Mastodawn

Anders Borum Jun 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.

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Greg Pierce

@palmin I think you are not wrong, and alternate models can be a better fit for some types of applications/markets. However, the market changes that followed from App Stores set consumer expectations in ways that make it increasingly like swimming upstream to attempt to adopt and communicate other models – making it that much more difficult to and risky to pursue them.