It's time for that podcast where the hosts don't quite know what they're doing, but they make it work anyway. It's time for FounderQuest. John, I love your shirt. I have the same shirt. That's why I love it. What shirt is that? I can't see. Your microphone is blocking it. Okay, cool. What company is that? Or what? Do you remember? What is the shirt? It's the Creative Process shirt. And I don't remember where I bought it now. Is that?
It might be, yeah. I go there for like dev tees every like six months and just buy a bunch of new ones and throw them on. So yeah, that's probably where. Yeah, it's almost as cool as your flipper shirt. But for those who are listening and aren't right in front of the computer, the creative processor has a big old squiggle.
And then it goes out to a straight line. And so it's basically like what the process is. You're all over the place. You're all over the map. You're trying to figure things out. And then eventually you hone in and now you're ready to go and you're off and rocking. Yeah.
I really like that. I want one too. I was going to say those are like some very tasteful scribbles. Yeah. Yeah. And Josh, I know you have high standards for shirts. You'll appreciate the blend of this particular shirt. It's a nice feeling shirt. It's nice. Yeah.
I do have extremely high standards for shirts. I also have similar high standards too, just so you know. And my dad was like, oh, I got this t-shirt, but I bought a large and it doesn't quite fit me. Do you wear a large? And I was like, yeah. And he's like, okay, here, I'll give it to you. And I was like, well...
I'm not necessarily going to take it. Like, can you just, well, let me check. And it was next level. And I was like, okay, yep. Yeah, I'll take it. That's fine. Yep. We're good. So same thing. Not even a gift. Well, in case you haven't noticed, we have John Nudemaker again with us on the pod today. We're excited to have you with us. Thanks for coming back, John. Love it. I think at this point we can just stop introducing you because you're a regular. Everybody knows your voice now.
Yeah, the third host. The third host, yes. And Josh, you have a bit of news tomorrow. You have some little rugrats heading back to school, right? Your summer's almost over. Actually, today, this morning was the first day. school so we got the whatever got the chalkboards out took some school pictures in the yard and sent them off this is actually a perfect day to come back to the podcast because now the house is quiet for the first time this summer so yeah but they're excited and it's uh
third grade for my daughter and first grade for my son now was he was your son was he doing full day kindergarten or is this the beginning of full day for him uh no he was full day before and same school they're both really familiar with where they're going and we did like the
whatever back to school night last week got to see their classrooms and meet the teachers and everything they get to pick their desks oh that's cool yeah so our school system we don't start until next week we're like the latest in the country i think
Yeah. We are on week three. We had a Wednesday start to the week. So this week is the third week. Last week was the second. The week before that was just a Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, which is... amazing for the first week it's like just enough where they get tired but then they can recover over the weekend and then the last full week was last week and it's first and fourth almost identical as you
and so the you know fourth grader my son he's good to go he's just like yeah i'm with my friends again uh you know first graders she is definitely tired definitely tired but It's fun. Yeah. Our school does that too. Like it's a lighter week this week. And then I think they have Friday off maybe. And then starts full time next week.
Yeah, it's good to ease back into things. You know, when you come back from vacation, you're not 100%, right? You got to get back in the mode. So I think it's cool to do that with the kids too. Yeah. I'm sure it's nice for the teachers as well because they probably have a lot of extra. extra work to do like for the first week getting all the kids organized and i thought you were going to go into like it's nice to ease back into your podcast when you've been off for a month like
You went there. You two recorded a podcast without me. It has been a little while for me. Yeah, it has been a few weeks. Is this really the start of season six? Because I feel like there's been a little bit of a reset over the summer and we don't really have a strategy for picking seasons. It's just like...
when we feel like it's a different season yeah i'm not sure if we're there yet but yeah at some point we will be had the same thought this morning when i was setting up the recording session like oh is this it kind of feels like a new season maybe it's because we've been off for a month so
Maybe this will be episode one, season six. We'll see. Yeah, we'll see. The other option is we might wait because we normally take like the month of December off as a company. And that's always a good opportunity because you can kind of restart a fresh season for a new year.
we'll see what we want to do but yeah we took a little bit of a podcast break because well let's see josh is on vacation and then we had summer slowdown thing and also we've been working really hard on getting alarms done for insights and it's taken a little longer than we expected and so we're heads down on that so yeah it's kind of a confluence of events yeah yeah i just yeah we've been
trying to make the most of the diminished summertime that we have to work as well so I've been like extra focused on trying to get that deep work in and all that yeah we definitely have a cyclical kind of thing happening when you're in the pacific northwest the summers are hard to get a whole lot of work done because the sunshine and the good weather is so tempting i know for me like every day i want to be out of my bike and not in front of the computer yeah so conversely in the winter time
it's much easier to get work done because like ah who wants to be outside like it's dark but two in the afternoon or whatever so it's like ah just hunker down and do some work yeah it works well it works well up here like summers are very low the low tide be outside and vacations and all that and the kids are out of school oh yeah i think we do the same thing it could just be like mentality slash business size also because like box out is similar like december
I'm usually MIA. I'm just, I'm gone. And I mean, the same thing in the summer, we try and plan big, long trips and things like that. It's not that way for everyone because it's kind of like tax season for sales. So the sales side is really busy in the summer because that's when all the renewals are.
