Ask HN: Curious about vercel password protection pricing

3 points by eeegnu 4 years ago | 1 comment

I was browsing through vercels docs when I noticed that password protecting [1] a project (so that anyone previewing a deployment needs a password) is an optional add on feature for (an insane?) $150 per month. A pro plan is $20 per month per member [2] and it just makes me curious who this works out as desirable for? For small teams paying an extra $1800 per year for a feature that's maybe a few hours of dev time to implement doesn't seem worth it. Even for large teams where a feature leak might be disastrous, they might be concerned enough to want their own implementation. Is there something technical I'm missing here that would be difficult (or impossible) to reproduce? I'm mostly curious because I'd think the economics of it would lean toward a smaller price tag; as for most teams this probably means ~doubling their costs if they wanted to use it.

[1]: https://vercel.com/docs/concepts/projects/overview#password-protection

[2]: https://vercel.com/pricing

leros 4 years ago |

$1800 is nothing for an actual profitable company. SaaS companies like Vercel try to find features to separate out small indie developers and actual companies so they can charge them differently. They're probably assuming that someone needing password protection is a company vs an individual.