[lewisl9029]

Seeing a lot of comments trying to dispute the claim that "individual developers do not pay for tools". The claim does invite these kinds of disputes since it's so absolutist, but I do believe there is some truth to it, at least if we take it as a generalization (rather than a literal statement).

Anyone who's either worked at a developer tooling company or tried to sell to developers themselves (I personally did both, having worked at CircleCI in the past and now building my own developer tooling product at https://reflame.app, Show HN launch thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33134059) can probably back the observation that we individual developers are notoriously reluctant to open our wallets, even for products that we love and use daily, despite our high disposable income relative to professionals in other markets.

Gonna share a few of my own hypotheses for some of the contributing factors as comments below for discussion.

Would be fun to see folks share their own! Especially if you've seen successful strategies for how someone might be able to overcome these hurdles to selling products to individual developers at scale (a topic near and dear to my heart these days)!

[lewisl9029]

Competition for developer tooling products is _fierce_, possibly more so than any other industry, precisely because we really seem to love spending our free time building slightly different versions of the tools we use that suit our preferences better, sometimes before we even try to Google if that slightly different version already exists.

Again, I'm totally guilty of this myself, since Reflame started as a side project initially to scratch my own itch, and I can't claim to have done an exhaustive search on the problem space before I started.

This results in a vicious cycle where every product, however innovative it might be at its inception, gets quickly commoditized by dozens of similar products immediately following any signs of traction, so they end up having to shift to competing on price eventually.

Combined with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33691132 means any product that isn't available for free then eventually rots into obscurity due to the unfair distribution advantage of "free" in this market. Thus they are forced to offer a free version themselves and the cycle continues.

[lewisl9029]

We get so many developer tooling products thrown at us, either for free or dirt cheap, that over the decades it's conditioned us to assign much less monetary value to developer tooling products compared to what a simple opportunity cost analysis would yield, given the high monetary value of our time.

I certainly suffered from this myself to a rather extreme degree in the past, having categorically refused to pay a single cent for anything I used to build side projects with, until I started to seriously think about pricing for my own product. Eventually I realized throwing money at almost any problem where it could buy me more free time should be a no-brainer considering how highly I value my free time.

Tangentially, I think there's an interesting analogue in here to what Steam did in the PC games market, but I digress...

[lewisl9029]

Developers know much more than other professions about how much SaaS products cost to run in terms of infra (i.e. very little for most products), so are much more likely to anchor on infra costs when considering whether a price is reasonable during purchasing decision than basically any other group.

Most SaaS are priced completely independently of infra costs (or any other costs really), but we are much less likely to accept products priced with high margins on top of obviously low infra costs, even though that doesn't represent nearly the full cost of running a SaaS (which consists mostly of payroll due to how high our salaries typically are haha...).

We also like to justify this line of thinking by the argument that "well, I can build this myself in an afternoon" (significantly underestimating the real ongoing time investment required to build and maintain a SaaS product, even seemingly trivial ones) or "I can write some bash scripts and put this on the VPS that I'm already running anyways" (undervaluing our own time).

[zamubafoo]

I completely agree with you but it's surprising that the biggest factors aren't being brought up.

Most people won't pay for a ton of small services since it adds up. There is a minimal threshold to pass to make online transactions financially reasonable, making the pricing models make little sense for most services. Given that most cheap services (ie. those at or below $5/mo) don't have large infrastructure costs, it's an even harder sell. Not to mention that sometimes people rather watch movies or television than get tools to make them more productive.

This is doubly compounded when you look at opportunity costs. With the amount of software that can be self hosted, the costs isn't just the comparison of having the tool or not or even other developer focused offerings, but instead having this tool (or access to it) versus any other tool that can be self-hosted (including those that might not exist yet).

Also, lets say we spend $5/mo, well for that we can host our own server which can easily be used for more than one purpose (with WireGuard now even the smallest VPS can be used to saturate most home links and bypass CGNAT easily). Increasing the monthly spending just increases the amount of opportunities.

This of course doesn't touch the elephant in the room which is privacy.

For the regular user privacy isn't a huge deal for these small services. For the average reasonable user that doesn't upload sensitive data, at worst it would be something like a personal photo being seen.

On the other hand as a software developers using these tools is a lot more complicated. Licensing, copyright, and possible work contracts start to matter. If the service interfaces with code (like Kite or GitHub Co-pilot) then you get into a some serious murkiness due to the fact that you don't really know what they are doing with it on their end. Even the things like telemetry and what type of data is being sent back matter in corporate environments.