171–180 of 205 posts
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> App appears to be free, which I suspect will rather drastically change the composition of incoming support messages. Wouldn't assume this; I've seen how dickish people can be to open source maintainers.
He probably meant that free users are more dickish. That’s my experience
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In theory you are correct but realistically you will upgrade.
The difference is without subscription, I can be pretty sure the next major version will benefit me. With subscription,the only thing certain is that the seller wants to do as little as possible to keep taking my money. This tends to result on product updates that benefit them.
Interesting how this can be different in a B2B setting. I run a B2B SaaS and consider personal support to be very important. While I do see some of what the OP described, the overall experience is mostly very positive. I enjoy talking to customers and from what I see, most customers appreciate honest responses, even if those responses explain why something can't be done right now or is much more complex than it seems…
I'll admit I mostly don't care for subscriptions for this sort of thing. But to be more constructive, it seems to me like it's a hole in the market that doesn't have a really good solution right now. I mean, software like this which does need at least a little bit of ongoing support, but doesn't seem to generate enough ongoing value for customers for it to feel reasonable to have a subscription for. None of the solutions we have for that right now really feel great to anybody.
Interesting how this can be different in a B2B setting. I run a B2B SaaS and consider personal support to be very important. While I do see some of what the OP described, the overall experience is mostly very positive. I enjoy talking to customers and from what I see, most customers appreciate honest responses, even if those responses explain why something can't be done right now or is much more complex than it seems…
I think I need to take a break from posting on HN.
Interesting how this can be different in a B2B setting. I run a B2B SaaS and consider personal support to be very important. While I do see some of what the OP described, the overall experience is mostly very positive. I enjoy talking to customers and from what I see, most customers appreciate honest responses, even if those responses explain why something can't be done right now or is much more complex than it seems…
> there is so much blind hate against subscriptions, with little (if any) consideration for a sustainable software business. This is correct thanks for the comment. You will enjoy my next post which is about exactly this. (HN will not enjoy it)
The perspective is very different once you actually try to make ends meet.
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As you have demonstrated with this comment, customers don’t really understand that there’s no such thing as “the product is done and costs are no longer incurred” even if the product is 100% done, and this is especially true on commercial app stores. It costs $99/year to keep your app on the Apple App Store. Stop paying and all apps are delisted. It costs $5/month to maintain a business phone line (Apple needs a phon…
You think that's bad? You should see what the hole in the wall food place pays for rent every single month. They still don't require a subscription for their service. None of that applies to Android, and it only applies to Apple because we have such abysmal regulation in the modern era, where you apparently aren't allowed to regulate business that happens with a computer for some reason.
As far as “none of this applies to Android,” you’re right, but the App Store is where 70% of mobile revenue is spent, even though Apple has less than 20% global marketshare. [1]
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For the majority of software I use, I don't really care about continuous upgrades and new features, as long as it works with the feature set I signed up for. A great example for me is the Xodo app on Android. It's by far the best PDF editor that I've found on Android, particularly for annotating with a digital pen. Some features are locked. If I want to unlock them, it's $5 a month. I get nothing out of that which is…
As you have demonstrated with this comment, customers don’t really understand that there’s no such thing as “the product is done and costs are no longer incurred” even if the product is 100% done, and this is especially true on commercial app stores. It costs $99/year to keep your app on the Apple App Store. Stop paying and all apps are delisted. It costs $5/month to maintain a business phone line (Apple needs a phon…
There are plenty of businesses that have all that overhead and still sell things instead of subscriptions.
Flip this argument around: you go buy a rake at the hardware store. They tell you they need to charge $5 a month for as long as you want to use it since they have to pay for a phone and website, no apple fee, but their city business license is more than that, etc.
Precisely no one will take that deal. If the store wants to stay in business they must continue to sell more products. It’s not my responsibility to keep paying them for a product so they can have a phone line.
If you are selling an app that has a service backing it or are providing support and updates, fine. Try to sell it as a subscription. If you are selling an app that runs entirely on my device? Version it. If you want me to pay for your overhead of continued development, create a new version that has something I would want to pay for.
> In other words, the best approach for us is what most companies do.
Every inexperienced entrepreneur starts with a promise that their support will not be terrible like Google, Comcast, or other big companies. And that will be their path to success.
But in the end, you learn that you need to offer the same level of support that other companies in your market offer. And if your support is really better, nobody will really notice. It does not matter.
And inexperienced entrepreneurs are stubborn (a good trait). So they usually have to learn that lesson on their own.
Thinking about customer support as a ‘differentiator’ or a way to drive profit is depressing. You should simply strive to do what’s best for your customers. The sort of feedback you’re getting is golden and in the right hands can be put to use rather than be dismissed. Assuming that people who disagree with your pricing model just don’t understand how business works is really telling. You have to accept that your pri…
> The reason bug reports feel like a ‘waste of everyone’s time’ is likely because you don't have the right error logging or telemetry built into the app itself. Having to wait for a manual bug report from a user is already a failure. Yes and no. You want enough logging and telemetry that you can roll out an update to 2% of users and know if something is terribly wrong before you roll it out to the other 98%. On the o…