Ask HN: How much would you pay for a beautiful IRC client for Mac? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How much would you pay for a beautiful IRC client for Mac?

4 pointsryeguy_248 comments

(GUI-based)

One man’s “beautiful” is another man’s “flat and bare” :)

That said - $20 feels right for this sort of thing. Gotta be light, polished and snappy though, truly exceptional. Not of an Electron variety. The fee is basically a pat on a back for the developer for a job well done.

Certainly not more, because it’s a goodwill purchase. But if it’s less, then it’ll look like a temp side project with a limited life expectancy.

Haven't ever seen Electron until now. What's wrong with Electron?

Electron apps basically include and run a full copy of the Chromium web browser, with all the cpu and memory requirements that entails.

Programs built with Electron are written in HTML 5 packaged by wrapping Chromium around it. People's main beef with Electron is size (of the binary) and memory usage. Since you're technically running a whole webbrowser (just with 1 "tab"), it's quite heavy. Think of a simple calculator app taking 50 MB of disk space and using 150 MB of RAM

A lot of programs these days are built using Electron, or similar techniques (packaged HTML 5 app) partly as it's a quick way to build an app that's cross platform and has a lot of functionality

Maybe $100? I suppose it would depend on features. Honestly though, something open source where I make a recurring donation (i.e. Patreon, GitHub Sponsor) might be better, since that may mean development over a longer period of time

I'd be willing to pay for a native (not Electron) macOS app that can connect to IRCCloud[1]

[1] https://github.com/irccloud/irccloud-tools/wiki/API-Overview

How does this app add value? Is it that it’s pretty looking or superior function in some way? I would not pay anything until I understood the benefit.

There are already quite a few options but I would want to pay as little as possible (under $10 or $9.99 max)

I paid 8.99 USD for Textual 7 (MacOS) a couple of months ago. You only see the price ater you install the free app (1 month free trial if I remember correctly). It has more features than I possibly use (I don't use IRC much) and isn't ugly. 19.99 USD would've been my limit.

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