Your pricing page breaks completely when accessing it from Argentina where prices are "larger" (ej. "ARS 1,037.20" for the Individual plan).
Worse, I see no way to change the currency. You shouldn't assume that because I accessed from Argentina the price in Argentine Pesos is helpful for me (it isn't). You should provide a way to change the currency (normally people put it in the footer) or not try to match currency with visitors based solely on the geolocation of their IP address.
As long as there’s an easy way for the user to choose a different language and currency, it seems defaulting based on location would be correct for the highest percentage of users, unless you have some reason to believe it’s more likely that your audience is, say, English-speaking users who prefer to see prices in USD.
In the vast amount of cases there is never any (clear or otherwise) option to set the language of the site. This has held true for Google as well as small mom and pops web shops.
Larger entities like Google can just send you into redirection hell sometimes if you try to set a language (where you can even find the option).
Others decline to show you the content since it is not "available in your part of the world" even though what you were doing was simply setting the language of the webpage, not changing its location in the world (I have been temporarily in the Netherlands now for a few months and this keeps happening on .nl domains!).
If the page is a for a SaaS, the pricing structure should allow me to select from all of the options they have. I do not want to be forced to only have prices in DKK, SEK, EURO or US if it is just tied to the location that the page thinks I am coming from.
Here I'm obviously excluding cases where the store/saas/service is location specific (i.e shop.se for Sweden for instance).
> In the vast amount of cases there is never any (clear or otherwise) option to set the language of the site.
Unless manually disabled for privacy reasons (in which case... well yeah) your browser sends a weighted list of your language preferences with the HTTP request, the option on the site should only be an override.
> This has held true for Google as well as small mom and pops web shops.
Google follows the above language list unless your account or temporary session settings override it. Mom and pop probably don't know how to support more than one language let alone how to implement it well.
No, Google has per-country versions… which in turn support different languages. My preferred language is always English but Google normally redirects me to “Google Argentina” (.com.ar, in Spanish by default) from the .com based on my IP and I have to fight it to switch back to English. In some platforms / scenarios this means clicking on a “use google.com” link (or setting it in my Google settings), and in others I never managed to fix it. Google is a very frustrating case because it forces a redirect trying to be “smart” and there’s no way (I know of) to explicitly indicate through the URL that you want the default and not the regional variation.
Having multiple TLDs is not mutually exclusive with putting the browser language list first. Not every browser has always supported the language list (certainly not when the google.tld names were originally registered) and the TLD can serve to do more than change the default language.
> which in turn support different languages.
They'll default to a different language for the region in absence of any other setting (language list, account preference, browser cookies) but it's not the function of the TLD to override this when the information is present.
> My preferred language is always English but Google normally redirects me to “Google Argentina” (.com.ar, in Spanish by default) from the .com based on my IP and I have to fight it to switch back to English.
Redirection to a different TLD is based off geo-ip not your language setting and done for more reasons than just to serve you a specific language in absence of other language info. You're really fighting Google thinking you (or possibly your account) is coming from Argentina and your browser possibly not sending a language list (or a fake one). I had to correct something similar once where the IP block I had been coming out of had previously been in use somewhere in Asia, I just gave updated info to this form https://support.google.com/websearch/workflow/9308722?hl=en and it was updated and stopped redirecting me. Of course if you actually are coming from Argentina then they won't update it.
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Rather than a bunch of talk though here is an actual demo of what I get browsing to google.com.ar using English in the browser UI but with with German set as my preferred language in the language list: https://i.imgur.com/N3XOSvg.png clearly .com.ar didn't default to serving the page in German on its own nor was there any history in the browser so the language list the browser sends is preferred over the TLD you load. I'd double check you don't have a privacy setting or extension stripping this info.
On language you may be right. On currency, it's complicated. In economically unstable countries people generally prefer to count in USD, or EUR, especially if it's something which has to be paid across borders.
The language thing is terrible. I use the English version of Chrome on an English language MacOS, configured English as my preferred language with Spanish as the second option (which are sent to the site)… and of I travel to Germany many internationalized sites decide I want to read in German… or Portuguese in Brazil. Language options and localization are old as time but sites use defaults based on IP addresses.
Some websites on mobile still display in swiss french for me, because I lived there in 2015. And I have changed 4 smartphones since then, but some websites that I registered or logged from years ago in switzerland still assume I'm living there. Worse of all? I cannot change the currency, and everything is shown in CHF.
> Please, do not try to be smart about these things.
There must be some sort of sales benefit to it, otherwise websites wouldn't be doing it. I'm guessing the main advantage is when it gets the currency right, it's easier to buy the product.
Not true. I've made i8n features like that in the past for companies where they thought it would be nice and did not put any research, before or after launch, into whether there was any benefit whatsoever.
"Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." -- Dr. Ian Malcolm.
> Not true. I've made i8n features like that in the past for companies where they thought it would be nice and did not put any research, before or after launch, into whether there was any benefit whatsoever.
That makes sense in a way. Managers tend to implement features nonsensically, as Hacker News constantly reminds me :-)
What would be the best compromise in your opinion, then: doing this magic automatically and giving the user an option, asking them up-front, etc. ...?
Don't do i8n unless you can afford to pay/hire people who know the cultures that you are adding. You'll hit all sorts of weirdness. And don't argue with the weirdness.
I had to translate a site into dozens of languages. Our German staff member translated the text. She would keep writing "e-mail" as "eMail" and I would change it back without her knowledge. Just recently I realized that the capitalization is a German quirk and is expected - it wasn't just a quirk of the translator. I feel bad for "fixing" her work now, simply because I didn't understand.
Speaking anecdotally, it does. Sometimes (not as much in the past couple years with Adafruit) I’ve been shopping for electronics kits on the internet and would usually bounce when the prices weren’t in USD. Occasionally I’d see the magic switch currency button, but usually it’s 10px wide somewhere I don’t see it.
Presenting such converted prices (without saying “this is an approximation”) also requires that you lock in the price in that currency indefinitely (which is possible, but I’d be surprised), or else you’re lying to your customers about the price.
I can’t find any plausible correlation between the prices it’s presenting me (AUD745.40 billed annually for the business plan) and any base currency. The Individual-to-Business ratio suggests 9 and 39 units of currency per month, but which that would be, I don’t know. “Includes VAT” makes the whole thing a mess; European VAT is inapplicable in Australia, though if they do enough business here they should register for GST (and the procedure for skipping that taax is different, too: in Europe the buyer gives the seller their VAT ID and the seller removes the VAT charge, but in Australia the seller charges GST and business clients can claim it back from the Tax Office in their Business Activity Statement).
Making this worse, the page source has a JSON-LD block listing an aggregate price range of USD9–49, which I’m pretty sure is just flat-out wrong.
I used this last year when I was working on a new site for something, I ended up paying for a month, then cancelling. I used it pretty much everyday, so I think, the £9 was well worth it.
There are obviously still browser quirks that needed ironing out, but this got me a good way there in multiple screen sizes at the same time - seeing how a little change looks instantly across different screens was super helpful.
Edit: The dev was super responsive as well, I emailed about a bug that I found, and he emailed back a version to test with the fix in, with the full version being rolled out later in the week.
That's yet another accessibility-related project with a website that is broken if accessibility features (e.g., slightly configured FF with minimal font sizes and colours set) or textual web browsers (e.g., lynx) are used. It seems that such projects tend to pick some very narrow view of what accessibility should be about, and only focus on that. I'd say it's ironic, to have inaccessible websites for accessibility-related projects, but at this point it just looks like a general rule.
The SaaS pricing of these tools is getting out of hand. €108/year for this. Another hundred for retool, another hundred for Postman, mmhmm / camera apps, Notion, Gmail, Trello/Jira, Github/Gitlab, Slack, an image resizing service, some load testing tool, Figma.. now every developer has a $1000+ monthly burn rate (!).
Most of the tools you listed are hosted services, not products you buy once. Gmail, Trello, Slack, Figma, and Jira are all closed source components on a hosted platform. Their core features are that you can use them and collaborate on them without taking care of running the actual software itself.
You can switch to alternative you host yourself. RocketChat or Element instead of Slack, Gitlab instead of Github, you name it. There are tons of open source and closed source alternative to all the cool hosted platforms if you dare look outside what everyone else is using.
This strategy incurs the cost of maintenance and management, which is why in many cases the hosted services are usually cheaper. Getting Gitlab on a $10 VPS isn't a problem, but getting regular backups, failovers, etc. is incredible difficult.
My personal developer burn rate is less than $50 per month. The company I work for doesn't even need pay for Docker's fancy account with higher limits because there's no need to, even if you run containers all day. You don't have to use all these expensive online services if you're willing to run some software in-house, but don't underestimate the cost of paying someone to set up all those cost-saving services.
Yes - there is some initial ramp up time and some hurdles to face (and I actually ended up going the self-hosted K8s route, which is definitely a lot of additional ramp up time, but IMO - worth it.)
That said... I save a LOT of money.
Currently hosting
- Bookstack
- Seafile
- Jellyfin
- Grocy
- Drone.io
- Gitlab
- Youtrack
- Keycloak
- OpenHab
~$50/year for dynamic dns. ~$15/year for hostnames. ~$5/year for backup and long term storage (this varies, but is often within the free tier on backblaze unless I have to restore a service).
Or about $5/month (not including the internet, which I already pay for anyways, and the hardware, which is literally my old/outdated machines running micro-k8s, and a NAS).
The maintenance can be annoying every now and then - but it's also the kind of work I don't really mind, and it's a nice exercise to stay up-to-date on tech I end up interacting with in the office anyways.
Why on earth would you pay monthly for image resizing tool? Also, not quite sure what load testing tool you mean, but there is a chance local version would be enough.
You can go to buying plain software licenses, but I most people don't bother.
As a counterpoint to most comments here, I've been using Polypane for a couple years now and it's been an invaluable tool in my arsenal.
I don't mind that it's not open source, it's made by an indie dev that's super responsive and really cares about helping people making better websites.
Yes, my issue with these types of 'services' always is that it only 'emulates' the screen resolution. They might as well just be iframes locked to specific resolutions; the result is that it's still my own browser doing the rendering. What I want is some kind of reverse-polyfill that accurately reflects the rendering capabilities.
Is it you that audit the code or just having a piece of mind with the thought: "Someone MUST HAVE looked at that code and if I haven't stumbled upon any bad press, probably this is good to go!"? Maybe you are running some automated tools that identifies whether particular software accesses data it doesn't have to or makes network connections etc?
Something being open source doesn't automatically mean it is secure. On the other hand, any software running on your pc requires you to put trust in the developers. I think it would be easier to just setup monitoring (like preventing outgoing traffic or identifying DNS lookups etc) and limiting permissions on what particular software can do, be it black or white box. White box of course allows running some analyzers, but... do any non-contributors actually do it?
I remember seeing some tool here, don't remember - was it Microsoft made or what? That scanned the code and tried to identify what accesses software makes.
If it is your intent, it's also disturbingly easy to hide behavior from code reviewers. The Underhanded C Coding Contest has a lot of examples of this type of stuff: http://www.underhanded-c.org/_page_id_25.html
I can already hear some of you starting to type a rant about how this actually is a C problem and not something that would happen in a modern language like ${YOUR_FAVORITE_LANGUAGE:-rust}; and to an extent it is true that C is especially vulnerable to this particular vector of attack, but like it or not a lot of open source software if it isn't written in C, depends on libraries that are. This includes the Linux kernel, OpenSSL, cURL. WebKit is written in C++ which might as well be C for the sake of this discussion. Other languages have other attack vectors, like the fractal-like dependency tree of NPM for example, something that has been demonstrated time and time again to be more than a hypothetical security risk.
The rendering engine is Chromium so… that's the most important thing as far as I'm concerned. At least for this usage: it's a browser for web development, not for everyday use.
It's an economic model that is certainly not for everybody, nor for everything, but for dev tools that help me earn money, I can't see the problem.
And if I stop paying for it tomorrow, and don't have access to it anymore, you know what? My site will still be online.
> It's an economic model that is certainly not for everybody,
Not calling you out directly OP (in fact, I quite like your project), but the subscription model is pretty badly thought out most of the time IMO. Especially in a commercial setting. You really should not have to pay a company a monthly fee to operate cameras you bought, on your property. These trojan horse subscriptions are then normally paired with other anti-people abuses, e.g. not allowing the user to use basic functionalities without the subscription.
> My site will still be online.
Just curious: what would happen if your website went offline? If your application is phoning home to verify a license, and the website comes back with an unexpected / no response (maybe you let the hosting run out), would the software still be usable? I think there should be more provisions against this sort of thing in subscription-payed applications.
I'm not affiliated with the project; just discovered it by chance this morning and found it deserved to be better known.
So, when I said 'My site will still be online", I meant as a web developper using Polypane, when and if I decide to stop paying the subscription, this will have no impact on the web site I've developped with it.
Subscriptions might be a problem when you risk loosing access to your data (looking at you Adobe), but in this particular case I couldn't see the problem.
Most of them? If you stop paying for Creative Clouds, your Lightroom database is of no use anymore; you'll probably be able to open photoshop/illustrator files with other apps, but maybe not with all their subtleties.
On the other hand, non-subscription based software was only good as long as they were maintained for your current OS… So I don't care much if my software is subscription based or not, but I care a lot about them saving my data using open standards.
Maybe a weird but honest question: How is/was software even able to finance itself without subscriptions? People expect updates and support which are continuous expenses.
One alternative, I guess, are full-price major revisions at semi-regular intervals. But won't that result in many people never getting an upgrade because they feel it's not worth it?
As a whole, subscription-based models are pretty bad for society. Companies have figured out subscriptions are so much better because A) they're not paid all at once, making the device attractive, and B) you can constantly drip dry money out of the customer's bank account. It's a great business model for businesses, though.
Where are you seeing $60/mo? The pricing page shows $11/mo for an individual (or $9/mo for annual) or $47/mo for a team of up to 10 (or $39/mo for annual).
