As I said, if you charge somebody more for something, there has to be some added value.
I think this is symmetric, though. The 'added value' of paying the non-coupon price is that you get the time you would have spent managing coupons and to conspicuously consume non-coupons; the 'added value' of paying the enterprise price is often just the conspicuous consumption of non-hobbyism. But if I want coupons to represent price discrimination, then it makes sense to see the enterprise tier as also price discrimination.
And if we use the 'capture as much consumer surplus as possible' definition, both of those are clearly serving the same general function.
Anyway, the point is that most SaaS/PaaS companies' pricing tiers are based on varying costs between the tiers, which makes them product differentiation, not price discrimination per Wikipedia.
The Kalzumeus response to this is that it leaves immense amounts of money on the table to sell software based on varying cost rather than capturing consumer surplus by price discrimination. When he sells Appointment Reminder, he encourages people to pick a tier based on the cost of one missed appointment rather than based on their particular needs (i.e. the cost of serving them).
When he sells Appointment Reminder, he encourages people to pick a tier based on the cost of one missed appointment rather than based on their particular needs (i.e. the cost of serving them).
It's insanity to ever ask a buyer to value a product based on your cost; that's like an elementary principle of business. But there is a difference in cost, in that in the article you linked, the author talked about 25 extra hours of work he put in just to land that enterprise deal. That is a different cost of the offering, and has to be priced in.
...if we use th
I was going to wait to post this for reasons, but realized that was pretty dumb when the difference of a few weeks could literally save people hundreds, if not thousands of collective dollars.
If you fly regularly (or at all), you may already know about this method of saving money. The method is quite simple: instead of buying a round-trip ticket from the airline or reseller, you hunt down much cheaper one-way flights with layovers at your destination and/or your point of origin. Skiplagged is a service that will do this automatically for you, and has been in the news recently because the creator was sued by United Airlines and Orbitz. While Skiplagged will allow you to click-through to purchase the one-way ticket to your destination, they have broken or disabled the functionality of the redirect to the one-way ticket back (possibly in order to raise more funds for their legal defense). However, finding the return flight manually is fairly easy as the provide all the information to filter for it on other websites (time, airline, etc). I personally have benefited from this - I am flying to Texas from Southern California soon, and instead of a round-trip ticket which would cost me about $450, I spent ~$180 on two one-way tickets (with the return flight being the "layover" at my point-of-origin). These are, perhaps, larger than usual savings; I think 20-25% is more common, but even then it's a fairly significant amount of money.
Relevant warnings by gwillen:
Additionally, you should do all of your airline/hotel/etc shopping using whatever private browsing mode your web browser has. This will often let you purchase the exact same product for a cheaper price.
That is all.