first and that kind of time frame but for on the dev side we don't want to break stuff right when people are wanting to renew so we just scoot out and go on trips anyway so summer always ends up slower and like same young kids they're running around it's good to spend time with them and all that kind of stuff so yeah i i gotta i want to try that rv life you got going on over there that's pretty cool i saw your pictures and
looked like you guys had just a blast and how many you were gone for like a while right yeah this was a month or more like 30 days yep but that that was like yeah it was june mid-june july basically Normally, it's like beginning of June, like right when the kids go to school, like we leave like the next week. But we just for various reasons couldn't this year. But we've talked about maybe Oregon, Washington next year. So just throwing that out there. Yeah.
yeah okay so maybe we'll have a live okay now we need to do it just for that i mean i feel like that yeah yep that would be a great idea but the problem is we have to do six weeks so it had to be like at least six maybe eight because it's like we've done almost all the way to the west coast and in six weeks and it was a hustle i mean it was a hustle to get around and we're like we're all the way out there we probably should hit california too
And so then it's really a hustle. So I don't know. We may just be gone all next summer. We'll find out. Well, once you get out here. all the way up to the pacific northwest then you know the next level is take it on the road to iceland right you gotta like cargo lift that bad boy and just that would be cool
Yeah, that'd be cool. I wonder if you could fit that on a ferry, like on the whatever the Puget Sound ferry to Victoria. We've ferried our camper. Yeah. Really? A couple of places where like in Michigan and some other where you basically the only way to get across is to ferry it. So you. you know pull in and on this massive boat and you have a massive camper on it it's weird but it works that's cool yeah yeah we have some pretty good fairies over here so you have no shortage of options
We don't have very many. We have, I think, Ludington, maybe, in Michigan. It's kind of halfway up on the west side of Michigan. There's a ferry there, I think. But, yeah. Yeah. We like the ferry to Canada. You can take it from Seattle or a few of the other coastal. There's a few.
ports that you can get on it and then it goes yeah to various places and then also the san juan islands and other parts of the puget sound it's just it's a really nice area we'll plan on it next summer i'll see you here yeah but
Between now and then, you're going to be raking in the big bucks because you just overhauled your pricing on Flipper. Just about done. We preemptively posted all the articles and stuff just to let's start with that and just see what the reaction is. And then we'll go to the next version, which is, okay, now. start letting customers switch to it and then the next version which is it's all live and you know slowly in a way to like
get it out and get feedback. So it's not just like this shocking thing, but we definitely over engineered it. That's for sure. And I'm okay with that. Because again, pricing is just one of those things that's always sensitive and scary. And so having the control to be able to put anybody on any pricing version for a little period of time and stuff, it makes you feel warm and fuzzy as a developer. Yeah.
Yeah, I was reading the two blog posts. So you posted a blog post about this on the Flipper blog, and we'll put these in the show notes. And then Garrett did a... post on his blog and i was reading yours and then i read his and i loved both of them but yours dove into the why you were choosing the specific pricing and then he
was much more focused on the implementation like even like code examples and i appreciated that as well because yeah we might steal some of that i don't know i was going to say ben and i were just doing our shaping session for the next few cycles, actually like the rest of the year. We realized there's two cycles left in this year for us. If we do that, like MIA in December, we're back to pricing ourselves and we're thinking about that as well. This was timely and I'm sure it'll be helpful.
But yeah, it seems like Garrett's got some pretty flexible modeling going in your internal. It's definitely been painful because going totally changing from, you know, like metered. or usage or like seat to fixed plan it's very different and then all your language and like what i love about garrett is he cares about all the verbiage and so it has to be like well this is seat limited this is not seat limited this is seat limited with a max
This is seat limited without a max and all those kinds of like subtle things that like I'm way too lazy to do. So there's a reason he wrote the tech side and I wrote the business side. Cause I was like.
hand wavy here's what I want to do and then Garrett went hard on it for a while and actually wrote all the hard stuff but I think it's I don't know I think it's in a good place and I feel like it was very intentional to split off business and other and we also very intentionally and it's fascinating but the programmer side is what took off. Like Garrett, he's a stinker. He doesn't have analytics on his blog, which would, I mean, that drives me insane. I can't live without analytics.
He was front page of Hacker News for quite a while and stuff like that, which is cool, I think, from the standpoint of like... when's the last time a ruby post was on hacker news for any period of time and what's funny is he submitted it like the day of and nothing happened and i submitted it the next day and it went to the front page so
I mean, who knows? And I didn't know he had submitted it. I was just like, hey, I'm going to submit it. And I submitted it. And he's like, I already did. And he's like, well, it doesn't matter. And then it popped off over there. So no comments. So he assumes everything was correct.
And no one had any issues. If you get no comments, you know. Of course. Of course, yeah. Yeah, it's perfect. It was perfect. Yeah, it was like functionally perfect. It's like Venus rising from the sea, right? Just fully formed. That's, you know, if you don't get a comment, you know that you're right. It's the most guaranteed way. Someone commenting and saying you're right, you can't even trust that. But if you get no comments, you know you're right.
