They are attempting to juice revenue across all product cohorts, this is simply another datapoint. Customers are captive until there are more connectivity options.
“Juice?”
As in they have the best product by a wide margin and are charging a totally fair price for it that reflects demand.
Nobody flying private cares about the price of Starlink.
It’s worse if they are squeezing people in underserved rural areas… our monthly has gone down from €35 to €29 and still getting the same speed.
The second SpaceX offers direct-to-cell in our area we will switch to their service as we’ve never had any issues with it whereas the incumbent mobile/broadband providers regularly throttle even when we’re paying top tier prices.
Totally agree there needs to be more competition and preferably not from other billionaires … but until then, Starlink is great!
Starlink should probably reverse course on this however, it's one thing to pay 10k for up to 20 guests on a small private jet vs a company like Delta with a fleet of 747s. Charge Delta 20k, charge this guy 10k.
I don't know who else is launching satellites, but many airlines do offer wifi, often via partnerships with telco companies. It's just expensive and slow.
So the only moat I see (as a layman) is the speed and capacity. The one flight that I was on that had Starlink, had better internet during the flight, than most airports have on the ground.
There are quite a few providers of inflight wifi via satellite (or even cellular towers). Speeds are not usually as high as Starlink but it is ridiculous to say they have zero competition.
You also have Amazon building a constellation, OneWeb with one already in place (though not available for retail customers), and a Chinese one under construction.
That 20 guests on a PJ are probably worth more than a fully booked 747. Price has always been set based how much customers are willing pay, not based on the value it creates.
Why? Rich people flying private want to be connected and Starlink is the most reliable game in town. "Do you have Starlink?" is probably already being asked by those booking private.
Also, not everyone in "aviation" is either an airliner or a 20 seat private jet. Joe Piston flying his two seater Cessna that cost him about as much as a new Toyota is not ever going to be paying Starlink's aviation price.
They really need more price tiers and scale them by a better price differentiator: max gross weight or number of seats.
Joe Piston probably has enough on his plate flying his 2-seater without global 1Gbps entertainment-on-demand or executing trades on his brokerage account while his team of financiers crunch the numbers in row 2.
Starlink Aviation has 2 General Aviation tiers at $200/mo and $1,000/mo, 3 business tiers, $4000/mo, $12,500/mo, $20,000/mo, and negotiable “Fleet” pricing for commercial and government.
Of course a pilot is not going to trading stocks while flying, but there are plenty of safety reasons to have in-cockpit connectivity, including weather, notams, long-range comms with their destination, and so on. Not to mention convenient Internet for a passenger on a long flight, who themselves might want to trade their stocks.
These use cases are approximately competing with SiriusXM weather, which has price tiers from $29.99/mo to $99.99/mo.
Whats the point of taking passengers if they aren't going to be paying attention. Leave them on the ground and take someone who actually enjoys the experience.
As a Joe Piston, the starlink pricing constant-whipsaw has been really annoying.
I love the tech. It's truly game-changing. And there is no competitor right now.
I bought my mini dish for $400 or so. I've paid $250/mo, $65/mo, $250/mo again, now $200/mo, and on standby for $5/mo and now $10/mo. Don't get me started on the speed-limit and bandwidth-metering games they've played along the way.
I literally have no idea from month to month what the thing will cost. It's still awesome. But there are thousands of butthurt pilots who bought the dish at 65/mo (and many made 100W PD power upgrades, self included, for another few hundred) and got raised to 250/mo immediately.
It's not so much the cost anymore as the principle of a completely unhinged vendor. Bezos' version will have a bunch of ready buyers if he can stick to a price for longer than a Ketamine high.
As I write this, I'm disputing a charge from Starlink because when I activated mine, they automatically started the free trial for me, but nowhere in the receipt or on their website did they say they would switch me to the most expensive plan after the free trial was over. And they made it extremely confusing to cancel my free trial. So I ended up being charged $120 for something that I had just opened out of the box. I disputed it twice through Apple Card and it still got rejected, even though I have the invoices. So I'm disputing it a third time, and I know one thing is clear: I am never going to purchase anything that Elon has made ever again. They also lied to me about the cost of keeping the Starlink. Their app said the satellite would need to stay "alive," and to do so I had to pay $5 a month. But then I recently realized that that was also a lie—you don't have to pay to keep the service or the satellite alive.
