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Comment by freetime2 | Hacker News Reader

The thing that actually surprises me most here is that Transmit for Mac is apparently quite profitable. Free FTP clients have been around for so long, and have worked so reliably, that the thought of paying for one never crossed my mind. I personally have used Cyberduck for years, which is free (although it does tastefully ask for donations) and has never given me a reason to look for other options.

Can anyone explain what Transmit does that makes it worth $45? I am wondering if I am missing out on something here.

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I paid $34 for Transmit 4 in 2013 and $35 launch price for Transmit 5 in 2017. Before that I used Cyberduck (and donated in 2010 to remove the banner!) I have also used Filezilla a lot on multiple OSes.

Transmit is better software. I mostly prefer it because it is better at managing favorites, I prefer its file editing workflow, I prefer its control over transfers and aesthetically I like the UI and how it presents multiple panes. Its directory mounting story is pretty good. I trust it more when I have multiple transfers in progress, etc. The use of tabs in the 5 update and easier search filtering of favorites has been worth the update so far.

Ideally everything I do would be a git deploy or an rsync command, but since it's not, I am happy to pay a quality software publisher to remove a lot of headache from annoying FTP and S3 operations. It's no different than why I pay for a good text editor or image editor even though I can get anything done in a free alternative.

I used an older version of Transmit years ago (it was a bit cheaper then) and was always happy with it.

Then I went years without needing to use FTP at all (capistrano deployments for the win!)

Over the last year and 1/2 I have been doing lots of integrations with 3rd parties where some varient of FTP is needed (sFTP, etc) to download data.

I tried a few different free ones and used CyberDuck for a few months, I started running into strange bugs that were not reproducible and basically gave up on it.

Downloaded Transmit and never looked back - it just works, also a great S3 GUI client.

Transmit/Mac when it's discounted is definitely worth it IMO. $45 is a little steep, but Transmit performs really well, especially when you have a lot of little files to move.

$45/yr is probably an hours worth of work in most of the US for software devs. If you work minimum wage that’s probably 5 hours of work.

It literally needs to save you about an hour’s worth of time over its lifetime to be worth it. And that isn’t even including all the other benefits you get from using a more frictionless and pleasing to use software.

I find complaints about the steep cost of tools from professionals when they don’t even cost triple digits quite short sighted, to be honest (an exception could be made for professionals from countries where their pay is significantly lower).

I'm fine with paying for good software and I probably have about a half dozen paid apps running right now on my desktop. I completely agree with your point that $45 is probably not worth worrying about (or the difference between $45 and a $25 sale price) in the grand scheme of things if the software is useful to you.

One thing I will say though is that there are other costs associated with non-free software beyond just the license cost. You've got to manage license keys. You've got to worry about upgrades. If your company is paying for it you've either got to go through IT for procurement or you've got to submit an expense report to be reimbursed. Sometimes there are obnoxious license servers that you need to deal with (I'm looking at you, IntelliJ!). Installation of paid apps is harder to automate than a simple homebrew or npm command.

Of course, all of this may still very well be worth it if the software is useful.

It’s even more puzzling given how many other FTP/SFTP graphical clients there are for Mac OS. Not just Transmit and Cyberduck, but also Fugu, which is open-source like Cyberduck (although it has not been much developed of late) but Fetch, which is commercial and older than Transmit (dating back from the 80s) yet cheaper at $29.

I just don’t see why Transmit is worth it with all those other options.

Its well designed, supports a good number of protocalls, and the "mount as disk" feature can be really handy both for daily use as well as automation.

I agree 49 is a lot though. I'd wait for a bundle or discount.

We spent the money because Panic is good and a lot of non-technical people are told by the government, as part of grant and reporting requirements, to upload/download files. $45 is pretty cheap to do a setup and have people do it on their own with a very user friendly program.

For me, Cyberduck was unreliable. It would constantly disconnect from my servers (VPS, shared hosting, Windows file server at work, even my local network servers), it would crash occasionally, and very rarely it would lock up for a few seconds then run fine (relatively) for a while. This was the case both on my Mac Pro running Sierra and my Mac mini running El Cap (I have neither machine now; sold the Pro and the mini's logic board died).

Command line ftp worked fine, Filezilla worked fine, and Transmit worked wonderfully on both machines. Anecdotal I know, but Cyberduck is not what it used to be, at least for me.

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