"Apple's most valuable intangible asset isn't its patents or copyrights – it's an army of people who believe that using products from a $2.89 trillion multinational makes them members of an oppressed religious minority whose identity is coterminal with the interests of Apple's shareholders."

-- https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#i...

Wow. Whatsapp for Business is more than 8 times more expensive in Africa (with the exception of South Africa) than in the USA.

What kind of price discrimination it is?

Things regularly cost different amounts in different parts of the world depending on demand, availability of competition, costs of operating etc.

Twitter also enables the posting of lewd content. Is it a coincidence?

It is understandable. And it is also easy to define what a "fair" cut is: if there is no incentive to migrate between the regions of different salary levels.

Their advertisement was the main reason, that I've bought an Onyx Note

how is it? <seeking peer review information>

It is a proof of that Google API is overpriced. Google apparently sells something, that can be computed as well.

If the quality of every dataset was equal this argument might be more compelling but we know it's not so this rings a little untrue.

Besides, I suspect that Google knows exactly what their data is worth and keep a very close eye on the price/demand model.

Just because something is subjectively expensive doesn't make it objectively overpriced.

Everyone of us software developers sells something that can be computed or made as well. For insane prices no less.

That's a pretty cynical interpretation. To me it seems more like they took an easy engineering approach when the cost per API call was low, then when the price went up they re-designed their software to use API calls more frugally by using some domain specific knowledge (that google couldn't know about so wouldn't be able to build in to their pricing).

I wonder how Google prices this api? The actual cost must be difficult to determine because if the source data.

Perhaps they have some margin formula for “buying” data from their internal sources.

It seems to me that they are value pricing and since they are close to a monopoly on this service they are testing the price elasticity.

The data for traffic is usually needed in real time, not just dumping historical data in one call and sitting on it. With that in mind, the most obvious pricing policy seems to be to either charge per API call or to have subscription tiers where you have a cap on maximum number of API calls per hour or per day or whatever other time interval they choose.

Sorry, I meant the price it sets for the api calls. The article calls out $10/1000 so the current price is a penny per call. I’m interested in how they set that rate.

There is an another interesting property of web applications: the can't be stolen. I guess, this could also be a reason of their ubiquity.

What do you mean with stolen? Someone making something similar or making unlicensed copies? For the former i do not see how web apps prevent that and for the latter that only matters when the developer asks for money for each license, which is extremely rare with web apps anyway (the closest is subscriptions and rentals but that happens with desktop/native applications too, e.g. see Adobe and Autodesk). But even that is really a facet of the heavily developer biased control i mentioned that web apps provide.

What about Adrive? They don't have Linux client, but they support WebDAV, rsync, (S)FTP(S). I guess, getting some pretty stable client for these protocols won't be a challange.