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Comment by ezequiel-garzon | Hacker News Reader

I’m a hobbyist at best, so the subscription is not justified or useful for me (plus I just don’t like subscriptions). I wish you guys had some intermediate product that allowed a one-time contribution through the App Store. Anyway, thanks for such a great app!

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I will second this, and add that I generally resist subscriptions from apps that tout syncing as a subscription feature because I'm already paying to sync stuff with Dropbox/iCloud.

If you're looking for a polished mobile SSH client without a subscription model, you might be interested in Blink[1]. It's worth mentioning that in addition to SSH, it also supports Mosh[2] (it's the official iOS client!), a remote access protocol tailored to handle spotty mobile connections. It's also open source[3] and gives you access to several Unix commands offline.

[1] https://www.blink.sh/

[2] https://mosh.org

[3] https://github.com/blinksh/blink

We serve the free version of Termius to hobbyists which is pretty powerful and has no ads. One more benefit that you can rely on it because it is part of a growing startup. Btw, we saw a lot of dead SSH clients in app stores along the way, just because they had no business model, e.g., one-off payment.

Well... thanks again! To be clear, I’m not arguing for you guys to drop the subscription model. Surely it must cover some needs. I’m simply letting you know that a bunch of us want to make a contribution. So something not as full-featured as the subscription product but maybe with another bell or whistle could be a way to implement this. (Personally I don’t need an improvement. It’s already great as it is.)

"no business model" e.g. one off payment

and yet Microsoft (worlds most valuable company btw) built an empire selling software.

And yet here we are in 2019 and they're moving to subscription model

Because now they can rope-a-dope the market segment who don’t need to upgrade every year, usually only with a new computer.

It’s rent seeking of a sort. No additional needed value delivered, artificial change to extract more monies.

Microsoft was not built on $5 one off software.

Per version payment is “no business model”?

You do realize Adobe, Microsoft, others, made money fine for 40 years before realizing they could leverage corporate procurement into wildly overpriced (~3x what was already profitable) subscriptions?

What's a "dead" SSH client? If the client works, and if you aren't connecting to untrusted hosts, what's the problem with using it?

No offense but your point of being reliable by virtue of being a growing startup is rather laughable.

YC money or not, startups come and go, sometimes going with more of their users’ data than they should. You could have avoided making that point altogether.

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