So yeah, he was kind of like, you know what? He was like, should we post this on the flipper blog? And I was like, here's my gut sense. This is coming back to a marketing thing. And I'm curious what you all think about this as well. But I was like, I don't think that posts. like that do well on company blogs. I get the goal for SEO and the goal for these other things, but
If you're both in it, if you're both owners, whatever, and you're in it for the long run, like it's better. Honestly, I think it's better these days just to build up a personal brand and, you know, send people.
to your company than to actually do it on the company site. Just the stuff that I put on the company site, nothing happens. I mean, it's just nothing because people see a company name and they're just like, I'm not even going to read that. They're just going to talk about how great their thing is, even if it's totally unrelated.
whereas when i put stuff on my personal site then it will do great i've even had posts rejected that were like all i did was like if i had put this on my personal site it would have done great and i've submitted to whatever lobsters or something like that it gets rejected because they're like oh it's a company yeah we've run into that read it and
post yeah because we do a lot of like developer content marketing stuff but i felt the same tension when i write personally write something about the business or that's maybe like not a direct company announcement but Yeah. It's, I don't know. I've seen like the other thing companies I will do if they're large enough, I guess, is have a separate engineering blog, which I've seen a few recently, but you gotta be like.
publishing a lot of engineering posts which is something we actually want to do more at honey badger but i'm not sure if it would make sense for us to have a separate blog so i told him i was like just put it on your site because it will do better there and if it does better that's better for us more people will click the links you know and so
He's been doing that with a few of them recently, like anything that's, it's related to flipper, but, and honestly, that's what I did back in the day on rails tips. It's what I did on ordered lists. It's what, so I'm like.
That thing actually works. I just forgot that it worked and then just was like, well, I'll just put it on the Flipper blog because of whatever. But I'm realizing that I think that's better just to keep that for company related things or business related things, stuff like that.
and then focus more of the engineering stuff or things that would be like, for lack of a better word it's cringe but like lead gen you know like things that are like your goal is you want them to read this and then be like i should go use flipper to do this for those kinds of posts it's way better just on a personal site so that's what he did and i think it has worked well and we did the same thing with
He just posted an associated objects post. And it's also great. And both of those things, I think... Garrett's really good at writing that stuff up and doing the figures and the explanations and all that. He goes through the details a lot more thoroughly than I would. I lose steam and just like, I'm going to ship it, hit a button. But yeah, the business side was definitely like, that was like.
I think everybody right now is SaaS priced out. You think about, even if you have a company that's doing well, there's stuff that you enjoy paying for.
and there's stuff that like you love the product but you feel annoyed every month and that's what just what kind of caused this is i'm like flippers young it's new it's not established like you all or like box out like my other software so like we can play around with this stuff and see what works and what doesn't but i was like i just don't like proceed pricing i just don't like it at all when i'm using software like that and i go to add a person i have to think every time
and be like is it really worth adding them to this product or not or is it really worth sending all of this data to this system if i'm metered on it and the metering is like really trying to find that point of extraction where that's the most the customer will pay. I don't like it. I love the 37 Signals. I was looking at the Basecamp pricing and I was like, screw it. That's what we're doing. I liked it a lot. They do per seat.
but there's a max and i was like that's i like that and again it's different you know they're like there's only so many things a person can click and do and type a message and all that so that makes their product easier to put a maximum on flipper honey badger people will send all the errors in the history of the world or they'll pull the the crap out of your system or send a bunch of telemetry there's things that can get it a little more out of scope
We're much more tied to costs, like the costs of usage in Basecamp does not necessarily equate to exponential increase in what it costs to have that customer, which I'm incredibly jealous of. I would love to have that type of app. But I guess our skill set is just accepting all this data throughput. Yeah. I love that they're like, they could.
go for maximum extraction they have the social proof and all the other things and they don't they're just like look for 300 bucks we can do it and it's worth it to us and it's worth it to you so like let's just let's chop it off there
so that's the idea and also we had started doing like the pro gem where people can install gem that people understand like the sidekick model and stuff like that and the main reason is that like for compliance or adding a new vendor is the thing that's sometimes tricky at a bigger company and adding a new gem is very easy
especially if it's a thousand bucks a year or something like that so we had a couple customers come around that so i was like okay yeah let's just make something and see what happens so we did and then all of a sudden i was like dang i just got a you know a thousand bucks
And I'm like, that's five seats for the whole year all up front. And I was like, that's the other thing that per seat pricing is not real great at is volume and annual kind of stuff. And I was like, I don't like that either. I like. just paying a fixed cost as a business owner i love paying like once i know i love a piece of software and i'm going to keep using it i love paying like a thousand to three thousand bucks and just forgetting about it you get a couple months free
You get maybe some other benefits. I think there's peace of mind in that. And it makes me like that product even more. And I get that with Honey Badger a lot. Like it's very rare that we go over our area quota and then have to upgrade for a month or something like that. It doesn't really happen. And so I feel like.
