Hacker News Reader

Comment by ekzy | Hacker News Reader

It seems free on Chrome and Firefox but £5 for Safari... :( Why?

One reason might be that you need to shell out $99 every year to be allowed to publish official Safari extensions.

It is, theoretically, possible to distribute without the App Store, but users need to activate Developer mode and do quite a few manual steps. It's not a click (or drag and drop) like FF and Chromium Based browsers.

The quick answer is: it makes it possible to work on project full-time. Only 1 of 2000 makes a donation https://darkreader.org/blog/500k-users/

I agree about selling the product. My question was about Safari, and why only on Safari users have to pay. Isn't it a bit like having your website say "works better in Chrome"? Don't get me wrong, I am still grateful that the extension is available on Safari, but it just seems a bit unfair

My thought process:

Apple is the only place I have to pay to develop. Apple is a luxury product. Apple users can pay luxury prices for my time.

I'm trying different approaches. The crowdfunding was not very successful, so I decided to try making the app paid for Safari, since the platform is technically different and users count is low. App Store makes its best in selling the apps.

At the same time Chrome Web Store is not suitable for paid apps, today it looks like a big dump: it is filled with outdated and poor made extensions. Raking system makes good apps hardly discoverable. Also paid Chrome extensions work only in 36 countries. Dark Reader owes its popularity to Hacker Vision extension that became paid some day. Maybe that's the reason why some developers prefer monetizing their extensions by selling users browsing history.

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