pricing

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Why Freemium Pricing Is So Popular
2 months ago
- Freemium pricing involves offering a free basic version and paid premium versions, popular among startups for rapid user growth.
- Key difference: Freemium offers limited features indefinitely, while free trials offer full features for a limited period.
- Benefits include no-risk usage, faster user base acquisition, customization (pay only for needed features), and cost savings for support.
- Commonly used in digital industries like software; examples include Dropbox, Netflix, and Evernote.
- Freemium allows low upfront costs for companies and steady revenue from users upgrading to premium features.
Why the Cleanup Sprint Always Loses
2 months ago
- Technical debt proposals get approved when framed as a price (e.g., cost in days or incidents), not as an adjective (e.g., 'the module is a mess'), because prices are comparable to roadmap priorities.
- Use a four-field template to describe debt: Construct (specific location), Interest (repeatable cost in tracked metrics), Principal (effort to fix), and Trigger (upcoming work increasing interest).
- Example: payment logic duplicated across three services costs 12 days per quarter in extra work and incidents, costs 3 weeks to fix, and a Q4 checkout redesign will increase interest.
- The template reveals that debt with no planned changes and zero interest can be intentionally accepted, ending pointless arguments.
- Three key habits: price interest in organizational metrics (e.g., lead time), attach principal to existing feature work instead of separate cleanup sprints, and let some debt stay based on interest vs. ugliness.
- Signs pricing is missing: unscheduled refactoring tickets, unexplained estimate growth, and all items marked critical in a debt register.
- AI-generated code increases debt because ununderstood code is debt even if clean, making visibility through pricing more critical.
Show HN: Open-weight OCR got so cheap I had to share it
2 months ago
- OpenParser offers the cheapest layout-and-tables OCR at $1 per 1,000 pages after 1,000 free pages, using the open-weight PaddleOCR-VL-1.6 model.
- The service has a transparent pricing model with separate meters for parsing (pages) and extraction (tokens), and no minimums.
- OpenParser provides structured output with typed blocks, markdown, OCR confidence scores, and block citations for extraction auditing.
- Self-hosting PaddleOCR-VL is an alternative to the hosted API, replacing page fees with GPU and operational costs.
- The page compares list prices across basic-text and layout lanes, noting that cheapest list price doesn't guarantee best quality for all use cases.
- Public list prices were checked on 2026-07-24, and batch discounts or volume tiers are not applied in the calculator.

pricing

Why Freemium Pricing Is So Popular

Why the Cleanup Sprint Always Loses

Show HN: Open-weight OCR got so cheap I had to share it