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Comment by tristanb | Hacker News Reader

I was a really happy Tower user before they moved to SAAS. I can’t justify a monthly fee for a git client.

Same here. I now recommend https://git-fork.com – great client, much more sensible pricing model.

Been using Fork for several years at this point and it’s treated me very well. Out of the clients I’ve tried, Fork and Sublime Merge are by far the best in terms of feeling lightweight, responsive, and stable without skimping on features, and Fork’s UI is built in the way that makes most sense to me.

I held out for more than a year and then gave in. Having to research, find, and learn a new git GUI was going to cost me more than $70.

So I've punted the problem for another year. But I strongly agree that it's absolutely the wrong fit for this kind of app. They will start adding all kinds of bloat just to justify the monthly fee.

Not researching, finding and learning a new git GUI is also going to cost you more than $70. Year, after year, after year ...

One more reason to learn the command line.

Once you know how git cli works, any UI is easy to understand.

No vendor lock in.

A gui adds a lot on top of a git cli for me. Scrolling diffs/history and adding/removing staged lines alone is better. Using a gui doesn’t mean you didn’t arrive there deliberately.

I actually do almost everything in the CLI (checkouts, pull/push, branches, most no-conflict merges, most rebases, tags, etc), however when you're rebasing, messing with branches and merges, nothing beats a visual medium to just even look at the graph and make sense of it.

that's one of the saddest things of our times, that indie shops are dying over the subs chasm. I wish there was more innovation in between paid once and monthly, right now offering yearly sub seems like a good solution. In any case $60 per year seems like a steal if the product helps you out to perform better doing your 150k job

Working Copy has got it right: a purchase unlocks all features to date, plus any new Pro features for the next year. After that point, you don't get any new Pro features -- but you don't lose the ones you paid for. The app is under continuous development and there is a constant stream of new free features.

There's great alignment between the developer and the users: dev gets people who pay more than once, and is strongly incentivised to add reasons to upgrade; users never get stuck with an out-of-date app and get to choose when to stump up more cash.

I wish more apps and services would adopt this model.

Same with Panic Software (MacOS app developers), while I haven’t been using it, I really like how they’ve set up the pricing model for Nova [1] using that same model. I’m happy to pay for new features when I need them, but don’t take things away from me that I already paid for!

[1] https://nova.app

Yeah that sounds a lot like the classic:

buy this software and it comes with a 1 year support contact. You can download any new releases that occur while you have n active support contract. if you don't choose to continue the support contract once it ends, you can continue using the latest version released while you have the contract (and possibly older versions too).

The big difference though is that with this model the consumer gets security, bug fixes, OS compatibility updates, etc even after the subscription/"support contract" has ended. This may have the downsides of possibly getting new bugs over time, or gradually accumulating new menu items etc that you can't use.

I honestly nearly spat out my coffee when I saw the pricing page. Cannot fathom how or why anyone would pay that for a GUI on top of git.

Yep. I switched to Sublime Merge. Very reasonably priced, especially when bundled with Sublime Text.

Sublime Merge is terrific. I've been using it since 2019 and haven't had any issues. Was such a massive leap up from SourceTree.

+1 for Sublime Merge, I use it every day and love it. Also seems to be one of the few git clients with Linux support, surprisingly.

Isn't Sublime Merge also Saas at $75 a year per user for a business license? (which is slightly cheaper than Tower's Pro license)

No, a personal license comes with 3 years of updates, after which it continues to be usable without updates.

> Individual licenses are valid for 3 years of updates, but do not expire after 3 years. Only if you wish to use newer versions will an upgrade fee be required.

Agreed, I stopped using it as soon as they introduced this pricing model. A shame.

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