The actual forced subscriptions like Ulysses and You Need A Budget somehow get a free pass though?
https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...
"When purchasing an annual subscription, you will immediately get a perpetual fallback license for the exact version available at the time (of the purchase)."
Parenthesis mine.
You buy version A (for full price) They upgrade you to version B (hoping you will pay the reduced price) When version C come out if you haven't paid yet you get reverted to version A
To give a developers perspective, I have been contemplating to implement subscription based model into my app to make it more sustainable. Putting in time for development and as well as marketing (to always get more users) is frustrating.
"Good" is a high bar... If an app costs $5/m, it has to convince me I'll see $300 in value over 5 years.
I can either increase the price or go the subscription way. If I do increase the price, I'm afraid, it might put people off.
Maybe I can try a hybrid approach. $60 for lifetime or $20 a year.
TextExpander is a good example of this. They changed from a $45 license to $40/year subscription. It's a well polished piece of software, and it syncs between Mac and iOS and has an iOS keyboard to facilitate use there. Quality stuff. But when it comes down to it, some people just want simple text snippet replacements on their Mac, and you'd be an idiot to pay a yearly fee for that.
Obviously I don't have TextEpander's customer/sales information, but I assume more than a few users jumped ship to aText's $5 one-time-purchase.
As the other poster mentioned, you could add features to justify a "pro"-labeled version... maybe pivot-searching backups, or automatic S3/rsync/etc backup.
On the subscription side, an obvious option is hosted backup service that charges per GB per month (hopefully $5-10/m for the average user).
For example some apps have moved to a sub model where the annual fee is more than the original one-off purchase price of the software was.
Photoshop, IntelliJ, MS Office — these apps can charge whatever they want, people just really need them to get their work done.
But if your app is a simple news reader or a markdown editor or an activity viewer — you‘re gonna have a hard time convincing people to pay for it every month.
>Google docs is fine for maybe 80% of use Which is able to undercut a good portion of Microsoft's market.
Keep in mind the original comment I was replying to:
>Subscription pricing requires the app to be so crucial you can‘t live without it.
MS Office is on its way to becoming redundant to the majority of users. The price is going to be less and less justified in the near future as Office loses its reputation as a crucial piece of software (at least for the average student/employee who doesn't need to perform very specific formatting or perform complex spreadsheet calculations).
I think my point was I think that even a typical student will find google docs lacking, but perhaps it is usable enough.
Even if the average person doesn't need MS Office for their own work, there will always be this one prof that emails homework assignments in MS Word format, or the accountant that sends you an Excel Workbook to fill, etc.
Yes, if you're a programmer you can probably get away without Office. But for many people who collaborate with others, having a copy of Word / Excel / Powrpoint is still pretty much essential.
(Side note: I hate people who use Google Docs for their presentations. "Oops, I guess I shouldn't have pressed the back button". "Sorry for the delay, the presentation should load any minute now". "Could everyone please turn off Wifi on their phones so the speaker can open his presentation!")
I might use a subscription based app if it's just a frontend for something that happens server side, but even with that the bar is very high. It needs to fundamentally require server side computation that can't be done on the client for whatever reason. For example, the cloud Mathematica thing does not pass the bar.
So far no application has passed the bar.
Unrelated, but another turnoff are apps that require .pkg installers. Drag and drop should be enough for anything except perhaps kernel drivers, and I don't want to install 3rd party kernel drivers anyway. E.g. VMware should use the hypervisor framework rathet than its own kernel drivers.
And, if you're willing to pay ' thousands of dollars' for the right to use a local app, why would you not 'rent' the license for tens of dollars?
I don't use it. I don't absolutely need any particular software.
I understand everyone wants a subscriber, not a customer, but my budget is dying a death from a thousand cuts here. I just can't keep paying for all these things, even when they're only a "few" dollars, every month. It all adds up. This is why people are saying they only pay for a subscription if it REALLY matters to them. The slots are full. If your model requires a monthly payment for something, it must literally change my life, at this point.
Thirty years ago, I had a $20/mo land line, and a TV antenna, and that was it! Think about that! I'm not at all clear that my quality of life is $500/mo better than it was back then.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0495559725
Across the board they are like this.
