Initial reaction : wow ! I need an iPad.
Second thoughts : yet another subscription, seriously what are they thinking?
Third thoughts : what about MY data, are my inner thoughts stored in the cloud?
Subscription fatigue, yeah, I know. Hoping to write an article about this in our industry, but the reality is that this is what's sustainable for a small team that wants to avoid venture funding (and eventual acquisition "incredible journey" stuff) or monetizing by selling your personal data.
I mean it costs the same as a Netflix subscription, or alternatively 2 triple-A games. I get that you have set the price you think you need to sustain a team, but I really don’t get the value proposition to the customer and not sure this is thought through.
Now whether the product is helpful enough with those things to be worth the price, well for that the market will decide :-)
All that said, I'll join the chorus of skeptics over the $100/yr price. Apparently you have people willing to pay that, which is great, and hopefully a sign that you have built a good product -- maybe we on HN are just a bunch of cheap, cynical bastards.
I highly doubt that. I've seen a lot of advice to overprice on here, the idea being that you can never charge too much. "Double your price" is the most consistent advice on this site.
I come from an entrepreneur attitude, my time is my most precious commodity. I don't optimize minor expenses, I optimize the big picture, my time, outcomes, and most importantly income/revenue coming in.
I understand folks gotta make a living but I feel the price is based on “Hey got away with it”. Best of luck but I’ll stick with my notes and scribbles on blank business cards and notepads
For me Muse’s competitor is 100 (double sided where appropriate) cards for a fiver every month or two. I’ve never had my data held hostage for nonpayment either (I don’t know if they do this, I’m just not new to subscription models)
Also if you do happen to use Evernote you know why I’m using business cards. So easy to digitise if I ever do need to
At the risk of sounding brusque, that comes off as more than a little reductive. "Your choices are poor compared to mine." I don't think you meant it that way but text doesn't convey emotion.
Regarding the what I value aspect: This is yet another (cool-looking) app that asks me to pour my creativity and thoughts into it yet charges me rent to keep them there, even though the app, as you say, does not have recurring costs to you.
So now, if I want to invest my time and soul into making this my One True Creativity App and keep it, hypothetically, for the rest of my life, I'm looking at $4,000. Or even if I just keep it for the next decade (assuming it survives that long and the shutdown of the subscription doesn't yank my data away from me with it), that's a grand.
I'm genuinely sorry but I'm not going to take that risk or pick up that expense. Sell me the app and I'll buy it; don't rent it to me.
That way people who hate subscriptions or lock-in know they have an out and don’t have to lose anything.
It doesn’t really matter if you sell 10 at $100 or 100 at $10, and sometimes selling 100 at $10 is significantly easier.
If you find value in their product, and use it frequently, is $100/yr that much? I haven't tried it yet, but superficially it seems much less trivial than Fantastical, which is a great product, but not worth $40/year.
I personally hate subscriptions as currently implemented. I'd like to see pricing amortized over two years, and after that a reduced subscription price since you are primarily funding maintenance in many cases.
Not everybody has Silicon Valley or even US salaries (I sure don't) and subscriptions quickly add up and become non trivial.
At work we still have Office 2010 on most our workstations. Imagine how much we would have paid if we had an Office 365 subscription all those years (I'm not sure 365 even existed at the time of 2010 release but bear with me for the example).
No this is rent seeking imho : this software is already built there's no need to work on it full time for the next 10 years just to bloat it with mostly useless features.
Sell it, make a profit, work on version 2.0 (1.0 is probably missing crucial things that will become apparent once it's battle tested), sell it again then put it in maintenance mode and go work on something else.
Please apologize for the tone I'm not a native speaker so I don't know how to say it nicer. I don't intend to hurt your feelings, actually I hope you will succeed even if I won't subscribe.
Super Cool App v4 - $9.99
Super Cool App v5 - $12.99
Total Bundle Price - $22.98
Bundle Upgrade Price if you have v4 - $8.99
Muse would also not receive the purchases it needs if it had an up-front cost of $60 or more (which is what a typical app would cost on the Mac).