Apple Card aka Goldman Sachs is notoriously bad at handling disputes. They were fined $89 million for mishandling disputes, yet the continue to reject disputes offhand [1]. I no longer use Apple Card other than for Apple Store purchases.
Who's your target audience for this... misinformation?
> charged $120 for something that I had just opened out of the box
It does not work out of the box, you need to install an app, add a payment method, and sign up for a plan, free trial or not.
>you don't have to pay to keep the service or the satellite alive
Not sure what you mean by keeping a satellite alive, but you do need to pay for the service. There is no "Free" or "Pay as You Go" plan. Also, the Standby Mode $10/mo, not $5.
As for it being "extremely confusing", that's highly subjective so I won't comment, but it's definitely standard UI and I think it took me less than 8 clicks to first downgrade then cancel my plan.
And, apparently, I now have to reactivate the service to one of the published plans if I want to use more than low-speed data. Previously, I still had high-speed bandwidth for $10 a month just not a lot of it.
They apparently changed things recently. And, now that I'm thinking about it, I probably skimmed an email that said something about this a month or two ago but, since the charge was staying at $10 a month, didn't pay much attention to the details.
I noticed this too, but decided to keep my mini because I downgraded my max plan (I was defaulted to this as a customer since they started) to a bitrate I still won't reach, and by doing so am saving $480 per year.
I am traveling in Europe currently and got a Saily SIM card - 5g coverage is really good and seems to be expanding fast - a small village I visited 2 years ago that had no cell coverage at all I was getting 250mbps download, faster than than the wired internet at most of the places I was visiting. This prompted me to actually look into Starlink speeds and apparently 5g is generally faster than Starlink...
This made me wonder if Starlink is a much more niche product than I thought - I actually thought it was significantly faster than cell data - but it seems it's just for folks in super remote areas at this point?
A few years ago I actually traveled all around the US and worked remotely with a 4g unlimited data sim card and was pretty amazed at the coverage, only very few places was I left without coverage. I'm guessing it's even better now?
Remote areas of USA (and other third world countries when it comes to the communication infrastructure) + companies that operate in remote areas (logistic, resource extraction, etc) + military are main customer base.
There are plenty of super remote areas in Europe as well. Even more in the US, where population is more clustered to population centers
But the big selling points of Starlink are either as a backup connection (which the consumer plan actively enables: in months where you use less than 10GB you pay $10/month) or as a connection for ships and airplanes
Theoretical max speed of 4G/5G are like 5Gbps down/1Gbps up, without going into mmWave. Actual link speeds of Starlink terminals don't seem to be published in the open, but it's at least throttled to up to 310Mbps down/44Mbps up for Priority plans. Looks like it's supposed to reach 1Gbps down with V3 sats, but then again, cellular is like up to 5Gbps yesterday, at least in the spec.
It's just that Starlink being a new thing and with zero users tended to be less congested, hence it tended to do better in somewhat of an unfair comparison in a remote cabin side by side against an LTE equipment. It was NEVER faster in theory compared to terrestrial cellular.
> Actual link speeds of Starlink terminals don't seem to be published in the open, but it's at least throttled to up to 310Mbps down/44Mbps up for Priority plans.
I had it last year in the Canary Islands (where I assume subscription is way below max capacity - no priority plan) before my current provider placed fiber, and I was getting up to 430Mbps down/100Mbps up with a consistent no-bufferbloat ~70ms ping, which is really not bad.
I guess in populated areas it can only reduce in speed as subscriptions increase, but in sparsely populated ones where fiber is not an option and 5G is crappy and priced similarly to Starlink, it's a valid alternative with no contenders for now. Not to mention that the ISP infrastructure it relies on does not depend on ground infrastructure, so if you're off-grid, you also don't depend on cabling/5G towers/etc for internet access.
I’m pretty sure rest of starlink customers will get similar treatment in the future. Their potential customer base is limited and it’s only ISP that literately burns their backbone network every few years and has to replace to keep it running.
On top of that, their claims it’s profitable does some heavy lifting with how to account for the cost of launching rockets.
It’s extremely cool product and very useful for many customers. But sustainability of current pricing is very questionable.
Their potential customer base is literally everybody because they are the only ISP that can cover the entire globe. Everybody’s potential customer base is technically limited because there are only so many humans, but they have the least limited potential customer base of anything that exists.
