I have a feeling that you are asking this question to find a product idea to work on and compete with cheaper price, I would advise against using lower pricing as the first strategy because it might become a race to the bottom.

Sure, you're right. But let's be fair, if you're a software engineer who downright doesn't want to take a job and doesn't want to do down the VC route and doesn't want to be a freelancer. What options does he/she have to make a living?

Start a sustainable business that reaches profitably quickly. And one of the ways of doing so, without much capital, is to provide a competent product a lot cheaper than some company exploiting their customer's is doing.

Same here, your description fits me exactly lol.

I have several apps/books making me little money every month (few hundred ish, not enough to cover living expenses yet, I am still working on it), it's okay to take the route of competing on price, but you will eventually lose to VC backed company which can provide their app for free or below operating costs as they have a lot money to burn. And offering lower than market price might make potential audience feel that your offering quality might not on par (eg: Walmart).

My advice would be to provide more value than existing offering or just downright give more shit/care about customers, you would be surprised how many software companies out there doesn't give a shit about customers / uses automated chat bot to reply support ticket (Google, I am looking at you). Replying to customer as a genuine person has a lot more impact than using the generic PR-ish polite sentences.

This is just my advice, of course you can try to compete with price, no harm trying it first!

Fore sure soulchild, I agree with you. Being from India, I think it's my first instinct to just try and compete on the price. I'm gonna keep what you said it mind, it also reminds me of SmugMug's story.

I'm gonna try and find your apps too from the link in your profile.

Amazon Web Services and other cloud vendors. The amount of traffic and processing power a single dedicated server can provide is astonishingly cheaper than the cloud.

I understand that the cloud provides additional software products, services and flexibility to scale quick, but you pay for it.

Yeah. The only thing I miss from bare metal server setups is the managed redundancy some clouds offer (massive RAID cabinets, etc).

But on most projects, if you plan for contingencies you can do well on bare metal using HAProxy for Load Balancing, database replication, lsyncd for some filesystems, etc. AWS is really a good commodity but more and more people complain on price ;P

Alteryx - limited functionality, doesn't scale, can't debug properly. But they have a great sales team I suppose.

Also SAS.

It amazes me how much money some companies are willing to spend on products that are worse than their open source alternatives.

Thanks for these two answers, I was hoping this would get more upvotes!

Matlab

To add to this: Simulink and select other matlab toolboxes (Which btw cost extra). I think base matlab can be supplanted very well with scientific python these days.

Basically every additional module costs extra (lot extra). What Python modules would you suggest?

Depending on your use case - numpy, pandas, scipy, matplotlib, statsmodels. Also check out R - you may or may not prefer it to Python, especially if you're coming from Matlab.

And to add on, octave is a good open source replacement for base matlab with near identical syntax.

Thanks a lot! I am more familiar with Python. Never used R before.

very expensive.

Database software?such as Oracle.

AutoCAD and other products from Autodesk

Splunk

Didn't know about them, thanks!

IDA Pro