Pricing Spaghetti

In Oh, You Wanted "Awesome" Edition Jeff Atwood dissects one of my pet peeves with current software pricing models: the fact that they're often segmented.

And what are we paying for? The privilege of flipping the magic bits in the software that say "I am blah edition!" It's all so.. anticlimactic. All that effort, all that poring over complex feature charts and stressing out about pricing plans, and for what? Just to get the one simple, stupid thing I care about -- using all the memory in my server.

As anybody who's ever looked at SQL Server or Oracle pricing arrangements can verify, parsing segmented "version" pricing charts is a programming discipline unto itself. It's practically a required skill. There are legions of user experience experts at Microsoft and IBM and Google whose entire job is to guide the customer through the labyrinthine pathways of pricing spaghetti.

And while I understand that flexible pricing models can help software developers make more money from their products, and while I support a developer's right to make a nice chunk of change in return for his or her hard work...let's face it. Having five different versions of your product is supply-side hubris. Get over yourself already and give customers one or at most two or three prices they can understand.