First, they would need global coverage for that. Because looking at this map tells a different story: https://starlink.com/gb/map
It’s still the best option, but far from “global”. Also Iran is an obvious lie with that “coming soon” color, so god knows what else isn’t true on this.
it has already gone up in price two times since i got mine. i still happily pay for the convenience and safety of having internet on my campervan in the middle of a national forest. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Having just flown some flights with Starlink internet connection, I really love the service, it's just amazing. But the rugpull here might actually break through the distortion field of Musk. It's really interesting to compare the reality distortion fields of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs. It took a looooooong time for Apple stock to get properly valued in the 2000s, after it was clear that they would take over consumer computing. Jobs' RDF worked amazingly well on aligning engineering towards consumer needs, and towards convincing consumers and (some) reviewers that they had created the right sort of products for the future. Elon Musk seems to have mastered RDF on investors plus consumers, and when you're chasing sky high valuations by always piling your prior failed "ideas" into your next big thing (i.e. next big gamble), it only takes a few bad gambles to bring down the entire house of cards.
At the end of the day, there's the people who can make a vastly superior product time and time again, and they all like to work with other people who can do the same. They like to be pushed, they love solving hard problems, hate bureaucracy, and will find leaders that can accommodate all that. Elon provides that the same as Steve did.
I agree, though honestly it starts with any of Musk's product presentation events, which, frankly are all absolutely terrible compared to what Jobs would put on.
Musk is good at getting money, he is not good at product design. Jobs had amazing taste, Musk has terrible taste. If Musk has a talent beyond raising money, it can be in making bold management moves, at least that's what I hear from CEOs that admire Musk. But I think in the past five years all the bold choices have not been so fantastic.
Cybertruck was when people started to see that the emperor had no clothes, i think.
It is an reckless business practice to not have the monthly price locked down, with strong contractual protections. Sounds like Correnti didn't negotiate well and are now finding out.
-SpaceX raised $75bn in the IPO which will only last so long for a loss making high capital requirements company.
-Then $25bn via bonds which have an annual interest rate repayment of $1.46 billion + repayment of the $25bn in 2031.
-Morgan Stanley said: "In our model, we estimate SpaceX raising an average of $72bn annually between 2027 and 2030 and then an average of $95bn annually between 2031 and 2034."[0]
SpaceX stock has also dropped below their IPO price. It doesn't change their current financials but it may make it more difficult to raise money in the future.
Note that the objection is as much to the abruptness as the scale of the price increase.
Large customers sinking millions into (here aviation) assets rightly expect that their vendors respect their market lifecycles.
Starlink's behavior creates a credibility gap that could drive such customers to the 2-3 upcoming competitors with poorer service and even higher costs, but perhaps more reliability as partners.
What’s even more concerning is that the current government changed their requirements for the rural broadband program so companies like StarLink can bid to bring internet to those remote areas instead of using wired or fiber connections. Not far-fetched that StarLink wins this contract and then squeezes those customers over time. ISPs will have little reason to expand in those underserved areas without government subsidies.
On the one hand, sure, the unlimited aviation plans are targeting customers with lots of money. And they involve fancy, expensive-to-replace, FAA-approved hardware.
On the other hand, it’s sort of an easy market to target as such things go, and TAM is limited. In the areas where terrestrial radio for airplanes isn’t viable (rural areas and over water), there is a very low density of Internet user and satellite constellation that can cover the whole planet will have plenty of bandwidth.
Right now this is Starlink and, with MUCH lower available bandwidth and correspondingly lower pricing, Iridium. But Rocketlab is surely planning to grow Iridium and Amazon is planning to launch Leo soon. And there is still only so much aviation Internet money to go around.
So I think that SpaceX trying to juice profits on a small market that is only temporarily captive is a bad sign.
Not a great move for SpaceX IMO. Things that get installed on airplanes are very expensive and people expect them to last 10+ years. If the equipment can only be used with a single service provider, and they have a track record of just doubling the price because they think they can get away with it, people are going to look for alternatives.
Starlink is clearly the best right now but there are competitors. In particular, these competitors may not have the capacity to service millions of households at $100/mo, but they definitely do for private planes at $10k/mo, especially when the service is only being used for maybe 40hr/mo.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 68.3 ms ] threadIf you live in a $300,000 home and pay $100/month for internet you’re paying 0.4% per year for the service.
