There is a tremendous benefit of grabbing hold of an opportunity, and doing whatever the hell it takes to strangle the value out of it. Which is what these guys were trying to do.
This was such an outlier in terms of standard use cases of their system so far, I think the way they responded was great. There's little value in going back and saying "Ohh... this will cost $700, but it's not written on the website, is that still ok?" and risk dealing with rejection.
The value of having POTUS use your service far outweighs the engineering time spent on this. This is now a fantastic leading story for all sorts of marketing efforts and meetings moving forwards, such as this blog post.
Calculating the return on this effort through short-term ROI measured in days seems a bit shortsighted.
I agree that they responded in the only way they could and I hope they can leverage this to greater success. I wasn't referring to retroactively making up bogus prices given that their pricing page specifically says it's "unlimited", even for the Basic free plan. Rather, I'm proposing a hypothetical scenario whereby future subscriber plans are capped for simultaneous connections with an overage rate. Had such a pricing plan existed when OFA initially signed up, I'm speculating that OFA would have happily paid $700 for the extra capacity for the 140,000 simultaneous listeners.
This was such an outlier in terms of standard use cases of their system so far, I think the way they responded was great. There's little value in going back and saying "Ohh... this will cost $700, but it's not written on the website, is that still ok?" and risk dealing with rejection.
The value of having POTUS use your service far outweighs the engineering time spent on this. This is now a fantastic leading story for all sorts of marketing efforts and meetings moving forwards, such as this blog post.
Calculating the return on this effort through short-term ROI measured in days seems a bit shortsighted.