HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

>25 dollars a month for solo projects

>125 dollars a month per seat for companies

That's.. irregular. I really have nothing nice to say about this model, so I'll just leave a really good conf talk here. The part around 8:30 is really pertinent to this situation. https://youtu.be/VBwWbFpkltg

⬐ _query

Just to clarify: The basic version of IHP is free and open source. The IHP Pro subscription is only if you want some closed source features.

IHP users that built business critical apps with IHP actually liked it very much that we've introduced the subscription. It gives people more confidence that the framework will still be there in the longterm future.

You can find some more thoughts on this here: https://ihp.digitallyinduced.com/blog/6392ad84-e96a-46ce-9ab...

⬐ danpalmer

I have no problem with the business model, if it creates a sustainable business and means good support, then great.

However, I would prefer to be able to use the features in development (before production) without paying. The features don't really bring any value until they're in front of users, so asking for payment before this value is realised is a hard sell.

For personal projects I'm just never going to commit to a monthly payment before I put something in front of potentially paying users. For company projects justifying expenses during the experimentation phase is a hard enough problem that I'd just not bother.

Note: I'm not including support in any of this, I realise that support costs money regardless of when it happens.

I understand that the private fork makes licencing hard for this way of charging, but it would be great to see nonetheless.

⬐ lgas

> For company projects justifying expenses during the experimentation phase is a hard enough problem that I'd just not bother.

Seems like you're probably costing yourself a lot of money then. We make the decision to buy instead of build quite often in this phase precisely because the economics make so much sense.

⬐ danpalmer

On the contrary, I just wouldn't experiment with it.

Experiments get left on, subscriptions get left lying around, people leave, documentation doesn't get written for early prototypes, and so they end up costing a lot of money. $25/mo isn't a lot, but finding out 4 years later that it's still going after that week you were interested in Haskell is an expensive mistake.

In small companies the processes for getting sign off for these sorts of expenditures are often not developed enough, and so doing it is a pain for an experiment. In big companies it's easier in some ways but might come with more box ticking necessary to get it to happen, or more business justification.

I don’t know about progressive, but he’s definitely something.

Here’s his last in-person RailsConf keynote: https://youtu.be/VBwWbFpkltg

He’s promoting anarcho-communism in a RailsConf keynote.

⬐ gscott

Odds are if the conference told him to keep it on topic... he would decline to show up ever again!

⬐ KODeKarnage

Now imagine he was offered 6 months pay to not show up ever again!

> My pet peeve with README

DHH had a funny line around Dropbox's "mission" in his 2019 railsconf video (linked to the direct point in the video): https://youtu.be/VBwWbFpkltg?t=2818

Dropbox's official mission as of 2019 was: "We're here to unleash the world's creative energy by designing a more enlightened way of working"

And DHH's remark was: "For fuck's sake Dropbox, you host files and make them appear on all of my computers"

Funny enough since then they changed their mission to be "Our mission is to design a more enlightened way of working" based on https://www.dropbox.com/about but it still doesn't come close to explaining what they do.

⬐ tmotwu

Customers don’t infer the purpose of a product from it’s company mission. The audience of a company mission are employees themselves. Dropbox has expanded to more than file syncing over the past decade. It makes sense to have a broad vision of their future, e.g purposeful mission.

Imagine Amazon telling employees to stick it to books because thats the business they started off with. Like why should AWS even exist, it’s not what they do! That narrow mindedness wouldn’t have gotten them to where they are today.

⬐ naniwaduni

> Customers don’t infer the purpose of a product from it’s company mission. The audience of a company mission are employees themselves.

ok sure then why is it in big red text on a customer-facing page, then?

⬐ mongol

It is a very good point. And the mission points to the future, where the management wants the company moving. It should not describe what it does, but where it is heading.

⬐ sundarurfriend

Zero people have looked at a mission statement like that and thought "Ah, now I understand the scope and limitations of my company, and will use that to direct my ideas".

This reminds me of a lot of DHH's keynote about open source from last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBwWbFpkltg

Even if you're not a Rails developer it's worth watching.

From what I remember from the talk he is totally fine with and doesn't hold any grudges against Twitter, GitHub or Shopify making hundreds of millions of dollars off Ruby on Rails while getting zero compensation in return.

Mainly because he open sourced Rails with no monetary / fame expectations and then worried about generating income from services around his open source project.

I don't know Marak's history but I do know developing a good faker library definitely isn't trivial, so I'm sure his work is very much appreciated by the folks who use it but I think if you're doing open source work for money and other non-pure byproducts you're only setting your self up for disappointment.

> Given the amount of value open source provides to for-profit companies (with the open source maintainers rarely getting any reciprocal value from the companies that profit off them), why is it so alarming to think that these maintainers might think of a clever idea like this to make a couple thousand bucks?

Because it's not a clever idea at all. First of all, open source software should stay true to what is is, which is free and open. If maintainers really wanted to profit off of this, they should have never made it free or at least offer some sort of pricing model that doesn't affect the essence of the project being open source (e.g., offering paid support), projects like Sidekiq having Sidekiq Pro. Users shouldn't be the one "paying" for open source software through the ads. This is making developers pay for the project indirectly.

DHH latest keynote from Railsconf 2019 hits the nail in the coffin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBwWbFpkltg

This recent talk by DHH also discusses this topic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBwWbFpkltg

It's an interesting idea but I wonder what will make this different than gittip from years ago, or gratipay, or Patreon, or just having a "donate" button in your README file.

I guess I'm just skeptical in that this will change anything for the developers who are trying to make some type of income for their contributions.

On a related note, DHH recorded a very nice keynote at Railsconf 2019 on expectations of payments in open source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBwWbFpkltg