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Comment by suhastech | Hacker News Reader

That makes sense. My app[1] is currently priced at $20. The way it's used, it can't be right to limit users with pro features.

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.

[1] https://thehorcrux.com/

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If you have some pro features that include an ongoing hosted service, that's the most justifiable way to do it IMO.

One other thing that's easy to forget: you can't just look at how much it costs and how important it is to your users. You also have to consider competitors and how difficult your product would be to replace. Even if your app is worth $120/year to me, I'm still going to switch to a competitor if they'll sell it for less.

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.

If all you need is text snippet replacements on your Mac, you can just visit the Keyboard pane of the system prefs. They'll sync to your iThings, too, albeit a little wonkily at times (like all iCloud syncing).

Good point, I always forget that's built in now. aText would be for more advanced stuff like including dates or customizable fields in the snippets.

I think you could raise the price to $30 at minimum. The hybrid approach is also viable.

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).

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