I feel more joy with that than other products where maybe I go over every month. And then I'm like, oh, not again. Now I've got to spend an hour trying to cut this a little bit. That was the driving force. What's a fair price? And then also what do I get annoyed by and how can I just make that not a thing for any customers that I have? And so that's what drove it. Yeah. Yeah. I liked that you started with what do I appreciate? Cause I think you're a lot like us in that.
regard especially with flipper that you are the customer you're the first customer of your product and and so hopefully what you like your customers will also appreciate and it's cool that you have other businesses that are also customers so you can actually get it from the other side but yeah it seemed like a good way to extend that it helps a little bit
There's just a few that we use this image editor. I think it's called Pintura or something like that. They're like a thousand bucks a year. And I'm like, I pay them immediately every single time. Cause I'm just like, I love the value. I get way more value.
than $1,000. Hopefully none of them listen to this podcast. And I'm like, they're getting a grand. I'm getting a value. Both sides are actually really happy in this scenario. I think that's actually what you want. You want both sides to be really happy. we don't have to be at this place where it's like, well, begrudgingly I'm giving you my whatever, but I don't want to, but I am. So I really liked that model. So that's what I was trying to achieve was basically like,
What's pricing that I would be happy paying for the functionality that I get from Flipper, number one? And then number two, how do I make it easier for people to pay me up front, which is a good thing in a startup? If you have something that's... not crushing it and it's just growing slowly it's good to have that money up front because then you can use it to help grow it faster so those are the i think the main summary points but yeah
yeah i like what you said about the the fatigue the saas fatigue because definitely people are feeling that i think not only with the number of subscriptions that they're paying for every month but also just the past couple years especially in the tech it's been kind of tough on people getting laid off
and trying to cut costs and all this kind of thing. And so you have what you experience then is a bunch of your account manager giving you a call or an email saying, hey, let me talk to you about your usage. And it's like, oh, okay, you want to sell me more, right? And getting...
The screws turned on them. It's like, hey, give us more money. It's like, I don't really want to give you more money. And yeah, we've tried to avoid that kind of feeling with our pricing at Honey Badger, like with the insights thing.
One of the keys was, hey, we really like Splunk's approach to being able to analyze a whole bunch of stuff. We really hate how Splunk likes to bill people, right? Because it's data dog, right? It's just like, how much money can we take from your wallet? And that's not a great feeling. And like you said, you don't really want to.
continue to have a relationship with someone that you feel like you're just being abused by on a monthly or yearly basis. Right. Yeah. I was going to say it's interesting because like for our business, especially we have this heavy, like the usage base, like we can't not charge for usage.
We've tried for years and it didn't work out so well, but at the same time, I think you're dead on the maybe the key is not thinking about the pricing during your day-to-day usage of the product. I think that's. the goal because that's like where for me that's where it gets annoying is like when i have to have those decision or inflection points when i'm just using the product and i'm not in a mode of wanting to evaluate costs or whatever. So I wonder if you are a usage based pricing model.
Maybe the key is finding that the middle point or the midpoint of I'm providing so much value for what you're paying me that you don't your mind doesn't go there when you're using the product, even if you are. technically increasing your costs by whatever, sending more errors or whatever it is. It is harder to do that when you have something like with seats where you're inviting a user, that's a frequent thing you do.
using the product and it's kind of hard to avoid that yeah but i wonder if that's the key is providing over the value yeah when i launched rails kits back in the day and i did the saas rails kit i was like okay what do i price it at
And my motivation was, I want this to be a no-brainer pricing. I want someone to look at the price and they would say, yeah, totally, I get it. I'm going to buy that because it's worth X amount of dollars to me and you're charging one quarter of that or whatever it is. I just wanted people to not have that objection.
and be like, okay, yeah, that's a deal. And I think we've tried to do the same thing with Honey Badger. Although, yeah, usage, having real costs, that's different from a piece of software that you can just ship to someone they run it themselves, right? So yeah, there's some factors there, but that was my goal. i'm trying to remember what the cost what the price was because i actually i remember like looking at your pricing
for rails kits and going through a little bit of the decision process. Like I had considered buying it. I might've actually bought it at one point, I forget, but it was appealing to me at that point, I remember. And I was like, not. At that point, I was not spending money on much software related things too much. I was probably fairly sensitive, but I do, yeah, remember. Well, I got to say as a new insights customer, I really like how you did daily limits because I upgraded.
and then i like blew through my limit because i wasn't paying attention to when i was logging and i was like oh and then i upgraded to like a big limit i don't remember what it was and then i was like oh actually i don't even need this much this is a daily limit i thought it was a monthly limit And once I realized that, I was like, oh, this is awesome. Especially for this kind of stuff where you might really need it at a certain time, but you might not be looking at it most of the time.
But you still want that data going in there. It's okay if it chops off towards the end of the day, like most of the time or something. It's just very practical, pragmatic. I like that a lot for metered pricing. Like I think that's a really thoughtful thing rather than doing this really long.
period just chop it down to like a day or something like that i think that's what it was yep yep it's a day yeah that reminds me ben we should do that for errors when we get you know when we address it yeah think about that yeah Yeah, we wanted to do that. We spent a lot of time thinking about insights pricing and the daily thing came about because, again, my frustration on being on the other end, being a buyer.
