Ask HN: What tools do you pay for today that feel overpriced or frustrating?

Hello everyone,

I’d love to hear about:

1. Tools you pay for that feel overpriced or frustrating (especially if you’d replace them immediately if something better existed), and

2. Anything that routinely costs you time, money, or attention (and how much money and time it costs you).

I’m most interested in problems that are painful enough that you’d gladly pay to fix them.

If you’re open to sharing, it'd be nice to know:

1. the exact problem 2. how you solve it now 3. the approximate budget or cost

Thank you. The more concrete and specific, the better.

>> Tools you pay for that feel overpriced

I get your thinking here - free market spots a gap and competes on price. But personally I think this is a "poor" business strategy.

Firstly, competing on price is a race to the bottom. There's always someone who's prepared to offer it for less. And that always means the offering ultimately gets worse over time.

Secondly if you go thus route you attract customers who are "price sensitive". They'll leave you as quickly as they joined for someone who offers a lower price. In other words you are self-selecting the worst possible kind of customer to have.

Thirdly you send a signal regarding quality. A $5 product is obviously worse than a $100 product, because if the $5 -could- charge more they -would-.

(Hint: for VC funded companies the customer I the VC NOT the person paying a subscription. So be careful comparing your pricing to VC company pricing if you are not VC funded.)

Yes, look for pain. If you make something good charge more, not less, than incumbents. Build a customer base of people who are quality sensitive not price sensitive.

30 years ago I had a product on the market at $199. It sold well, validating the market space. A not-quite-as-good competitor appeared for $99. He made some sales. I was tempted to reduce my price. An old head told me otherwise. Sales wise we'd say things like "you get what you pay for". We outsold the new-guy. Which meant we had lots more revenue for support, docs, polish and so on. Today we charge $399. The competitor folded after a couple years.

We aimed high, charged a lot, and focused on delivering quality. We attracted loyal customers who appreciated quality more than a few $ saving. 30 years, and 50 products later, we continue to dominate our space.

2 months agoby bruce511

Every single app for streaming TV or movies. The price keeps going up, fragmentation makes it all a frustrating mess, and I think everyone is waiting for the market to collapse on itself a so we can get one-stop-shops like we have for music.

This isn’t really a problem a developer can fix, if you’re fishing for ideas. The problem exists with the content owners and competition based on exclusive content.

2 months agoby al_borland

Fusion 360: the price I'm paying for effectively hobby projects(and ones I occasionally publish for free if I feel someone would benefit from them) is absurd. No other cad software comes even close to being as easy and as flexible though so I'm accepting it for the time being.

2 months agoby axegon_

Everything Adobe. Customer support is just a forum where 98% of the offered "fixes" for bugs in their software is "revert to previous version" or "reset your preferences". I swear everyone at that company doesn't even use their own products because for every one thing they fix, two new things break. Functionality of some things don't make sense. There is zero reason to have Media Encoder be its own separate program when it can be integrated into Premiere and AE on its own, which can repeatedly cause connection/bug issues if they're not able to sync properly (also not being up to date on newer file container types which it should offer). Which also leads into the problem of separating everything into more and more different programs to milk every cent. On top of the massive cancellation fees they try to stick to people and KEEP trying to force cloud saving onto everyone so you become reliant on keeping your sub to keep access to files. It's unfortunately become industry standard and while there are other/free options they're not as up to par on capabilities just yet for top tier level for an entire creative suite of work. Currently it's around $700/yr per user.

Shutterstock is $1500/yr per seat for level I use, with frustrating UX in search function and now you have to pay for a subscription, and then pay even MORE if you want to use anything they deem to be "highly desirable" like Amazon. Oh you have a subscription? Well to get access to what you see here you have to subscribe even more. They added AI content which is chock full of AI slop and copyright issues which clearly isn't being moderated. They also have a ton of vector files which werent checked at all because they're just JPGs saved in vector containers, making them pretty much unusable. Also suffer frequent outrages/download issues that take hours to resolve which clearly is an issue when people have deadlines.

2 months agoby fuzzy_lumpkins

LLMs subscriptions. Ideally I wouldn't need to pay for top-notch software (e.g., linux, ffmpeg, qemu, etc.), but here we are.

2 months agoby dakiol

Page monitoring tools.

I use them to watch for changes in German laws and other changes that affect my work.

I wish there was a better, faster way to catch changes to a specific part of a page. The tools are expensive, clunky and not all that reliable.

2 months agoby nicbou

ERP systems (and no campfire, rillet, light, are not real erp systems yet)

2 months agoby balderdash

Not a tool but my accountants cost me more than my 13 servers large infrastructure whilst I have 2 incoming invoices a month and no outgoing ones. All because of VAT and EU bullshit. I have no idea why this cannot be a simple 5€/month tool. Don't get me wrong, my accountants are absolutely amazing superstars and they did amazing things for me. But still, the money I pay for such a ridiculous service is atrocious.

2 months agoby gethly