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If this is supposed to replace Microsoft Excel - Would an enterprise be willing to pay $500 / month for this thing instead of getting an entire Office Suite?

I don't want to demean this amazing work but I think the user persona and the price for the tier seeming to be a mismatch.




Interesting to see that you already think about replacing Excel. We won't go that far. Currently, bamboolib is intended to save time for Python Data Scientists and therefore it integrates perfectly into their working environment. Python Data Scientists cost their companies between 2k to 10k USD per month. And with bamboolib they should easily save 10h per month. Especially if they need to explore new data sets or don't know the full pandas API by heart. Thus, the price of 49$ per month should be a great deal because we want to provide 10x value per cost.

On top, bamboolib aims to reduce the training time for new Data Scientists.

In addition, bamboolib makes pandas available to people who are proficient with working on data but not specifically Python or coding. Thus, companies can let people with business knowledge work on the data transformations who then hand over the code to Data Engineers who deploy the code, or similar

What do you think about this?


Awesome demo, so you deserve some honest feedback.

After the demo I looked at the pricing and immediately decided it's not worth it by far.

From the viewpoint of a freelance software dev that does quite a lot if data cleaning lately, the price is so high that I wouldn't even bother trying it on binder.

As a comparison, I pay €53/year for PyCharm professional that I can install on as many machines as I like and pay for my Excel/Office a similar yearly amount. I switch between 3 computers, so having a license nailed to one of them is a dealbreaker.

Also, $49 + taxes roughly translates to 1 hour of income per month - every month if I use it or not. Plus I'd have to factor in the time it takes to setup and deal with license problems & bugs. Setting up licenses behind a company firewall is quite a challenge - unless you use a simple txt.file license option like jetbrains. BTW, Jetbrains also has a very cool feature in the license model: If you pay for at least a year, you get to keep the last version that's at least one year old for free. From my usage, I estimate that bamboolib could save me 1 hour per month max - currently I just paste to excel if I need to scroll in a larger data set or use the .sample() function to look at some examples.

So to tempt me there should be a freelancer license at a maximum of $49/year that covers at least 3 machines (only use one at a time) and should work offline.

BTW, the companies I work for all have not made the jump to Jupyter labs, yet. They are firmly Excel based and I'm constantly trying to drum up interest for Jupyter. I also do regular meetup talks on Jupyter (where normal business people show up) and many of them don't know that it exists, yet.

So having a very cheap or even free personal license would showcase your program to companies... and you could write the license in a way that companies need to buy a full price version.


Thank you so much for your honest feedback! That is the enabler so that we can serve you better in the future

Also, thank you for the licensing input - so that we can consider and support other options in the future.

Why do you think that you will only get 1h per month out of this? How many hours per month do you spend with pandas? Given this estimate, I can totally understand your price proposition of 5$/month because we also aim to provide at least 10x value. However, we assume 10h savings per month. Did you already see the data visualization features? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0a58h1OCcg

Did I understand you correctly, that you propose offering a free version (because it might not make sense to charge less than 5$ per month anyway?) for business and another one for 49$/year for freelancers/businesses? Or do you also propose adding another company license?


Thank you very much for that honest feedback. It means a lot to me. Honestly, I will have to reflect on what you said, but I would like to get back to you on this later.


Excel or perhaps r-studio.




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