And it's like, do I have to pay for so much extra just in case I need it? Or on the other hand, do I have to get cut off on the third day of the month because I'm on a certain plan and now I've used it all up? And it was like, well, how can we avoid that kind of pain with insights? And so let's try daily because if you blow through your daily quota, it's like, oh.
okay, you're probably fine with that because tomorrow's a new day, right? And I'll be back to normal. Or you're like, well, I really need all that. And so you upgrade for that day. And then the next day you can drop back down again. So I'm glad to hear that that's worked for you. I don't know what the right word would be, but a faster feedback loop.
for me as a customer because if i have to wait 30 days or two weeks to get some estimate of like how much data i'm going to send to you and then i sent way too much now i need to go back in i need to cut some data out or i need to up my plan and so like the feedback loop is so far i think probably from the business side it's good because it hooks people in because now they're like well
I'm already committed for this long, so I'm just going to go in. But from the customer side, the daily is so much better because, again, if you mess it up, you know right away. And you have a pretty good idea. Like, you know, within 24 hours, I'm like, yeah, I'm under my limit. I'm cool. I know exactly which plan I'm going to be on and I'm ready to commit to this. So I think that's, it's a really interesting choice. I'm trying to think of anything else that meters.
daily like it's not a common thing so i think it was really thoughtful and i i gotta say i like it personally so awesome yeah yeah i hadn't thought as much about the i mean we thought about it a little bit like of how it helps figure out how much you're going to need because that is that's like the problem the other problem with our pricing model that we've struggled with is how do people know what they're gonna
yeah what they're going to use and that's something i'm still iterating on and i'd love to have it like an actual like useful calculator of some kind that we could put on the pricing page that like helps people figure that out but in reality a lot of times you just don't know So I think that's really a great feedback from you. One random idea when you said that is you could again, throw log range in, get like a standard rails request, a bite size.
and then apply that to like a rate just to be like look if you're a typical rails app that does 10 requests a second and you are logging this type of information this what plan you're going to want to choose that something like that might help i thought i yeah yeah i think so
I like that. Yeah. I'd also like communicating the fact that this is low stakes to get it wrong. I think if we can bake that into our message that this is what you should expect, but if you get it wrong, you've got a day, a worst case. and you can try again the next day or whatever yeah yeah i was talking to a customer who was just getting started and they were really concerned about the costs of insights in particular
And they're like, but I don't want to show up at the end of the month and have a $10,000 bill from you guys. And I'm like, well, that's not how I work. You can, you set your limit. And then if you hit the limit, well, then.
you're done. We're not going to charge you more than whatever you agreed to do. And if you decide, oh, wait, I don't want to be done, well, then you can choose that you want to spend more and get more quota. He was starting to feel better about that. He's like, OK, but what if I add the fifth user?
And then all of a sudden, you're going to charge me $10,000. And I'm like, no, no, no, no. That's not how I do it. We don't do pre-seat pricing. And I'm thinking I can imagine the various vendors that he's dealt with in the past. And I can picture the names in my head about who has charged.
this ridiculous per seat pricing or who has given him the surprise bill at the end of the month because of the amount of data that he sent you know and so i think by the end of the call he was like oh okay i'm feeling feel a bit better about that because yeah we're not here trying to take advantage of you we're just trying to make sure
that we make a profit and that you have a great product, you know. Once you get the people in the same room, you can really convince them that, but I think like John's right that like people are just expecting to just be bled. and who wants to get on a call and spend an hour talking for some demo or something to be hit by a, whatever, $2,000 bill the next month.
I mean, to your point earlier, like you don't need to maximize the amount of revenue you get from each customer, right? You can find a happy place where you're making a good profit and your customers are happy to pay you because they're getting good value. I think when you have investors or when you have other things.
going on that are pushing you to grow grow grow that that's why you get in that scenario because then it goes all the way through but like when you have whatever you want to call all of our businesses i would call them sanely run i don't we don't have to call them lifestyle or anything like that but like
Calm. There we go. That's a good one. Yeah. I'll use calm. So like when you have a calm company, I'm like box out hasn't changed pricing in five years. Like all our competition has. We're at this point now, like we're not the highest price solution anymore.
And part of me is like, well, maybe we should up our prices just so people understand. Like we do feel like we're better. But the other side of me is like, again, if you can get someone who's just this value that you're getting is so much more that you're just like, yeah, just add to cart. It's fine. Like I'm going to do this. Our biggest plan is like 2,400 a year, I think, or something like that, which is like, I mean, that's not that big. Like there's schools that, I mean.
massive schools, Notre Dame, et cetera, that use us. And some of them pay more for custom stuff. And like, that's fine. But like for most people, they can spend the same amount as somebody else and get the same result as like a top tier school or something like that. That's a huge.
deal for them and fits in their budget. So it's just about having some way for them to get started. So like free trial or a low plan and then some larger plan. I think the one thing we've talked about, I don't know if you guys, I guess you kind of do this because you have. Metered pricing but like we've talked about having like a monster plan like a plan like nobody would buy just because
Maybe some people will buy it and that might, and it will make sense for them. It'll have the value in it and they have the budget and they just didn't know that they could put the budget towards that. But just so people understand, like, look, we're not the cheapest.
We just happen to be a very well run company and we're all doing fantastic. We don't need to charge you this crazy amount because we don't have growth estimates that are getting set by a board that's occupied by other people. It's just us.
