91–100 of 294 posts
As someone who buys a lot of apps this is very disappointing. Things that would make me buy MORE apps (demos, upgrade pricing, better support) are still not in the app store, meanwhile the one pricing model I detest (subscriptions) is being added. I suspect I'll be buying far fewer apps if there's a mass movement from a purchase model to a subscription model among app developers. I'm perfectly happy to pay $20-30 for…
As someone who buys a lot of apps this is very disappointing. Things that would make me buy MORE apps (demos, upgrade pricing, better support) are still not in the app store, meanwhile the one pricing model I detest (subscriptions) is being added. I suspect I'll be buying far fewer apps if there's a mass movement from a purchase model to a subscription model among app developers. I'm perfectly happy to pay $20-30 for…
I think the mindset change that needs to happen is this: Apps are a service. I would actually prefer to pay developers of apps that are truly useful to me a monthly amount so I know they can continue to update and improve the app. If an app saves me $1000/yr in headache, I'd prefer to spend $30/yr on a subscription rather than lose the app entirely because the developers can't keep the lights on.
Yes, I have subscriptions for IntelliJ IDEA, for Dropbox, for FastMail and for a DigitalOcean VPS. All these are producing money for me. But the list ends here. Because here's the thing: $5/month here, $10/month there and pretty soon we're talking about serious money. Not only that, but as soon as you stop paying for whatever reason (eg temporary financial problems) you're out.
Of course, with our oversized salaries, we stop noticing that $5/month for a passwords app is actually expensive. And that's actually a good example because a passwords app at least has some utility.
More importantly, subscriptions are immoral because the end result is robbing users of any sense of ownership. And as a software developer, you no longer feel compelled to innovate, to improve, in order to convince users to upgrade. I for one hate renting things, I prefer ownership.
As someone who buys a lot of apps this is very disappointing. Things that would make me buy MORE apps (demos, upgrade pricing, better support) are still not in the app store, meanwhile the one pricing model I detest (subscriptions) is being added. I suspect I'll be buying far fewer apps if there's a mass movement from a purchase model to a subscription model among app developers. I'm perfectly happy to pay $20-30 for…
I think the mindset change that needs to happen is this: Apps are a service. I would actually prefer to pay developers of apps that are truly useful to me a monthly amount so I know they can continue to update and improve the app. If an app saves me $1000/yr in headache, I'd prefer to spend $30/yr on a subscription rather than lose the app entirely because the developers can't keep the lights on.
Putting all your eggs in one basket is generally considered a bad business model, and the same easily applies to software. Free software does not need to just be ethical to be useful, it is also highly pragmatic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My app usage pattern is a handful of apps I use every day and a much larger number of apps that I use very occasionally (down to once a year for something like GPS Nav, an offline mapping app). The problem with subscriptions is that it's hard for me to justify paying a recurring $12/year subscription for an app that I'll use once in that time. These kinds of apps I'm most likely to just do without if they go to a sub…
Even for commonly used apps, subscriptions raise the spectre of "how do I get my data out". Currently, if a purchased app stops being supported I can still open it and get at my data (until an iOS update that breaks it at least). What happens if I don't want to subscribe to an app anymore (for example if the pricing changes)? Can I export data already in it? If there's no clear export story upfront, why should I trus…
As someone who buys a lot of apps this is very disappointing. Things that would make me buy MORE apps (demos, upgrade pricing, better support) are still not in the app store, meanwhile the one pricing model I detest (subscriptions) is being added. I suspect I'll be buying far fewer apps if there's a mass movement from a purchase model to a subscription model among app developers. I'm perfectly happy to pay $20-30 for…
I think the mindset change that needs to happen is this: Apps are a service. I would actually prefer to pay developers of apps that are truly useful to me a monthly amount so I know they can continue to update and improve the app. If an app saves me $1000/yr in headache, I'd prefer to spend $30/yr on a subscription rather than lose the app entirely because the developers can't keep the lights on.
Sounds like Apple is still too incompetent to care about backwards compatibility.
In a reasonable world, stuff running locally on your device would keep working, regardless of what happened to the original developers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been very pleased with the subscription experience on the App Store. The reason I usually hate subscriptions is that they are a headache remember, changing credit cards requires me to remember and update subscriptions in many different places, and providers make it hard to cancel. My experience with subscriptions on iOS has been very positive. It's easy to pay for and easy to cancel. Personally, I would rather p…
Out of curiosity, how much money do you spend monthly on software subscriptions?
As someone who buys a lot of apps this is very disappointing. Things that would make me buy MORE apps (demos, upgrade pricing, better support) are still not in the app store, meanwhile the one pricing model I detest (subscriptions) is being added. I suspect I'll be buying far fewer apps if there's a mass movement from a purchase model to a subscription model among app developers. I'm perfectly happy to pay $20-30 for…
Apps have existed with subscriptions long before now. I suspect you will still be able to buy a flashlight app for a fixed price, but maybe you'll subscribe to Hulu through Apple rather than Hulu's backend.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Sketch is _NOT_ switching to a subscription model. It looks quite a bit like a subscription model to the average person. $99/year is a pretty big jump in price, but I guess they've gotten a chunk of pro market people. The whole bit about being unfair to late adopters is a bit of bunk.
> It looks quite a bit like a subscription model to the average person Not really? My problem with subscription software is that you lose access to it if you stop paying. I used Photoshop 7 for a looooong time because we didn't need any of the new features. You can't do that with Photoshop CC. Because it's a subscription. If anything, maybe you could call it an "update subscription," but if the software works without…
> For that much money, you could use Adobe Illustrator every January, May, and September!
Illustrator is $19.99 per month paid monthly, so a little easier to handle but 2.4x more expensive. Illustrator has a lot more support but the difference in price just got reduced ($99 for about 2+ years versus per year).
Its about a 2x jump in price for Sketch.
I'm most saddened that neither company cares about customer loyalty in a money way.