Apparently you missed the part where he quoted PG saying: "Take a luxury and make it into a commodity"
It's because he's charging a commodity price that I decided to give it a go and pony up. I would never ever pay the going rate for a 'professional' in this business.
No, I got that part, and also the part of his positioning where he said "name consulting was previously only available to big companies and we want to make it available to smaller companies".
Pricing isn't a binary decision between "cheap" and "nosebleed". This is another geek pricing pathology.
I think $50 is too cheap. I think, if your market is "people that actually need names but are smaller than PepsiCo", there are very few three-figure prices that aren't rounding errors. Why would he want your business? How many entities are there like you, and how often do they pony up for names, and how much does it cost to support them?
Well, in our case we would normally just come up with a name ourselves. But because 50 dollars is worth a shot we're giving him some business. And something tells me there might just be more people in the same situation as we are. But I guess we won't know until he lets us know how many from HN decided to give it a go.
It's because he's charging a commodity price that I decided to give it a go and pony up. I would never ever pay the going rate for a 'professional' in this business.