If you own a $15,000,000 jet and pay $20,000/month for internet you’re paying 1.6% per year for the service.
By this comparison, we might say private jet owners are paying 4x more for their internet on their plane.
It’s worse if they are squeezing people in underserved rural areas… our monthly has gone down from €35 to €29 and still getting the same speed.
The second SpaceX offers direct-to-cell in our area we will switch to their service as we’ve never had any issues with it whereas the incumbent mobile/broadband providers regularly throttle even when we’re paying top tier prices.
Totally agree there needs to be more competition and preferably not from other billionaires … but until then, Starlink is great!
So the only moat I see (as a layman) is the speed and capacity. The one flight that I was on that had Starlink, had better internet during the flight, than most airports have on the ground.
When it comes to internet, this IS the moat.
You also have Amazon building a constellation, OneWeb with one already in place (though not available for retail customers), and a Chinese one under construction.
Why? Rich people flying private want to be connected and Starlink is the most reliable game in town. "Do you have Starlink?" is probably already being asked by those booking private.
They really need more price tiers and scale them by a better price differentiator: max gross weight or number of seats.
Starlink Aviation has 2 General Aviation tiers at $200/mo and $1,000/mo, 3 business tiers, $4000/mo, $12,500/mo, $20,000/mo, and negotiable “Fleet” pricing for commercial and government.
https://starlink.com/business/aviation?srsltid=AfmBOoqiIuBL1...
These use cases are approximately competing with SiriusXM weather, which has price tiers from $29.99/mo to $99.99/mo.
I love the tech. It's truly game-changing. And there is no competitor right now.
I bought my mini dish for $400 or so. I've paid $250/mo, $65/mo, $250/mo again, now $200/mo, and on standby for $5/mo and now $10/mo. Don't get me started on the speed-limit and bandwidth-metering games they've played along the way.
I literally have no idea from month to month what the thing will cost. It's still awesome. But there are thousands of butthurt pilots who bought the dish at 65/mo (and many made 100W PD power upgrades, self included, for another few hundred) and got raised to 250/mo immediately.
It's not so much the cost anymore as the principle of a completely unhinged vendor. Bezos' version will have a bunch of ready buyers if he can stick to a price for longer than a Ketamine high.
[1] https://www.consumerfinance.gov/archive/newsroom/cfpb-orders...
It does not work out of the box, you need to install an app, add a payment method, and sign up for a plan, free trial or not.
>you don't have to pay to keep the service or the satellite alive
Not sure what you mean by keeping a satellite alive, but you do need to pay for the service. There is no "Free" or "Pay as You Go" plan. Also, the Standby Mode $10/mo, not $5.
As for it being "extremely confusing", that's highly subjective so I won't comment, but it's definitely standard UI and I think it took me less than 8 clicks to first downgrade then cancel my plan.
I only get 10G per month of bandwidth but I rarely use it since I have a fiber connection that is mostly reliable.
It might be a grandfathered plan because they don't list it anywhere I can see:
Edit: turns out this is a feature/mode and not a plan:https://starlink.com/na/support/article/37bb3b47-9525-7224-5...
And, apparently, I now have to reactivate the service to one of the published plans if I want to use more than low-speed data. Previously, I still had high-speed bandwidth for $10 a month just not a lot of it.
They apparently changed things recently. And, now that I'm thinking about it, I probably skimmed an email that said something about this a month or two ago but, since the charge was staying at $10 a month, didn't pay much attention to the details.
I kinda wanted to get one of those for standby, but the price seemed too good to be true, so I figured they'd either eliminate it or raise the price.
This made me wonder if Starlink is a much more niche product than I thought - I actually thought it was significantly faster than cell data - but it seems it's just for folks in super remote areas at this point?
TBF that's like 70% of the US, large parts of the Southern Hemisphere in general, much of China, India, Russia, etc.
But yes, StarLink is best when it has some user density but not too much user density. It will be this way until... probably forever.
If I go camping? StarLink. Otherwise no cell/internet service.
A few years ago I actually traveled all around the US and worked remotely with a 4g unlimited data sim card and was pretty amazed at the coverage, only very few places was I left without coverage. I'm guessing it's even better now?
But the big selling points of Starlink are either as a backup connection (which the consumer plan actively enables: in months where you use less than 10GB you pay $10/month) or as a connection for ships and airplanes
It's just that Starlink being a new thing and with zero users tended to be less congested, hence it tended to do better in somewhat of an unfair comparison in a remote cabin side by side against an LTE equipment. It was NEVER faster in theory compared to terrestrial cellular.
