I greatly appreciate you taking the time to comment. FWIW, the other feedback I received is that I should charge my normal hourly rate (~$500/hr). ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Looks very relevant. If the same service (e.g same instance of the model, or even different instances of the same model) is provided to more than one client, I'd guess a prosecutor might reach for it.
Easiest but most costly way this could be avoided is by creating new models for each client using the client's own specific data and keeping the data and models fully isolated for each client.
If derivative insights are gathered across all models, it'd have to be one-way informing e.g business decisions for the overall company rather than informing how the models themselves operate.
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edit: "We pivoted to a 'global model' that used data across countries to significantly reduce the amount of data required in any one country."
This might paint a bullseye on their back, but I'm a security and risk person, not a lawyer.
There's a lot of existing legislation around the world about discounting as well.
In many countries to be able to discount you need to have sold an item at full price for a certain amount of time, and you can't discount for more than another amount of time (i.e. to prevent perpetual discounting).
In some countries you can't sell the same item at different prices for different customers. You can issue different discount codes to different customers, but those would likely need to be widely applicable so that it's not just different pricing in disguise.
Having worked in an ecommerce company, I'm excited by the prospect of better automated pricing tools and tools that can do things like target sell-through by a particular date. However as a consumer and keen advocate for consumer rights, I'm concerned about a future where every last penny is eeked out of consumers by automated systems designed to identify ways they can be exploited with pricing.
In many cases TM pays venues to be their exclusive ticketing company. Before TM, venues purchased hardware and software. One of the most genius business moves of all time was this business model innovation.
TM does not keep all the fees they collect, but since the market views them as predatory they are providing "hated company" as a service for their customers.
With respect to dynamic pricing or pricing in general, TM is going to charge a percentage of the transaction as a fee and thus make more when demand is high along with their customer (the venue) and the producer/talent (the venue's customer). It's a complex supply chain.
Ticketmaster often puts out that "we're just pretending to be the bad guys so people can still love their bands" story and I don't buy it. They are unregulated monopolists so one must never give them the benefit of the doubt. It's pretty clear that the bands themselves are under strict NDAs about the relationship so the only word we only ever get Ticketmaster's side the story.
We had this issue and went back and forth with Google for weeks with no progress. It was infuriating, since the peeps on the other end just cut and pasted responses.
Then, we hashed the Contacts before uploading them and our app was immediately approved.
Subsequently, they decided to ding us on this permission "QUERY_ALL_PACKAGES", which we needed for inviting people you know to our app. Since we were so beaten down, we removed that feature. Congrats Google!
From a user perspective it’s good to hear about apps being forced to remove the “invite everyone you know” feature. It’s time for that obnoxious user-hostile growth hack to stop.
I don't want you to query my packages and I don't want your help to invite people I know to your app. That sounds like a feature that was made for your benefit, not for mine.
So it seems that Google made your app better for me as a user. Congrats Google indeed.
It's not helping them invite your friends to their app (which is impossible). It's helping you invite them if that's something you want to do (probably by listing the messaging apps you have and giving you pre-compose buttons; EDIT: confirmed by sibling comment).
If you don't want to use that feature, don't press the "invite friends" button and that code will likely never run. If you don't want the app to even theoretically have access to your app list, don't give it the permission. Is it not a runtime permission? That sounds like Google's fault, not the app's.
Not to channel the usual Hacker News acid at you but have you considered the optics of “we are using code that requests fairly broad permissions because we couldn’t be bothered to invest in doing a better job that didn’t have to do this”? I don’t see this explanation as being particularly comforting.
(Dear Walnut/DemoStack/Reprise CEO- I know your stuff is invaluable and literally spits out money for each company who adopts it, but you're underachieving pretending to be a mission critical enterprise system of record. I would be demoing your system right now if you showed me your pricing.)
This was my exact thought as well. This trend of hiding pricing until after sign up (getting my eval address) feels really sleazy, to me. I'd much rather see the pricing upfront as that has a huge impact on my decision. Then I can quickly decide if this product is for me or not. This is an instant bail, again, for me.
I've come to the conclusion that if they are not upfront on pricing, then I am not part of their target market.
I think its the reality of their business models - mid-sized corps and above.
Not for the likes of us - too full of fastidious frugalness.
Congrats! Whether it's Notion, Google Docs/Sheet/Slides, Coda, Figma, Adobe Cloud, iCloud, Slack, Google Drive, One Drive, etc. the issue for me is content management and SSO. There is a high bar to get anointed to manage content inside a company/team.
For example, we use Office 365 and OneDrive for file management. But, I prefer Keynote over PowerPoint. Saving Keynote to OneDrive folders works perfectly fine. Of course that means anyone who wants to edit my documents needs OneDrive and Keynote, but that's reasonable for our team.
To use Decipad, Notion, Coda, Google Docs etc. We would need a way to manage the documents in OneDrive, an authentication mechanism so that the documents can be open and edited from OneDrive. Whether it's OneDrive, Box, DropBox, or GDrive my issue might be the same for others.
Just rewrite the software to run on Mac & Windows and save documents as files, and then we would give it a try :-)
Good point. We would have no interest in paying for or managing SSO. Sorry for not being articulate.
My point is that since Decipad is not a client app that creates documents on the file system, my recommendation would be to integrate with the Office 365 ecosystem to gain SSO with Office 365 so that our users could easily navigate to Decipad. For us, that would be table stakes.
This up-pricing is so short sighted. Offering SSO is a whole user creds mangement flow you don't have to write, secrets you don't have to store, and password theft PR you don't have to have.
So it's cheaper, less risk, and reduces friction to join.
If I'm doing a professional SaaS today, I don't store passwords. I use login with (Microsoft, Google, Apple with a user flow for FIDO Alliance passwordless) and SSO. If consumer, I'd use those and add Facebook. Gaming, Discord. Etc.