I've been thinking about that a lot. And that's what I've been thinking about with Flipper too, is I'm like the same thing. I'm like, I just want something that's fair. The only two costs that can increase on that are basically the, the meterable stuff, which would be how often do they pull to get synchronizing?
the data back and forth and how often do they push the telemetry data to us and if those two things are the two things well we can get around that by just putting limits in place like you're talking about That's a very easy problem to solve to say like, look, you can only pull us every 60 seconds. And if you want updates that are faster than that, just use a webhook.
that's really easy we have that already you'll get instantaneous updates it's the right way to do it don't just set all your thousand servers sitting there every 10 seconds hammering us like that doesn't make sense and the same thing with telemetry we can set limits on how much telemetry we receive but even that the biggest thing is like not receiving the request it's more like the crunching of the data i was looking recently like
We've been storing all the telemetry data for all time. We haven't shut any of it down or actually enforced any limits. We store it for free people, paid people, all the same. and so again i'm lazy so we were like okay i looked at the table and it's like okay the bill's starting to get to like five six hundred bucks a month which not a big deal except for this app and the size i was like that's kind of more than it should be it should probably be in the 100 or 200
range and i was like okay we're getting charged based on storage and all of our raw data was at like three to five hundred gigabytes or something like that and i'm like it's just raw data we don't need we've compressed it all into hourly aggregates
and it's like the raw data is like 300 some 500 some gigabytes the compressed data is like 200 meg at that point you're like well if you just delete all the raw data because you don't need it anymore or put it in cheaper storage like s three or some other file system, whatever.
then you have immediately dramatically reduced the cost of it and therefore the cost that you have to incur or pass on to the customer and so i'm like these are all these problems are very solvable problems and i would rather have be forced to have to solve them by having a lower price that's a great value than to just be like, I'm going to be lazy and just pass on more costs so that I don't have to truncate data or aggregate or think about stuff or learn ClickHouse or whatever.
Yeah, I think what you said about limits is key. And Josh kind of alluded to this earlier. Like when we started out, we didn't really have limits on some areas that drove a lot of our costs. And we had to learn the hard way that limits are a good thing and charging for usage. which is a good thing. But over time, we've learned that whatever new feature we deploy, it's got to have a limit. We never deploy something that's unlimited. And maybe the limit is high.
and at a point where we think no one will touch it right or it's low and we've already planned to give people a way to buy more. For example, like our, you were talking about polling. Like we have a limit on the number of poll requests you can make to our API. I can't remember what it is right now. It's whatever per minute, right? Or per hour or whatever. And for 99. 9% of our user population, it's fine. They never notice. They use the API and whatever, but for like literally three customers.
they've been like, hey, this limit is pretty low. We're trying to do this and we can't do it because your API is not allowing us to read data fast enough. And I'm like, okay, we can bump you up. But if we didn't have that limit, then we would not even know. We could be spending tons of resources on serving someone who's polling every second for no good reason. So, yeah.
That's key. I think to help keep your costs down and keep your pricing reasonable. Lately, we've been trending towards starting with the low end. for limits because even if you're not going to charge for more like you can always expand it later and it's like people are getting something new you can write another blog post about it and be like we're increasing the limit for everyone
whatever. Merry Christmas. Agreed. We even had some of those discussions on like how we break down some of the pricing and we're like, ah, I don't know. Cause we ended up the tiers, the fixed tiers will have like.
seat limits just because it is additional cost to us with more developers because we do personal environment synchronization. And so like when they're working on their laptop, they're making requests to us and stuff like that. From that standpoint, we're like, okay, there is some factor.
costs. So I think we, I don't remember what we ended up doing. Maybe it was like 10, 25 and 50 or something. Everybody was currently like, I don't think we have anybody who has 50 seats and we might have one or two customers who have 50 seats, but most of the people are lower than that. And so we're like, it's, that's a future problem.
people you know hit that limit like it's really easy they'll say hey i hit this limit and it's kind of like that aws style aws has hidden limits all over the place and then you talk to a rep and you get a price and you get it worked out and so i feel like that model of like here's a low limit
and then you can customize it and raise it up it makes a lot of sense and we went back and forth on the number of seats and we're like you know what i was like let's just start low same as what you guys are just talking about let's start low and we can always raise it that's fine if we find that we've done something wrong but when you lower it that's people don't like that as much and i wouldn't like that as much and i think
The only other thing that we did is we incentivized yearly plans. I was like, look, I want people to pay yearly. So I'm like, if you want the, let's say it's one, two, and three, if you want the middle retention for analytics, you can pay yearly.
And then we'll give you a higher retention for that. And I think that's cool. Yeah. Yeah, I like that. I thought that, yeah, I wrote that down when I saw that. I thought that was really cool. Because, you know, it's standard to offer like a discount, like two months off or something. But I hadn't seen like actually. including extras in the annual. And it makes total sense. Like that's a great incentive and I'm sure it'll get more takers for annual pricing. That's the hope. I don't know.
That might've been a shower thought. I don't know. I was just like, all of a sudden I was like, what if we like, cause again, I sold like one pro gem and right as soon as that happened, it's like today I learned, I was like, I just got all the seat payments basically up front.
how can i do this more i was like mikey likes it and i was like uh okay and then we were right then we were talking about all the pricing stuff and i was like gary what if we up the retention periods for like analytics like we'll store instead of a day we'll store
week or a month if you buy yearly because i'm like at that point they're committing to us i'm happy to give them more like they've made a commitment it's it's fair on both ends and obviously we do two months like box out does three months free because we're like you know what it's a lot of schools
Schools have three months off. We don't want them to think about canceling and re-upping and all that kind of stuff. We'll just give them three months off so they don't even think about it during the summer when they're not using it. Yep. that's cool yeah i'd almost want to frame that like i like pitch it as like you get the summer for free like schools out schools out on pricing or whatever yeah okay i'm gonna steal that i'm gonna write that down
Yeah, please do. Yeah. Glad I could contribute something because I'm actually writing notes and are shaping. pitch for our pricing because we'll think about some of this but yeah i think this is good i did want to say just one an extra benefit when you start with the low limits is that it also forces the people who care get in touch with you like you'll hear from them if they're hitting a limit and oftentimes those conversations wouldn't happen if you just started with
a super high limit that no one is everyone's gonna like obviously so sometimes you get those conversations and then it helps you figure out like where should this limit actually be yeah and another bit with the starting low and going high later versus the other way around i think that hits into the loss aversion thing. It's an economic thing where people are much more sensitive to losing $10 than they are to gaining $10 or whatever it is. So yeah, definitely start low.