I see some sort of reverse consolidation happening in the next few years. Netflix, Amazon, Google, Apple and probably Facebook would lead this aggregation, as they have been doing (or trying/planning to do, as the case may be).
At least one of the apps on OPs list (2do) is included.
I'm a couple of TV shows away from going to an "online streaming only" mode of TV watching.
I'm becoming increasingly annoyed by the "only" in the sales pitches.
Professionally, I use Linux, MacOS, Windows, Emacs, programming languages, and TeX a great deal and they are all extremely powerful and end up being either free or just part of the expense of having a computer. I don't mind paying for IntelliJ, its a great product, and I get regular use out of it and JetBrain's other tools. I also don't mind paying for on-line services: Arq backup, Dropbox, etc. These seem to be worth it.
My problem is that I'm a nerd and I like using software. I'm unhappy using low end software and so I end up buying crazy expensive software that gets very infrequent use: Mathematica, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Acrobat Scanner/OCR/X Pro, Adobe InDesign, Adobe Illustrator, QuickBooks, SPSS, Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Microsoft Word, Excel, the list goes on and on. It even includes games like World of Warcraft.
It would make more sense if this high end software was priced per days of use not for the number of months that I've owned it. I've owned many of these products since they were installed via 3 1/4 inch floppys. Not all of these are sold as subscriptions but they might as well be because of the way the expensive upgrades work (e.g. Mathematica and Adobe products).
I wonder if the problem is you're undervaluing your software. You're expecting a certain price point but often that's too low for a business to be sustainable.
Is that too much?
Even at $120/year, I have serious reservations about putting my photography library in piece of subscription software. I've heard that LR6 is the last standalone licensed version, so I'll be looking into Darktable as an alternative.
It's not much different from another piece of software that you buy outright, but that is not going to be supported after X years. You'll have the same problem: "hey photo_something 2.0 doesn't work on MacOS High Sierra anymore, but our v3.0 does, for a small upgrade fee".
Are you going to hold back on upgrading your OS? For how long? At some point all the delay tactics stop working, and by then there isn't enough of an ecosystem for the "old world" anymore to help you transition out smoothly.
$120/year is really not that much if you are a professional photographer (or digital artist) who needs the bells and whistles that PS/LR provide. If $10/month makes or breaks your business, I have bad news for you.
I personally think that $10/mo for LR/PS is a great deal.
I bought Lightroom 6 for $79 (upgrade price from LR3) about 26 months ago. It still works fine. Whatever features I'd have gotten with the CC package ($260 and continuing upward forever) are certainly not worth more than tripling the price.
Obviously if it's your profession or a more serious hobby the value proposition changes. But the "everyone pays the same price, even the occasional hobbyist" model is pretty shitty for the occasional hobbyist.
[1] http://prodesigntools.com/creative-cloud-one-million-paid-me... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2017/03/17/ad...
If you've been following the standard "sell and charge for upgrade once every few years" model, expect a backlash from loyal users when you move to subscriptions. It's quite simple to get this if you put yourself in the user's shoes and look at things. Wouldn't you feel ripped off or locked in by a subscription? Would you prefer some app that stops working, just like utilities to (like water supply stops if you don't pay the bills)? Many companies who've been in the business still fail to understand this simple point (AgileBits is a good example I can think of in the recent times), but they also change their focus from long time/loyal users to new users who don't really care much about comparing things or using many features. They don't see losing long time/loyal users who complain about this switch as a loss (and probably see it as good riddance).
If you're really anxious to get subscriptions done to get a steadier stream of revenue, my recommendation would be to price the subscription very low and aim for a large number of subscribers or price it quite high and work to get just a low number of subscribers. Both have their pros and cons, but this depends on your product, how valuable it is for users (compared to competing apps), who it's intended for, etc. As a user, my preference, if I do want an app or something, is a very low priced subscription. Maybe a dollar a month or better, a few dollars a year would be better (don't laugh, there are apps and others doing exactly this).
Also it's not clear how much outrage was over the switch to a subscription model (for which there are pros and cons), or for the switch to a cloud services model and the about-face from the "you own your data" position they held before.