In the case of Netflix that's obvious - new shows. Dropbox is a little more annoying, but there's still the premise the cloud component is fundamental to how their service works.
"Daily admission to the software I installed" doesn't feel like much in the way of value, even if you are continuously investing into the product behind the scenes. The equation can even become negative (e.g. forced UI revamp, user hates it, now they feel like you're charging them to make their life worse).
I get the cashflow appeal and business arguments, but I disagree it's the only way. I sold software online with a small bootstrapped team for over a decade under the plain old "buy it once" model, resisting the subscription fad even when the MBA's pushed to go that route, and made it work. My customers were always happy to buy the major version upgrades (every couple years or so) because it was really clear what new value they were getting.
I balk at yearly subscriptions to software too for the exact reason you state. But, I also realize that one time purchases don't keep the doors open indefinitely. I wish I had a magic solution for this conundrum, but I don't.
This doesn't seem to be any better incentive-wise than the model I described (stopping payment stop further updates, so you keep whatever you have today), but comes with the user-backlash of losing what they thought they had (no one feels good about rolling back)
tl;dr: you buy the app and 1 year of updates. You keep what you pay for.
I wonder if it would be viable for an app like photoshop to have a feature marketplace. You start with a very basic version of the app and you buy the features you want piecemeal. You then have a separate service contract for ongoing support (ie: bug fixes).
[0]: https://agenda.com/ [1]: https://medium.com/@drewmccormack/a-cash-cow-is-on-the-agend... [2]: https://www.sketch.com/
It might work better with consumers, where such a strategy isn't cost-effective, but I also imagine its a difficult system to tech support -- you get a combinatorial explosion of possible "features" that may be in play. Anyways, it incentivizes bad behavior even consumer side, encouraging results like 200 $1 features and communities/tutorials/discussion becomes strangled
I've been thinking about this repeatedly for years, usually triggered by apps like this. I might even have written about it here or on my blog and I agree it is a hard problem.
First, for anyone who wonders why do companies need recurring revenues after the initial version has been (I didn't either a decade ago):
Releasing software into the wild is less fire-and-forget than one would think. Platform APIs change, security holes are found etc.
Second: I have been trying to look for models - hoping to find some I truly enjoy - and I'll try to summarize the ones I can remember, with examples:
- the original WhatsApp model: a tiny recurring charge. In an alternative world where they weren't bought and at about the same time - as network effects set in they could have started charging companies for API access, not to spam but tonrun helpsdesks, bots etc. Micropayments also looked promising.
- The Jetbrains model: you pay a subscription but as long as you have paid for a minimum amount of time you get to keep the last version that was released while you were paying.
- A similar model is used by the Agenda app. I almost never use it and yet I'm tempted to pay (again, I have done it before) because I love the business model.
- then you have the commercial sponsor model where someone pays to be the default choice for something the end user would probably choose anyway: this worked really well for Mozilla and Opera for a number of years.
- Then there is the old school pay one model, this often bleeds into one one of the above models as new more or less improved releases are pushed every year.
- There are freemium models which are more or less free: some charge only for superficial features (reddit), other for one time upgrades to extra tools, other charge on a monthly basis for access to extra tools.
I think I currently have 3 app subscriptions going, one for MeWe and one for Concepts and one for Paper Pro, and then there's a couple of newspapers, mandatory payments for the national broadcasting, there's Netflix and Spotify and payments to Hetzner for my hosted NextCloud instance and after that I really really don't want another subscription unless it is
- very inexpensive
- or is something I use everday,
- or it replaces one of my existing ones.
I've downloaded it to test now, but for now it looks like a OneNote competior priced at the same level as the entire Office 365 personal edition?
Edit: I've tested it a bit now this looks extremely promising but the price is steep for an app and there is no option to pay monthly for a couple of months to test. At least you were generous with 100 reusable cards so I will continue testing it.