Re:uBlacklist – Block specific sites from appearing in Googl...
by pitched on Friday June 10, 2022 @12:38PM
(#31696427)
Scraping and building their index probably costs way more than querying it. The way that db would scale is very friendly to replication (read your own writes isn’t anywhere near required for example) so the number of queries (times cost per query) needed to match the indexing costs is probably very, very high. I bet the 10$/month cost is meant to cover scraping and indexing costs, not the queries.
Re:uBlacklist – Block specific sites from appearing in Googl...
by CrendKing on Friday June 10, 2022 @06:09PM
(#31699925)
> I'm either overpaying
The company is aiming to have many users that everyone is overpaying with their $10, so that they make money, thanks to the reduced marginal cost. And the company hopes that the $10 is low enough that enough everyone knows they are overpaying they are still willing.
At the moment, I'm either overpaying (because I perform less than $10 worth of queries per month), or the company is losing money on me. And with the existence of the free tier, the business model can only work if most paying users are effectively overcharged significantly. Right now they are operating at a loss in both tiers, if their pricing page is to be believed.
One would hope that costs amortize better with more users (e.g. scraping is pretty much fixed cost regardless of the number of users, but maybe that's already negligible) to push the price low enough for pay-per-use to not feel spendy. (When did you last think about how much one toilet flush costs you?)