Hi IndieHackers,
I just updated my landing page copy and pricing. Any feedback would be appreciated!
https://pydist.com
#landing-page-feedback
Dev Here! landing page looks good. Didn't actually read you URL but got the idea in your first sentence.
As a paying customer of other dev tools (NPM, Dockerhub, previous Github) I was surprised by your pricing model. I was expecting a per user unlimited structure. From a solo dev perspective $50 would be my entry price. Coming from NPM Orgs this seems steep (https://www.npmjs.com/products). I get it there is a level of uncertainty from you end on how much activity a user or group can generate. Your pricing model guarantees that a users variable cost is covered. These other tools seem to be comfortable with the per user model and must have a reasonable understanding of their User vs Load(Bandwidth and Storage) ratios to still be making a profit. Asking myself how much Load can one dev actually create? Could python packages grow big enough? Then I think about S3 costs.
I googled for your competitors to see if other python package services use a similar pricing model (looks like you have some SEO in your future). cloudrepo.io was your first competitor I found (Googled "private python packages hosted"). They give me a $9 entry but those data limits are a turn off (its 2019, 100mb for $9!)... That google search also showed me there are a lot of self hosted options. It appears you are trying to serve an undeserved dev market for private hosted python packages. Nice find.
Ultimately if I needed private python package hosted and didn't want sink the hours into self hosting an opensource soltuion on a VM or didn't know how to self host a solution my options are between you and cloudrepo.io. Undercut them (especially as a solo entry), remove any worry about scaling with your solution in the future and once I upload my first package to you I won't be looking anywhere else. At an extreme offering a single private repo for free indefinitely might be the hook some devs need to embedded you in there workflow moving forward. As for the per user vs per org pricing model, if the python community expects per org then stick with what you got. Personally I expected a per user unlimited.
This response grew larger then I first expected.
Nice work on getting this far. Good luck.
Thanks so much for this response!
You're not the first person to suggest an unlimited per user model, but I don't know that it's as good fit for Python as it is for JS, because a Python package can contain ~anything and as a result can be orders of magnitude larger than a JS package (one popular ML package is ~750MB!). Of my 3 competitors, all charge by storage and bandwidth, so I'm already going out on a bit of a limb here.
I will definitely consider creating either a free tier for a single private package, or a similarly cheap storage/bandwidth limited option.
I'm just browsing, but, dude, awesome answer :)
Best to ya.
Thanks for the feedback! I definitely agree that I need to make the CTA clearer and add a CTA to the documentation.
About improving the copy: public packages are an issue because usually you have code that you can't/don't want to make public. This is quite common as a software engineer, so I'm not sure I need to call it out, but of course I still want non-engineers to see the value add and forward it on to engineers. I'd appreciate any suggestions you have to improve it, without making it too low or breaking up the flow.
No reviews or testimonials yet--I don't have any active users. Will hopefully change in the next week or two.
I've thought about a 12 month option, but I want to be more sure about the product and that the plan limits make sense first.
I think your landing page looks great! The color scheme looks beautiful as well as your font choices. The intro copy gives me a clear picture as to what you're site is about.
it's nice