101–110 of 276 posts
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Subscription is $13.49/yr or $1.49/mo for mini according to Mac Store page.
In all fairness, you can't even buy a cup of black coffee from a 7-Eleven for that much.
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software is ongoing though, the subscription model makes more sense if you want ongoing maintenance
profits mainly. some software managed to work just fine for years with one time buy..
The software that can't be released free often has users that require features that need constant maintenance. API integrations, for instance.
These features aren't really optional anymore to be competitive.
People are probably going to be confused between this and the "full" version of Little Snitch. My take on it is that Little Snitch Mini is something you can install on a non-technical friend or family member's computer whereas power users may want to stick with the existing offering. I say this as a long time heavy user of Little Snitch. It's very annoying when you first get it installed, but it provides really usefu…
Little Snitch is great, but it does a bit too much for my liking. I've been using LuLu [0] which is a free product from Patrick Wardle, and I'm pretty happy with it. It mostly stays out of the way and I just need to approve new connections the first time I run an app. [0] https://objective-see.org/products/lulu.html
LS seems to have trouble popping transfer attempt warning modals even if set to all desktops.
They don't even list the price along with their other products: https://obdev.at/shop/index.html
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I generally agree with you so I looked it up. In-App Purchases: Yearly Subscription $13.49 Monthly Subscription $1.49 That's surprisingly modest. 3-4 years of subscription approximately being equal to a license sounds reasonable. The real question is, is little snitch rent seeking? Given what happened after Catalina, I am giving them the benefit of the doubt at the moment. Paying for updates before receiving them def…
> 3-4 years of subscription approximately being equal to a license sounds reasonable. Which is probably why the apps on the App Store which offer both subscription and lifetime pricing tend to have the latter at about 3 times the cost of the former. But Little Snitch Mini does not offer that choice. I’d be willing to pay more than 40$ for a one-time purchase of Little Snitch Mini, but there’s zero chance I’ll do it a…
Why is obdev sku-ifying their product? Because the incentive model for selling a license means that the market can saturate and there is a lack of recurring or stable income/income safety for the dev. In order to get new spikes of income, a new product is generated. If the market for a particular license becomes saturated, how will they make more money?
Licensed based sales incentivizes creation of new product and disincentivizes incremental improvements on already complete products.
On the other hand, subscription models incentivize rent seeking. If money is coming in, there is no reason to do more work. Income is not dependent in any way for work done, except maybe compatibility adjustments.
So a license is a wonderful model for the buyer and not so great for the seller. A subscription is awful for the buyer, but too good for the seller.
So what kind of payment method/pricing scheme, keeps the developer engaged in improving the product, but doesn't incentivize rent-seeking?
How would you price things if you were the seller?
I have to download and install the app to see how much it costs? They don't even list the price along with their other products: https://obdev.at/shop/index.html
There can be 175+ different territories that you may sell an app in, each with a different local price point. You also can't expect to simply show a converted $US dollar amount either as you may want to do price discrimination (so that the app is cheaper for regions that cannot afford the exact $US equivalent).
Overall options seem to be:
1. Don't show pricing and leave it for the App Store to display - the most common approach
2. Only show $US pricing on the website and let non-US customers manually translate to their local pricing - not a great experience for non-US users
3. Manually or automatically sync pricing on the website display with the actual current App Store pricing. This is quite a labour or integration intensive task and I've only seen this been done by large vendors
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I generally agree with you so I looked it up. In-App Purchases: Yearly Subscription $13.49 Monthly Subscription $1.49 That's surprisingly modest. 3-4 years of subscription approximately being equal to a license sounds reasonable. The real question is, is little snitch rent seeking? Given what happened after Catalina, I am giving them the benefit of the doubt at the moment. Paying for updates before receiving them def…
> 3-4 years of subscription approximately being equal to a license sounds reasonable. Which is probably why the apps on the App Store which offer both subscription and lifetime pricing tend to have the latter at about 3 times the cost of the former. But Little Snitch Mini does not offer that choice. I’d be willing to pay more than 40$ for a one-time purchase of Little Snitch Mini, but there’s zero chance I’ll do it a…
You satisfy users who are happy to pay a large amount upfront by they are also likely your most enthusiastic customers. So in essence they would be the customers who would probably pay more than 3 years of subscriptions over the period the lifetime payment covers.
Users who aren't that enthusiastic are more likely to not use the app for long periods and also unlikely to pay a large upfront cost.
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In all fairness, you can't even buy a cup of black coffee from a 7-Eleven for that much.
Please let’s stop comparing software subscriptions to coffee. It misses the point about the recurring cost and lock in, and not everyone lives in the USA and pays high prices for coffee every day (or ever). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32738791
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> 3-4 years of subscription approximately being equal to a license sounds reasonable. Which is probably why the apps on the App Store which offer both subscription and lifetime pricing tend to have the latter at about 3 times the cost of the former. But Little Snitch Mini does not offer that choice. I’d be willing to pay more than 40$ for a one-time purchase of Little Snitch Mini, but there’s zero chance I’ll do it a…
I see both sides. This dilemma is capitalist hell. Why is obdev sku-ifying their product? Because the incentive model for selling a license means that the market can saturate and there is a lack of recurring or stable income/income safety for the dev. In order to get new spikes of income, a new product is generated. If the market for a particular license becomes saturated, how will they make more money? Licensed base…
People are probably going to be confused between this and the "full" version of Little Snitch. My take on it is that Little Snitch Mini is something you can install on a non-technical friend or family member's computer whereas power users may want to stick with the existing offering. I say this as a long time heavy user of Little Snitch. It's very annoying when you first get it installed, but it provides really usefu…
I've always thought this should be a feature in an OS for advanced users. Combined with some OS level security optimizations it could be quite a powerful security feature for the paranoid and at-risk. I haven't tried mini but there's probably plenty of UX gains in between the standard Little Snitch fine control approach and the UBlock Origin style community curated defaults where control/customization is optional/on-…