Reading Mastodon and listening to podcasts it has become accepted truth that only subscription pricing makes software development sustainable. That having users pay once is irresponsible.
But the underlying fallacy is that every user should make you profit.
To be sustainable your users collectively need to pay you enough and with millions of future users it is very possible to just have income from new users.
You still want to cater to existing users. Their goodwill will bring in new users.
@palmin I quite heavily rely on @ShellFish. I would quite happily have a subscription option to keep trickling money your way to make sure it remains under development. (Assuming others would do the same.)
Equally, I’m happy to stan for it - it’s a great app folks! - but I worry that probably doesn’t send much your way.
@palmin I agree that subscriptions—really, I would call it rental—is not the only way.
However, I’m not sure how I would even calculate profit per user.
Paid upgrades are important. Mine has been a huge boost, but it’s the first in five years, and it’s totally voluntary, not forced on previous customers.
@palmin if it wasn't impractical it'd be nice to have a happy medium, something along the lines of "pay X per month, but only in months where you've actually used the app".
Some tools are worth paying for, but if I don't use them very often the price per use can be very high. And manually managing subscriptions to only have the "correct" ones active is terrible…
@andreagrandi The model in Working Copy is working well and my other apps allow the user to either pick a subscription for short term usage or a lifetime purchase if they prefer this.
But the pendulum has swung so far towards subscriptions that users question if there will be long-term support for apps without subscriptions.
@palmin Here’s another great example of a reasonable, helpful way to do subscriptions/upgrades while still being mindful of existing users (also another great app: @goodlinks), similar in spirit to @WorkingCopy
@WorkingCopy @palmin At the other end of the app subscription spectrum. 😂
@palmin I’m not entirely sure yet, but based on the unlock premium screen, the new @menubox looks like it might be another app that follows a similar pro model?
Attached: 1 image We're very excited to be able to announce the official release of Menu Box! Menu Box is an app designed to provide beautiful custom menus for use in your advanced Shortcuts. Menu Items are fully customisable, including allowing you to add an SF Symbol, an existing App Icon, or your own image, as well as allowing you to add a data payload to be read in via your Shortcuts. Menu Box helps make your Shortcuts even more powerful and is especially perfect when paired with the Action Button to make your phone even more useful as you go about your life. Find out more at https://menubox.app
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