Anders BorumJun 20, 2024

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.

Show threadJeff Johnson

@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.

Jun 20, 2024 at 12:42pmWeb
Show threadEhlerJun 20, 2024
@lapcatsoftware @palmin for what it’s worth, I wouldn’t have discovered your paid upgrade if I didn’t follow you on here or see it in an indie blog. But I also heard about the original STM on an indie blog, so take that with a huge grain of salt.
Show threadJeff JohnsonJun 20, 2024
@ehler At some point I’m going to advertise the upgrade within the old StopTheMadness extension, but I haven’t done that yet. I don’t like to be pushy. :-)
Show threadEhlerJun 20, 2024
@lapcatsoftware an extension is probably the hardest type of app to do this in a way that people will actually see that doesn’t interrupt people. A new message about it on the settings would make sense, but I haven’t cracked my own settings in awhile on it.