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People are framing this like they're creating sustainable businesses, but if you look into the details, what they're consistently doing is stagnating on any kind of feature development, making the apps and sites more difficult to use and have more nags, and they're increasing prices, sometimes by 10x or 100x. When I look for a company that I think I would admire, I'm looking for customers that are satisfied and recommend the product to their friends.

Charging $20,000 for a note-taking app subscription is not that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48849810

by Grombobulous1 hours ago|

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I certainly don’t find any of that positive, either, but sometimes what a lot of these companies need to survive is to increase prices and only worry about the feelings of the customers who find those higher prices to be worth it.

The $20,000 price plan wasn’t a real price, that was just a not so gentle nudge to move to a different offering. Maybe it feels bad but that plan effectively doesn’t exist anymore. Things change.

It’s got fewer features for the dollar, but if the previous company was not sustainable in the first place, it is what it is.

A company raising prices or cutting service quality is only a problem if they’re in a monopoly situation with no other market alternatives. None of the companies Bending Spoons has acquired are in that position. Many of them are far from being the market leaders.

The point is that Bending Spoons isn’t buying companies and saddling them with unsustainable debt like they’re Toys R Us. They’re buying companies that need drastic operating change and implementing that change so that they can exist in perpetuity.