We did that also with like actors, like the number of actors you could add to an individual feature. Way back in the day, I set the limit at like 100. I was like, I'm just going to pick a number.
set it to 100 this is like my personal goal and then we'd have people who like i'm trying to import and i've got like 5 000 actors so then we basically just made it so we could up the limit for certain people and stuff and like over time we just have naturally up up the limit so we had to do that less often
But it's just like little things like that, especially where it's like something where someone might shoot themselves in the foot or cause problems. Like you can just put a low limit in and be like, look, just trust me. probably not going to want to go over it. And if you go over it, you're going to want to talk to me so you understand why you're going over it. So that, and that's, it's happened. I mean, we've had people reach out and they're like, Oh, we want to go.
we want to add more actors. And then I'm like, Hey human, nice to meet you. And you get to like talk with them and that's really fun. They get a good touch point. Cause most of the time, again, developers are trying to avoid talking to you because they think you're good. They're going to get squeezed, you know? Right.
Having those points like where you force someone into a conversation, especially with developers, I think is just essential. We can't get people on the phone any other way unless they want something from us. And so, you know, create more of those opportunities. Yeah. We actually had a bug one time.
that like made it camera what it was but like so people had to reach out because they're like oh like something is just really not and we're like we should just do this every month add this bug every month just to like start meeting the customers because it wasn't terrible it was just like just enough that people were like
yeah i need to let them know about this we were really tempted about like bug driven development for like a little while just and it was like no we can't do that but maybe once in a while we'll see so yeah that's a good point That's hilarious. I think the takeaway for this episode is if you want to be a company's favorite customer, just call them up out of the blue and say, hey, I want to chat to your dev team and talk about the product. They will love you forever.
At least on DevTools, because DevTools is so hard. Like on other, you know, again, it's totally different on BoxOut because everything we do there, it's magical to the end user. They're just like, I don't even... comprehend how that can happen so there it's less i would say it's less where we're like yes please talk to us because we get a lot of people who are like well i'm sharing a team password with everyone and it's annoying for this reason and we're like
Just don't do that. We let you add as many people as you want. Oh, really? How do I do that? You know, it's like, so it's, there's definitely, you know, your audience. So like if your audience is devs, you should definitely break stuff once in a while and force them to converse with you and have low limits. Yep. Make them talk to you. Nice. Yeah. Well, and as we all know, devs are the best customers. Yep. Yeah. They're like a totally different species of customer. But the best one.
yeah like when you make them happy you know you've really done something well so yeah well i mean it's a lot yeah exactly really hard fish to catch like it's like you know this is not this is not like some trout this is like shark i don't know What's the rare? Yeah, something rare. I did want to ask, so least favorite pricing of all time. Do you all have any? Does anyone come to mind or someone that you're willing to?
Throw under the bus. I have a least least favorite pricing. I'm not going to say the name, but you can guess who it is because it's someone that we all know. But a company that prices. not only per user like per seat but also has different kinds of users. Like they charge one rate for someone that gets to log in and see a chart, but then they charge a different rate for someone that logs in and sees like more charts, I bet, or whatever it is, like a tier based on level of access.
well that like metered usage it's just like i feel like it's gutting yeah i mean i again like i i've used i'll i'll say the name because i don't care but i've used new relic forever And I loved them. And they put me on a free plan like way back in the day.
i think it was lou himself put me on a free plan just because i was writing up and having graphs and rails tips and stuff and i was on that plan forever and then they're like hey you need to pay and i was like no problem i've had a free plan for so long this is fair and this is right and then it was like i'd like to add a second user oh that'll be like a thousand
And I was like, what? I'm like, uh, okay. I mean, that's the kind of stuff like when it's, you're talking about tiered and then also the data coming in is also getting, it's just when you add all those things up. And then you're like, you're just, yeah, it's super frustrating. That's, I think that was, I want to say five or six months ago, maybe a little more now when I went through that.
okay, this is actually, we're going to change flippers pricing because that was kind of like the straw that broke the camel's back. I was just like, no, I'm not going to, I don't want anyone else to use my software and feel this ever. So we're going to find a way. Cause we talked about maybe doing analytics as a separate thing based on how much data is coming in.
in addition to the purse seat because that's what other people do. And I was just like, no, like I, yeah. Anyways, I had a feeling it was, so I thought I'll just take the blame off you. It's my fault, New Relic. You can come after me or just change your pricing and then we'll talk good news.
