In the last few days, readers have alerted us to two synth makers, Teenage Engineering & Music Thing Modular, running ‘name your own price’ sales on hardware.
This type of flexible pricing sale has been common with software, music and sound libraries for years, but not with hardware, where there are hard costs associated with manufacturing each individual device.
Teenage Engineering is offering the OP-1 Field with ‘pick your own’ pricing, with a lower limit of $1399 USD. That’s $600 off the device’s usual price.
It’s hard to imagine anyone actually choosing to pay more than the $1399 lower limit. Does the ‘pick your own price’ approach make the sale less painful for those that paid full price?
Meanwhile, Music Thing Modular is running a ‘pick your own price’ sale on its Workshop System compact modular synthesizer.
This one’s a little confusing, too, because the slider lets you go all the way down to
£99, but only actually lets you select prices that are higher than the default price of
£450.
To make things even more confusing, selecting the ‘Buy for this price’ option at £450 takes you to their online shop, where the system is priced at £375.00 (Excl. VAT).
The way MTM’s slider works made us wonder if they’re just having a laugh at Teenage Engineering’s expense.
What do you think of these ‘pick your own price’ hardware sales? Cool deal, joke or an annoying gimmick? Let us know what you think in the comments!
100% gimmick and I’d be pretty irritated if I bought one for full price before this (talking specifically about TE). If it were really pick your own price, they’d have $1 as an option, which then I’d say it was not a gimmick.
I bought one full price. Dont care. The End
It’s a sale. It lasts till the end of June. After that a different TE product goes on sale in July and so on until December when supposedly the XY goes on sale. There’s a colour coded chart on the website that indicates all this
Is it a gimmick. Yes
Is it undermining people who bought at full price? No more than any other product that has gone on sale
The price will probably go back ti normal at the end of June
This might be the future. (No gimmick at all)
Until now you can only select to buy a product or not – then the seller will react and raise or lower the prices – then the buyer reacts again – and so on oand so forth.
Selecting your own price speeds up that process. Kind of like bidding at an auction but in both directions.
This model already exists when selling tickets for different events.
You can choose to participate at a lower price or support the “project” by paying more!
Totally viable for physical or software products too!
“You can choose to participate at a lower price or support the “project” by paying more!
Totally viable for physical or software products too!”
This.
Having a name your price with a minimum (to cover costs of production, etc.) is no different than name your price options for records, software bundles, and even Patreon kinds of support.
I think people who dismiss it are looking at things from a kind-of capitalist point of view– where commerce can be boiled down to quid-pro-quo transactions. Clearly, some consumers take a bigger view, wanting (for example) to support the efforts not just for a particular project, but also for a particular set of design ideas, future development, etc.
You have to be joking. It’s a sale with a stupid gimmick attached to promote it
Which has worked very well because there’s a lot of gossip about it
Agreed, it’s just a gimmicky way of having a sale. It is a way of driving traffic to their website.
Everyone let’s not forget OP-1 stands for over priced one.
I think it’s a great idea! Sliders are a great way of dynamically and quickly selecting a value while not sacrificing fine control of the parameter. I’m not a big fan of performance instruments that don’t use sliders so good for TE in finally including one for the OP-1 Field!
from the “no such thing as bad press” school of thought
It was a marketing trick to get free advertisements across the web. Worked quite nicely.
TE wouldn’t have tired the gimmick if they were selling more units. It’s clear they were trying to determine if lowering the retail price would move more units. They know every single person would choose the lowest price. I adore the OP-1, but I paid $735 for mine at launch–and yeah, I can see $1000 today. To me, it’s clear they pumped the price up, and it didn’t work.
Feels like a gimmick — it’s a sale by another name. Anybody who is interested is going to pick the highest discount.
These kinds of things devalue their products, alienate customers who’ve paid full-price, and create FUD fur potential future customers who’ll now have to consider another sale before jumping into the Teenage ecosystem.
Companies, hardware or software, would be better served by respecting their users/customers and lower the price of something, rather than devalue their brand.
It’s a good idea actually. Offer an affordable price, but those with plenty of extra disposable income who really wanna show their support can pay more.
99% of people will pay the lowest option.
Still, if Reverb offered something like this, I would use it.
I also think it is a good approach for making prices.
For event ticket sales it shows that more then 90% choose a “middle” or “normal” value, only very few choose the low/lowest or high/highest.
So people rarely overpay but also don’t want to underpay. They only chose the lowest price if they really cannot afford anything else. Most do not want to be stingy and choose a middle ground. And a few fortunate choose to support by paying more.
MIght be different with physical products mainly because you can buy more then one product. So you would have to find a way to prevent bulk orders and scalping.
Choose your own price is absolutely viable (no gimmick).
It’s a tale as old as time….
Teenage Engineering put the OP-1 on sale and folks that hate Teenage Engineering have yet another entirely manufactured and invalid reason to get on the internet and once again tell us how much they hate Teenage Engineering.
So good!
Americans can’t digest te, they are so used to being sucked up
well I’ve always thought the OPz was way more than 600 dollars overpriced and now that suspicion is confirmed.
Any1 with 1/2 a brain can get ok results with a lot of this gear.
At somepoint these companies should be releasing
“Free advanced music testing for the masses”
Teenage pocket operators is a great example. Owned an op1 and several pockets operators. Sold most or given as gifts so I’m down to a best of, 1 sampler operator.
I bought an op1 at 800. Sold at 1100. No love lost.
Pocket operators, 99 dollar synth, 50 dollars case..I threw a few away. Not worth the rechargeable batteries I bought for it.
At least I got free shipping from Amazon?
.
But how else would we know all the people who hate Teenage Engineering? And all the people who think their products are toys? And the folks who think their products are overpriced? And those who only use proper synths? And others who think people who buy their products are stupid? If it wasn’t for this marketing decision, we’d never hear from them, and their opinions would be lost.
Such complaining w*nkers! If you feel like TE are overpriced, there are tons of cheaper and very interesting options: Norns, PiSound, Organelle, etc. You can create a DIY headless Tracker for the $30 cost of an arduino board and a usb cable. Add another $50 if you buy a cloned game boy and use it as a terminal.
Gimmicky marketing has been around before the 99 cent shrimp cocktail. Why? Because it works. So assume the lowest price is the price. If you’re loaded, feel free to pay more.
Teenage Engineering creates interesting and creative devices that are likely to be classics of a sort. And not all of them are expensive such as the pocket operators or EP’s. Don’t have the money? Buy used or buy something else. I bought a used OP-1 and have a lot of fun with it. It wasn’t expensive and I enjoy traveling with it.
It’s not like we’re in a cheap hobby. What’s a decent drumset or guitar cost? What about a fender Rhodes, Hammond organ, Prophet 5 or a moog? It’s all disposable income to a degree.
But I don’t have the income, and I prefer to blame others for my life decisions to avoid feeling ashamed of myself. The more I find fault in TE, the more okay I am with my life. I need you all here as an audience since I don’t have many friends or a social life, and I’ve noticed that saying controversial stuff gets reactions to my comments