> NovaChat is a paid app with a monthly fee of $10 (price may go up after beta period)
Wow $10/mo?! Pidgin was the multi-network chat tool, and was free! I'd understand $10 one-time, but not per month. And the price may go up? No thanks
Wow $10/mo?! Pidgin was the multi-network chat tool, and was free! I'd understand $10 one-time, but not per month. And the price may go up? No thanks
1) It's less likely to be abandoned.
2) It has less (hopefully no) incentive to secretly monetize me or my data.
3) Instead of being a side project for a handful of people, this has the potential to be the full-time project for at least one person.
I was a heavy Pidgin user too, and when you're in an arms race with Google, Facebook, etc. (all of whom are trying to keep their gardens walled in), the work becomes too much for volunteers. Much of it is not rewarding.
Pidgin was gradually and quietly abandoned, so I'm not excited about the prospect of using something that has a similar fate.
Flawed assumption.
A $10 monthly fee may severely limit it's use --- and the less it is used, the more likely it is to be abandoned.
Personally, I think a $10 annual fee would be more reasonable but finding the magic sweetspot between users and dollars is a market research topic.
It's not an assumption. I have been burned by FOSS (e.g. libpurple and Rambox) that were abandoned. I have not yet been burned by any paid software. The latter is much, much rarer. If you charge anything and have users, you can sell the business to someone who will keep it going, even if you're not cash-flow positive yet.
> A $10 monthly fee may severely limit it's use --- and the less it is used, the more likely it is to be abandoned. Personally, I think a $10 annual fee would be more reasonable
You may serious underestimate how difficult it is to reverse-engineer and maintain client libraries for messaging services. $10/user/year is not reasonable.
Someone could sustain themselves with just 300 users at that rate, and they could live comfortably with 1,000 users.
For something I use for hours every day for work, $10/mo is absolutely nothing.
That's certainly true, but not at the same scale as FOSS.
> Personally, I think a $10 annual fee would be more reasonable but finding the magic sweetspot between users and dollars is a market research topic.
Sure, but it's much harder to bring 10$ a year to a 10$ a month price than the reverse. In one case you will make people angry and assuredly lose many customer, in the other, you may just gain more.
People always forget also the cost to support people over a "beta" software. That cost goes up the more customer he get, thus starting with less customers is certainly a good way to limit the amount of time spent on answering to support request.
I wonder if libpurple just needs to be updated to support cloud services/various chat apis. I’d be willing to bootstrap that project...
All of the popular chat services (FB Messenger, What's App, Snapchat, Signal, etc) are very keen on remaining closed systems.
They don't have an API. The bridges for these are basically dirty hacks that patch Electron apps with some hooks, use web versions (What's App) or even Android apps directly.
There is no "just" here.
Now everything's proprietary and hostile to unofficial clients. Most Matrix bridges have to do stuff like scrape the webapps to work.
Facebook MQTT: https://github.com/dequis/purple-facebook
Telegram: https://github.com/majn/telegram-purple
Skype web: https://github.com/EionRobb/Skype4pidgin
Pidgin is a life saver.