Y Combinator company, ladies and gentlemen.
Or you could spend 5 minutes in TamperMonkey and replace the button with a working one. 10 minutes if you want to hide the other upselling interface elements.
I pretty often make little fixes to websites I use. It's quite satisfying.
Sometimes I hear people say that to succeed in our economy you need to offer the best product for the lowest price--or rather, the right balance between the two.
But so often in my career and in general, I have seen the most successful companies doing extra work to make their product worse. It's both obvious and subtle how bad this is; if the people who implemented this feature had instead spent their time doing nothing, it would have improved the product.
"Competition is fierce, so let's spend time and money making our product worse"--is this the winning strategy from the company at the forefront of technology? Apparently. This is a testament to the health of our free markets.
You know people like to complain about things and how everything is worse these days, but this is exactly how shareware operated back in the day.
No one's gonna pay just for the sidebar being collapsible. Maybe someone is going to because it was the last straw, but most are just going to be annoyed. Better ask for money only for something with real value (which I'm sure the pro tier also includes).
The site in question seems unusable if you visit it on mobile (iPhone/Safari):
It could at least show a “designed for desktop use only” message or something.
When you absolutely could not come up with any plausible rationalization. They sidebarred it.
It's been a while since I saw anyone post that Philip K Dick quote, from the book Ubik... it's about time I feel.
The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.” He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.”
“I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.” In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip. “You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug.
From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door. “I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out. Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”
Imaging telling the general public one day they would be pumping their own gas.
There are so many of these sandbox sites. Has a clear best option emerged?
Use it as an opportunity. I just found out that you can locally install JSBin. I was a bit fed up with jsfiddle being so slow recently, so I will try that one.
Good idea, going to implement this in my app right now
If you are a dev on a JavaScript/CSS development website and can't figure out how to script this yourself, you deserve to pay extra.
It is $28, not $8.
This is absurd, I do agree with this framing... but rather than trash the company in the comments I'm curious about what people think.
Would ads be better? If JSFiddle were your project, what would you do to provide yourself a salary?
I think we've discovered that the "buy me a coffee" strategy is just that, enough to generate a little bonus income... but is it simply unreasonable to expect that a project on the web that requires ongoing maintenance can generate a reasonable income for most people?
How do we get off the enshittification treadmill? is this a corporate owner being too greedy? are we expecting too much? have our lifestyles become unsustainable?
Which saas is this from?
The problem with VC-backed startups, is that you eventually run out of other people's money.
And then you desperately need to find ways to monetize your product, hence the enshitification.
Enshittification should be a crime.
Create the problem.
Sell the solution.
Enshitificaytion, at it's finest.
(Yes, I shitted a misspelling for a more pronounced enunciation.)
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Software is weird because it is expected that should be free (as in beer) for most consumers while while being for profit and giving high salaries to its workers. I struggle to think of any other privately owned sector of the economy that works that way.