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Comment by mdavis6890 | Hacker News Reader

I really want an app-store filter for paid/free apps, where I can filter OUT the free apps. Anyone else?

I feel like a big part of the problem is that the entire space is filled with junky 'free' apps, and getting to something high-quality is difficult. And so we're trained not to value apps because they're awful, and therefore not worth paying for anyway. A vicious cycle.

If the apps are reasonable quality and solve a problem, what's $5 or even $10? Many people spend around that for a cup of coffee that will be gone in 30min. I'd happily pay that for a good app - if only I could find one.

I'd LOVE to see super-cheap subscriptions too - like maybe ten cents or even less per month. This solves another issue: Once a dev has gotten most of the one-off sales they can, there's not much incentive to maintain the app. A subscription model is much better for this, but for most simple utility apps it needs to be very cheap.

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Some guy created this play store search alternative(1) that lets you find apps by filtering IAP, Ad free, etc. It's very useful but I think it's on a small server so it takes a lot of time to search. Still very useful imo.

(1) https://playsearch.kaki87.net/

edit: sorry it looks to be down right now. Was working before last time I tried. I'll just leave my comment here in case he updates it again.

I believe the most sustainable and fair payment model is paid app at version X, which will get bugfixes indefinitely (or for a long time at least), but no new features. Later a new paid version comes out that will contain the new features, but that way existing users that find the previous version they paid for enough can continue to use it, yet the developer gets a steady stream of money as presumably many of the users will buy the newer version.

See the Reeder app for an example.

Though this doesn’t work where service fees are part of the equation, perhaps the best way to handle that would be passing the cost down to users through an optional subscription.

You're describing the way software used to be sold, and that worked fine since really there was very little that needed to be patched over time. It wasn't connected to anything. There was no internet and barely a network. It ran on one specific OS/version that was expected to remain static over years. And app compatibility largely fell on the OS vendor anyway. If your app broke with a new version it was their fault.

Things have changed now.

"paid app at version X, which will get bugfixes indefinitely" - Would you continue maintaining some old version of an app you wrote three years ago that nobody buys anymore? I certainly hope not.

There are different levels to maintaining. I would definitely try to support it to the max for an overlapping window with the new version (like a year?) and in a much lower-level mode after that. I don’t think software should break all that much once it was that battle-tested, but sure enough it can happen. After a time I would probably only care about personal emails notifying me of a bug, and if it is a quick-enough change, maybe will do it.

There appear to be few good apps left that do not use a subscription model, and when they do, more often than not they charge at least €5/month, or a yearly €40 subscription. I remember around circa 2012, apps like Nova Launcher and Titanium backup were considered expensive, at €7 or so. Another example, I have a grandfathered subscription on Sleep Cycle for €2 a year, if you would take a new subscriptions it's €30 a year.

So many people even on HN complain about something as trivial as a $1/mo price change (digital ocean). I don’t get the mentality but it exists. That’s a great idea about micro subscriptions. I wonder if the friction is the same between $1 and $0.10 though.

I have on the order of 100 semi-interesting things that I'd like to subscribe to.

If they're all $10 per month, $1000 total, I cannot afford to subscribe to all of them and I'll likely subscribe to none of them.

If they're all $1 per month, $100 total, I could afford to subscribe to all of them but I won't. I'll pick one or two killer apps and only pay for those.

If they're all $0.10 per month, $10 total, I will subscribe to all of them, and maybe after some time weed out one or two that I never use.

People have more than one server usually.

Probably the friction scales more with transaction count than overall cost, so you're getting at a real issue. It would be a pain as a vendor to deal with a zillion little one-cent transactions.

Still I think there are workarounds: Maybe I can pay Apple $20/mo for 2000 'points' that I spend on whatever subscriptions I want, and they pass the points/payments along in bulk to each vendor. Not sure.

I totally agree. Especially one time purchases below $20 are peanuts in the grand scheme of things for quality apps that will never nickel and dime me or nag me about IAPs.

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