I had it last year in the Canary Islands (where I assume subscription is way below max capacity - no priority plan) before my current provider placed fiber, and I was getting up to 430Mbps down/100Mbps up with a consistent no-bufferbloat ~70ms ping, which is really not bad.
I guess in populated areas it can only reduce in speed as subscriptions increase, but in sparsely populated ones where fiber is not an option and 5G is crappy and priced similarly to Starlink, it's a valid alternative with no contenders for now. Not to mention that the ISP infrastructure it relies on does not depend on ground infrastructure, so if you're off-grid, you also don't depend on cabling/5G towers/etc for internet access.
On top of that, their claims it’s profitable does some heavy lifting with how to account for the cost of launching rockets.
It’s extremely cool product and very useful for many customers. But sustainability of current pricing is very questionable.
It’s still the best option, but far from “global”. Also Iran is an obvious lie with that “coming soon” color, so god knows what else isn’t true on this.
https://www.ft.com/content/3a023b95-66c3-41e1-b0ce-df752a499...
Having just flown some flights with Starlink internet connection, I really love the service, it's just amazing. But the rugpull here might actually break through the distortion field of Musk. It's really interesting to compare the reality distortion fields of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs. It took a looooooong time for Apple stock to get properly valued in the 2000s, after it was clear that they would take over consumer computing. Jobs' RDF worked amazingly well on aligning engineering towards consumer needs, and towards convincing consumers and (some) reviewers that they had created the right sort of products for the future. Elon Musk seems to have mastered RDF on investors plus consumers, and when you're chasing sky high valuations by always piling your prior failed "ideas" into your next big thing (i.e. next big gamble), it only takes a few bad gambles to bring down the entire house of cards.
These parts are likely pushing the best minds away from Musk these days. Not sure when that turned, perhaps Cybertruck?
Musk is good at getting money, he is not good at product design. Jobs had amazing taste, Musk has terrible taste. If Musk has a talent beyond raising money, it can be in making bold management moves, at least that's what I hear from CEOs that admire Musk. But I think in the past five years all the bold choices have not been so fantastic.
Cybertruck was when people started to see that the emperor had no clothes, i think.
[1] https://www.blueorigin.com/terawave
-SpaceX raised $75bn in the IPO which will only last so long for a loss making high capital requirements company.
-Then $25bn via bonds which have an annual interest rate repayment of $1.46 billion + repayment of the $25bn in 2031.
-Morgan Stanley said: "In our model, we estimate SpaceX raising an average of $72bn annually between 2027 and 2030 and then an average of $95bn annually between 2031 and 2034."[0]
So huge amounts needed continuously.
[0]https://www.ft.com/content/09a62ed4-16af-433c-adb7-c877d1975...
But there are many ai companies!
/s, but only kinda
Large customers sinking millions into (here aviation) assets rightly expect that their vendors respect their market lifecycles.
Starlink's behavior creates a credibility gap that could drive such customers to the 2-3 upcoming competitors with poorer service and even higher costs, but perhaps more reliability as partners.
I'd see this as an opportunity.
He will extract as much as possible, whenever possible.
ouch.
https://old.reddit.com/r/AmazonLeo/comments/1uupd3w
will they offer aviation suitable plans?
On the one hand, sure, the unlimited aviation plans are targeting customers with lots of money. And they involve fancy, expensive-to-replace, FAA-approved hardware.
On the other hand, it’s sort of an easy market to target as such things go, and TAM is limited. In the areas where terrestrial radio for airplanes isn’t viable (rural areas and over water), there is a very low density of Internet user and satellite constellation that can cover the whole planet will have plenty of bandwidth.
Right now this is Starlink and, with MUCH lower available bandwidth and correspondingly lower pricing, Iridium. But Rocketlab is surely planning to grow Iridium and Amazon is planning to launch Leo soon. And there is still only so much aviation Internet money to go around.
So I think that SpaceX trying to juice profits on a small market that is only temporarily captive is a bad sign.
Starlink is clearly the best right now but there are competitors. In particular, these competitors may not have the capacity to service millions of households at $100/mo, but they definitely do for private planes at $10k/mo, especially when the service is only being used for maybe 40hr/mo.