Ask HN: What software products do you find expensive? - r_singh
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soulchild37
I have a feeling that you are asking this question to find a product idea to
work on and compete with cheaper price, I would advise against using lower
pricing as the first strategy because it might become a race to the bottom.

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r_singh
Sure, you're right. But let's be fair, if you're a software engineer who
downright doesn't want to take a job and doesn't want to do down the VC route
and doesn't want to be a freelancer. What options does he/she have to make a
living?

Start a sustainable business that reaches profitably quickly. And one of the
ways of doing so, without much capital, is to provide a competent product a
lot cheaper than some company exploiting their customer's is doing.

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soulchild37
Same here, your description fits me exactly lol.

I have several apps/books making me little money every month (few hundred ish,
not enough to cover living expenses yet, I am still working on it), it's okay
to take the route of competing on price, but you will eventually lose to VC
backed company which can provide their app for free or below operating costs
as they have a lot money to burn. And offering lower than market price might
make potential audience feel that your offering quality might not on par (eg:
Walmart).

My advice would be to provide more value than existing offering or just
downright give more shit/care about customers, you would be surprised how many
software companies out there doesn't give a shit about customers / uses
automated chat bot to reply support ticket (Google, I am looking at you).
Replying to customer as a genuine person has a lot more impact than using the
generic PR-ish polite sentences.

This is just my advice, of course you can try to compete with price, no harm
trying it first!

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r_singh
Fore sure soulchild, I agree with you. Being from India, I think it's my first
instinct to just try and compete on the price. I'm gonna keep what you said it
mind, it also reminds me of SmugMug's story.

I'm gonna try and find your apps too from the link in your profile.

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Sembiance
Amazon Web Services and other cloud vendors. The amount of traffic and
processing power a single dedicated server can provide is astonishingly
cheaper than the cloud.

I understand that the cloud provides additional software products, services
and flexibility to scale quick, but you pay for it.

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juangacovas
Yeah. The only thing I miss from bare metal server setups is the managed
redundancy some clouds offer (massive RAID cabinets, etc).

But on most projects, if you plan for contingencies you can do well on bare
metal using HAProxy for Load Balancing, database replication, lsyncd for some
filesystems, etc. AWS is really a good commodity but more and more people
complain on price ;P

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altairiumblue
Alteryx - limited functionality, doesn't scale, can't debug properly. But they
have a great sales team I suppose.

Also SAS.

It amazes me how much money some companies are willing to spend on products
that are worse than their open source alternatives.

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r_singh
Thanks for these two answers, I was hoping this would get more upvotes!

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pr07ecH70r
Matlab

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sgillen
To add to this: Simulink and select other matlab toolboxes (Which btw cost
extra). I think base matlab can be supplanted very well with scientific python
these days.

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pr07ecH70r
Basically every additional module costs extra (lot extra). What Python modules
would you suggest?

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altairiumblue
Depending on your use case - numpy, pandas, scipy, matplotlib, statsmodels.
Also check out R - you may or may not prefer it to Python, especially if
you're coming from Matlab.

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sgillen
And to add on, octave is a good open source replacement for base matlab with
near identical syntax.

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limw
Database software?such as Oracle.

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suhaskale
AutoCAD and other products from Autodesk

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selmat
Splunk

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r_singh
Didn't know about them, thanks!

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arthurcolle
IDA Pro

