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singpolyma3today at 1:05 PM2 repliesview on HN

... more customers so they must increase prices? This seems backwards from how scale usually works.


Replies

benry1today at 1:30 PM

It is, but more customers at a time of historically high component prices will do it. If you set your costs assuming every user's hardware is $1, and your customer base doubles when the hardware is $2, you're going to have to raise prices for everybody

Machatoday at 1:18 PM

The next set of hardware purchases will cost more than their last set of hardware purchases, and that's going to outweigh any labour economies of scale given just how many hardware components are in shortage this year.

If their growth had been in their projections in say 2024, they might have just been able to skip a round of hardware purchases, but the combination of growth meaning they must expand their hardware and hardware costs made this inevitable.