Your morning latte costs $4.50.
The author traced every penny through 17 years of coffee industry data, from your local café to farms in Honduras.
The result? Your barista captured $1.67 for 3 minutes of work. The farmer who spent 6 months growing your coffee? They profited $0.04.
That's not a typo. Four cents.
This isn't about individual greed—it's about infrastructure. The entire supply chain is architected to ensure 97% of value is captured before coffee reaches the farm gate.
It sounds extreme, but the bulk cost comes from the coffee shop and those costs seem very reasonable (labour, equipment, rent, milk etc.).
On the other hand, I buy high quality, roasted coffee and prepare it myself. I pay maybe $0.30 per cup. If you compare that amount to the $0.04 the farmer gets, it seems far easier to grasp.
I have one and agree with the technical issues mentioned in this thread. This is my first experience with a writing tablet, although I have occasionally dabbled with an iPad with a stylus.
What draws me to use this device is that it creates a sense of "roominess," allowing me to lean back and consume, write, and engage in a non-aggressive way. This quality is something I miss in my other devices.
The monochrome display makes playing Wordle harder :).
I was a 16-year-old kid in still-developing India, 1986. One had to wait seven years to get a landline connection.
My friends and I went through the Morse Code speed test and evaluation course, for which we prepared weeks and weeks. I was issued the handle OM118.
The non-profit organization that issues the license had a single Ham Radio for which you need to apply well in advance for 30-minute slots.
Four of us huddled in a small booth of a room, fiddling with knobs, wondering why there was static instead of some exotic voice from another part of the world - Sri Lanka, at least, please God.
A voice crackled in. We immediately knew who it was, but we were too cool to admit it. The voice asked us where we were...Madras, we said. He was too...We went around talking over each other, and the other end said, "I am an actor. My name is Kamal Haasan."
Useful service and a large problem space. Congrats and all the best. As someone who is a target customer, my 2 cents:
a. If this is a strategic value for my pipeline (and it is), we are going to code it ourselves, only because we can host it inside our fences. Critical customer data and hence.
b. The pricing is way off and is not reflective of the cost or value (for us). Even if it was 1/10th of the prices you charge, it will still be a no-go. At the volumes we have, it makes sense to build this ourselves.
c. SOC2 / ISO27001 - You might want to obtain them asap if you are looking to sell to outsourcing companies or FSG.
certifications (SOC2 / ISO27001) and offer an on-premise solution! I see there's already a discussion about pricing, so I'll leave that be. However, would an unlimited volume at a fixed cost (and self-host) be an attractive solution? It could be interesting for very high volumes.
I can tell you that the world I operate in will want something like what you are proposing (fixed rate + OnPrem) and the pricing is going to have a ceiling because building this in-house is a real and viable alternative. Our problem is not so much lack of talent but other product-roadmap priorities. What is the ceiling? I do not know, but can hazard a guess. 1/4th of the yearly cost of a good developer.
Thank you for taking the time. It really helps us define our value proposition and outline the next steps in product development. As you mentioned, the challenge isn't the inability to produce something in-house but rather other product-roadmap priorities. Our goal is to ensure that companies needing to produce many documents —where documents are necessary but not core to their business— can use our solution at a fair price and limiting the pain of creating such solution in house. OnPrem + fixed rate seems to be the best option for high volume. We'll explore this and see what future solutions we can offer to meet these needs!
In the long term, ~$0.005 per page (as opposed to document, which I assume hatchedlake meant) say on a mortgage document (~300 pages per) it adds up. The other alternative, which is to build this in-house (say 3 months and custom build, edge cases, such goodies), is more desirable (for us).
We indeed price starting at $0.005 per document, but have slightly updated the pricing following the good input we received yesterday from the community - hence the slight discrepancy in comments.
Unrelated, out of curiosity. In a 300 page mortgage document, there’s probably >90% of boilerplate with a few pages of custom content. Hypothetically, you could generate those <10% and then stitch it together with the rest onsite.
Street smart! But yes, programmatic merging does get complex, especially with large document sizes. It's a balancing act between functionality and handling those technical challenges!