Exactly. Exactly. And John? So John is also going with New Relic? Yeah. Okay. So for me, New Relic's a good one, but Netlify, I will also... say the name we use Netlify i like a lot about Netlify but the thing i don't like is their pricing and we have even left and come back like grudgingly because we like the product so much or it works so well for us otherwise and we've had to like
basically hack our usage a little bit around the pricing. But their pricing model is seat based. Like many of their competitors, they're not unique in that. But they also add a component of Git contributors. are added to the seats, but they have it. So basically if you have, say you have a GitHub repository, that's like building. So in our case, we have a middleman site that like builds our website and our blog, and we're using just like Markdown blog posts or whatever. Anyone who has.
a Netlify account that can get into the UI and use it directly is a seat but then also anyone who contributes like anyone who opens a pull request and gets it gets merged basically is a seat for that month which I I appreciate that it's not like just added as a seat forever or they're not charging for your entire GitHub organization, but it feels like the next level down of like, how can we like just capture everyone who is like doing anything like touching this repo?
In our case, the real slap in the face was when we got billed for our bot user on GitHub that we have that just makes a commit occasionally that updates version numbers, for example, because we display the latest SDK versions on our docs site, for example. We're getting charged like whatever, like $25 a month for a bot that is just updating like a JSON file once a month. And yeah, it's just, it's like super frustrating. And then we have like other people who like.
write blog posts and might submit a pr so every time like anyone who's not already on the team submits a pr for a blog post we get charged for them too. That's my rant. It's pretty galling that their business is serving a static webpage and they charge per user who puts that webpage up on their servers. That's just ridiculous.
just not yeah it's not tied to reality yeah and you have to believe that like somewhere someone did just did not expect this use case that's what i like to think and if we just reached out maybe they would be like oh geez okay well we'll just give you like
whatever, a hundred dollar credit every month or something to fix this problem. It reminds me of like the Netflix sharing and the proliferation of that. And it's like, it sounds like that's maybe why they added it. It was like, well, they just have one person in there to like approve things, but they've got a hundred people over here in army.
doing their stuff but i'm like for us i'm like even though it's on flipper i'm like we have a few people who like do a shared one to get under the like to get one seat and I literally reach out and I'm like, just add your whole team and I'll charge you 20 bucks. I don't care, but please just use the product right.
Like, I don't care if that's all you want to pay. I'll just do that just because. But don't use the product wrong because then you're just feeling pain and you're going to associate that pain with it. And that's another reason why I'm just like, OK, we're just going to do fixed plans. You know, it's fine. Yeah, totally. Yeah, well, I did reach out to Netlify, and as I recall, they did not help me with any of this. So, yeah, I guess Netlify fits your pricing.
Did you build a headless CMS or did you use one that's out there? I'm just curious. I'm actually using Statamic, which is a Laravel-based CMS, and it is awesome. I got to say, Rails doesn't have anything that compares that I've seen, and I wish it did. I do like Rails apps, but I am on it. My first production Laravel app is running, which we're now using with Insights, which is cool, so we have something to monitor.
But yeah, it's cool. It's like all flat file by default still. So it's, it's the familiar, like whatever. It's a little bit like Jekyll, except it has a CMS on top of it and it can do like hybrid style. You can serve an actual like dynamic website with it. Cause it's Laravel or you can generate, it does like static generation and you can deploy it that way. Cause I pronounce everything wrong. And so like in my head, it's always been statomatic and yeah.
that's same here actually it's that statimatic was was like the one i had to like correct but i'm pretty sure that's not right do you know what addison says and how addison reads it ben satanic It is a strange name, which is, I don't know if that helps or hurts it. Maybe it's one of those things where it's quirky enough that it's like, I mean, we're talking about it right now for like,
Yeah. 10 minutes on a podcast. So who's the evil genius here? And that makes me think that our next podcast episode just needs to be all about product naming. You know, we talked about pricing today. Next product naming. Yeah, because we're geniuses at product naming, obviously, with Honey Badger. I just watched Despicable Me 4 and there's a Honey Badger in it. And I thought of you for like a good 10 minute period.
while watching the show last Friday night with the kids. That's awesome. Yeah. That's very cool. Cool. Well, any more wise words you want to drop on us, John, about pricing? No. I mean, just make it so that it works for both sides, you know?
I feel like that's people just... And honestly, people, again, overthink it. I was overthinking it for a long time. Finally, I was like, screw it. Let's just do a couple... fixed tiers three tiers are so easy people like looking at you know am i small medium or large some people are going to buy large because they want the best some people are going to buy small because they want to get started with the cheapest and most people are going to go in the middle because
Well, they don't want to buy the cheapest or the most expensive. So I just think it's easy to process. Don't make people think about your pricing. So just make it simple. And if it's simple, then they won't think about it a ton. That's where I landed. Love it. Cool. Well, this has been FounderQuest. Find us at foundrequestpodcast.com. Go rate us and review us and go check out John's new pricing when it drops and sign up for Flipper and sign up for Honey Badger. We'll catch you next time.
FounderQuest is a weekly podcast by the founders of Ani Badger. Zero instrumentation, 360-degree coverage of errors, outages, and service degradations for your web apps. If you have a web app, you need it. Available at honeybadger.io. Want more from the founders? Go to founderquestpodcast.com. That's one word. where you can access our huge back catalog of episodes. FounderQuest is available on iTunes, Spotify, and other purveyors of fine podcasts. We'll see you next week.