" and "I need another USB C cable, this one is starting to get pretty stressed, I'll order one on Amazon instead of driving miles out of my way to go to Walmart or Best Buy hoping they have one".
Those are this week's purchases. All things I needed, all things I would have had to buy somewhere, all things I got a 1$ credit for which I will use towards eBooks I would have purchased either way.
Or last week when I ordered a tofu press, I have no idea where to buy a tofu press in the real world but wasting gobs of paper towels and using books just wasn't doing it for me.
It's not like I opened Amazon in a moment of boredom and said "let's see what I should waste money on today".
Related, I went to buy a shoe stretcher on Amazon. Had to buy 3 before I got one that wasn't complete garbage.
I'd have gone to someplace local but none of the local places have much inventory for quality goods anymore either...
For me Amazon is still a net win in regards to convenience, but there are a lot of things I just won't buy.
Heck for a little while earlier this year the official Sonicare page was somehow taken over by people selling knock-off replacement heads, all the links from the manufacturers verified page went to obviously fraudulent misspelled products.
Yeah for me it's mostly books (digital and physical), Amazon basics stuff and stuff I can't get anywhere locally (that I know of) like a tofu press or hard to counterfeit stuff like my televisions/an iPad Air 2/my reconditioned vitamix.
Besides, I don't think I've ever re-read an eBook. If I think I'll refer to something again I buy it in print.
A system in which a poor person making $30k/year and spends $500/year on products or content advertised via Facebook versus a rich person who makes $1M/year and spends $10k on products/content via facebook is not exactly progressive. The poor person ends up paying 1.6% of their income, while the rich person spends 0.1%.
The poor person spends 16X of their takehome earnings than the rich person, not exactly progressive.
[1]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising/2018-19_Report
You MUST have localized pricing for these types of apps. We're going to cut our pricing for India, and basically all developing nations.
Students too... if you have a university email we'll give you a discount on top of your normal region-specific discounts.
It's a fools errand otherwise. These users will just NOT convert.
That's the cost to jump the waitlist, not the ongoing price for what will be (he hopes) the majority of users. Back when Facebook was Ivy-league only, there were TONS of students I knew who would have paid to get access. As it gets less exclusive the price will come down or become free
That's fairly country-dependant - I actually sent some feedback to Cloudflare expressing my disappointment with their pricing - it's currently 5.30 USD in my country with 20% lower purchasing power than the USA.
EDIT: I logged out and back in and it looks like it let me in without paying...
And they need volume to make it work. So this pricing seems like a big mistake to me.
Yeah, not a big fan of this. You could buy very nice cloud hosting for $12.99 a month, and run your own instance of a federated social network like Mastodon.
I stood up a Mastodon instance and invited a bunch of my friends. Only like 3 of us use it, but it's up and connected to the greater Fediverse.
Google+, now's your time to shine!
How can he expect to create a platform of honest people if he is dishonest from the point of account creation?
This is not the way to do it.
If they were just to give accounts out free immediately they would be inundated and the servers might not be able to cope.
This allows them to grow the service organically with paying subscribers supporting the "freeloaders".
Hope that clears it up.
Current wait list: 60,000 people (estimated hold time 30 days) but you can jump the queue for $12.99/mo or $100/yr.
Done. Honest. Transparent.
The site's current account flow is infected with dark patterns and turns off those familiar with them, like me.
Perfect great!
Imagine it’s intentional and a pretty effective way of doing business
Now lets just critique why it isn’t a luxury brand
I can easily afford this product myself but I don’t want to pay for a social network if a portion of my friends/contacts are priced out.
But Facebook's model, for instance, also prices people out. I am entirely unwilling to use Facebook because I consider it far too expensive. True, I'm paying with data rather than cash, but it's still paying. From my point of view, $12.99/mo is actually cheaper (assuming that paying that means I'm not going to be datamined).
Charging a high price for a luxury brand is a fine business model but I wouldn’t consider a product accessible to only some socioeconomic groups to a be a Facebook competitor (as indicated in the article).
* Netflix here starts at $2.8 for the cheapest (mobile only, single screen) plan and has its highest plan (4K, four screens) at $11.2 a month. Netflix is considered so expensive that account sharing among a few people is quite common.
* Amazon Prime (with two day shipping plus Prime Video and Prime Music) costs about $14 a year.
* A print newspaper subscription of any major national newspaper would cost about $2.8 or even a lot lesser per month.
* An Audible subscription (one free credit a month) costs $2.8 a month, with lower prices on audiobooks and discounts on them.
* Some premium news publications cost about $30-$45 a year.
I'm not saying that this is similar to Netflix or Amazon or a national newspaper, but it's more about how the more popular as well as niche/premium services have priced themselves and how people perceive value. Comparatively, this $12.99/month or $100/year social network focused on news seems like it's meant for some sections of first world inhabitants. It could've probably done better with a currency adjusted or purchasing power parity specific rate. For example, Cloudflare WARP+ costs about $0.97 a month (compared to $4.99 a month in the US).
Having talked about the pricing, the UI doesn't look great either. I saw a list of groups to choose from and the page looked like it was built more than a decade ago. It ought to look like a modern website (with more bells and whistles) if it wants to command more than premium rates. Even Facebook's site, which I think looks outdated, cluttered and ugly, looks better in comparison.