For all the naysaying I wanted something that was “like languagereactor and anki put together” a few days ago and had it done in about two hours. And it runs on-device, because much of the time the whole reason for a cloud is to justify the subscription. And I can just install an apk (for now, I guess Google wants to steal that from us).
Your app subscription is now my weekend project
241–250 of 390 posts
Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
how do you feel about licensing where you pay once, get the software, and have access to updates for one year? if you want future updates, you pay for another year of updates (discounted, of course, for loyalty). or is it more compelling to just have one clean, flat, lifetime rate?
I think the best way is you buy a software, and that version is supported "forever". The developer then creates version n+1. The old version is kept supported, but new features go only into the new version, which you can optionally buy again.
Time/energy wise, even with agentic coding, that's probably not the most fun value proposition for smaller/solo dev teams. I now have to maintain a mental model of several versions of my software, track features, refactors, etc across all the supported versions, and make sure my work doesn't overlap too much lest I cause more bugs while keeping everything stable.
I wouldn't charge customers _less_ for that just because it's now a one-time payment.
Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
Linux desktops (not the kernel) are actually among the worst when it comes to platform churn. It's one of the reasons why Flatpak, AppImage, Snap, etc require relatively complex machinery and runtimes and whatnot to function. The churn is just masked by package managers.
It's come across to me so far that this just results from application developers targeting a specific DE and not really thinking about compatibility, or even really whether they need specific functionality provided a specific way. Would be nice to see the XDG stuff like portals etc. better respected, though, yeah.
> It's come across to me so far that this just results from application developers targeting a specific DE and not really thinking about compatibility, or even really whether they need specific functionality provided a specific way.
They are, but it's not their fault - Wayland removes so much functionality that X had, and delegates that to the WM/DE.
I tried to do a small personal app last year for myself that intercepted and injected events for keyboard and mouse. Not possible in Wayland (so I switched to X instead) - that is delegated to the WM/DE.
There's hundreds of these tiny little cuts that cause friction for app devs.
Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If they're worse value than my... password providers... who only charge me $5/mo In that case, people who run Bitwarden for free are screwed . In fact, looking at how much I use the web browser Chrome, and how much I get out of that , and the fact that I pay $0 to Google to use it (inb4 I'm the product because I'm not paying for it), paying money for anything digital is terrible value! What you've discovered is tha…
> What you've discovered is that prices are all made up. If we think about how to price a product, say a chair, from first principles, you'd take the cost of the raw materials, the time it takes you to turn those raw materials into the finished product, add a %age profit on top, and call it a day. In the real world though, that's not how pricing things works. You have a product, which costs $X in raw materials, and t…
I think you need to recalibrate because charmin is fucking lol
Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
Making your own software is a good way to escape enshittification and influence. I switched from Spotify to buying MP3s and using my own audio client, because I'm fed up of a company telling me which music I should listen to every single time I open the app. It costs more, but I own the music and I escape the constant redesigns, price increases and influential behaviour. Most apps are very simple and there isn't too…
I did MP3s on my plex server for a while but with endless new music added to my playlists it became a hassle and Apple Music was just convenient and Shazam adding any song I hear and like is just too easy...it also plays perfectly on my Apple Watch over cellular when I go for a run, but everyone has their own use case and where they want to spend their time...
That's understandable. I have quite minimal music taste so my setup worked for me. I only listen to music at home when I'm not doing anything else and it's mostly classical so there doesn't tend to be too much to add at any given time.
A minimal web client audio player with some basic database tables in the back for organising and searching does me fine.
Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project
#246You too can implement a slither of the features you need right now in an insecure form without hosting, support, maintenance or future development. This reminds me of the people who think they can build docsend in a weekend. No, you cannot. You can build a wee throwaway app with some of the features of docsend. But that is not equivalent to what people pay docsend for. Businesses and SaaS aren’t just a bunch of stati…
You over-estimate quality of most SaaS products
Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Just because some products or services are great value, doesn't make other products bad value. Sorry, but no. If they're worse value than my email and password providers which my digital life revolves around and who only charge me $5/mo each, then yes those products are a bad value. I pay $3,000/yr for Altium, $200/mo for Claude Max, $60+/mo for ad-free streaming, and begrudgingly $50/mo for Adobe so I'm not agains…
> If they're worse value than my... password providers... who only charge me $5/mo In that case, people who run Bitwarden for free are screwed . In fact, looking at how much I use the web browser Chrome, and how much I get out of that , and the fact that I pay $0 to Google to use it (inb4 I'm the product because I'm not paying for it), paying money for anything digital is terrible value! What you've discovered is tha…
> What you've discovered is that prices are all made up. If we think about how to price a product, say a chair, from first principles, you'd take the cost of the raw materials, the time it takes you to turn those raw materials into the finished product, add a %age profit on top, and call it a day. In the real world though, that's not how pricing things works. You have a product, which costs $X in raw materials, and then you just... make up a number, $Y. Hopefully, $Y is much greater than $X, and you're able to make a great living off selling your chairs. Maybe you're called Eames and people will pay you $5,500 for your chair/lounger, maybe you're Office Depot and sell them for $129. Maybe you're not very good at chairs, so they're not level and then you can't give them away, not even to your friends.
It's just common-sense though - if the market is willing to pay me $100/widget, why would I sell it for `($10 cost to manufacture + 35% markup)`?
The new lower bound for simple side-hustle apps now is virtually zero. All you need is a computer, electricity, internet and (optionally) $20.
Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What you've discovered is that prices are all made up. If we think about how to price a product, say a chair, from first principles, you'd take the cost of the raw materials, the time it takes you to turn those raw materials into the finished product, add a %age profit on top, and call it a day. In the real world though, that's not how pricing things works. You have a product, which costs $X in raw materials, and t…
I think you need to recalibrate because charmin is fucking lol
Who am I to argue about toilet paper with a user named goopypoop!
I assume you use vintage fire hoses from the Birmingham campaign to clean down there?
Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project
#249You too can implement a slither of the features you need right now in an insecure form without hosting, support, maintenance or future development. This reminds me of the people who think they can build docsend in a weekend. No, you cannot. You can build a wee throwaway app with some of the features of docsend. But that is not equivalent to what people pay docsend for. Businesses and SaaS aren’t just a bunch of stati…
Insecure? What do you think is more secure, trusting a third-party SaaS with your data or processing it on your own server?
Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most apps rationale for subscriptions is "Ongoing development" without an option like jetbrains etc. to fall back to a perpetual license. In practice, regardless of whether an app needs ongoing development or not, this is the best way to try to guarantee continuous income and make a living off of a project I guess. Perhaps LLM's will force developers/companies to change their stance and to stop users from recreating…
Or drop the price to $20 a year instead of $20 a month and and focus on small software updated infrequently. Software as a service has a dirty secret that it was more service than software. The companies became larded with payroll and most never had great gross margins.
Pretty much. A lot of software is just good enough already, just keep security updates going and fix occasional bug people complain for too long.
But that might require just firing some people because that amount of man-hours is not needed any more or moving them to make something new and no investor likes it