Edit: spoke too soon. It seems to hang on “Loading pricing plans…” so I can’t seem to. It’s good you offer a lifetime plan (the only way I would buy it) but subscriptionware is repulsive. Please consider just not using subscriptions.
For an app to be available on the app store, even if no features are added, needs to be regularly maintained. That maintenance has a cost. If you want to have an application with no maintenance, just side load an app file and be done with it.
My point being that the recurring cost of a developer license can easily be diluted on one-time payments.
Crunchy Bagel is not a random HN dev making a random app. I highly dislike this attitude people have with expecting free work when it comes to software. If the app was sold as it was with 0 additional work of any kind, I bet you wouldn't buy it. You expect free work. But if I ask you to come clean my toilet for free, you wouldn't do it. This is why we have ads on the web nowadays.
I wouldn't answer questions or read feedback then as a dev because it's not a product really, but why not go that route?
It's also not an issue if you publish it. External users might complain, but that is their problem if you make it clear this is a personal project
Now that's a stretch.
For a design company, just getting the exposure and being talked about [1] (i.e. nothing tangible) can already be worth enough giving some work for free.
So you might work for free giving away muffins on the street if that might make people want to come to your cake shop and buy some other stuff. But it's silly to think that you should give your pastries away if you don't have other products and pastries is the only thing you do for a living.
Crunchy Bagel also have HealthFace, Hexiled, and Streaks Workout apps, all monetized. See the pattern? IMO, Streaks is just their way to show off their good design and coding practices.
[1]: https://www.triplezero.com.au/ designers of Streaks, winners of Apple Design Awards 2016.
"An app can be provided for free if the app itself is not meant to make money but as a funnel to bring more customers to other related business."
You are assuming that a random HN dev has a business at all which is not necessarily the case. App <> business
"So you might work for free giving away muffins on the street if that might make people want to come to your cake shop and buy some other stuff. But it's silly to think that you should give your pastries away if you don't have other products and pastries is the only thing you do for a living." You are just agreeing with me here. Making stuff available for others is more work and software is not different unless you just drop the zipped app file in mediafire and leave people to do with it whatever they want.
Patterns, the app discussed here, is definitely a business. They are asking for a subscription fee because presumably they want to make a living out of it. Also, it is the only product they have to offer (it doesn't look to be the case of being a free goodie intended to bring customers to other business the author might have).
Thus, my point was that it is not reasonable to compare it to a free offering like "how does the Streaks app from Crunchy Bagel manage to do without subscriptions". They are just whole different categories of products (or maybe to nitpick, the intentions and financials behind them are totally different).
However, devs must build an app with feature flags in mind from the start (or at least from the point of introducing a lifetime plan).
The majority of small developer apps are not subscriptionware. Many developers have for decades successfully run a business without recurring perpetual income from completed sales.
Resist the drip feed demand that developers be paid in perpetuity for work they did once. Not all software is SaaS.
I get where you're coming from, especially if an app has no service component, but it's inevitable if a platform has no good way to charge for upgrades. And as much as some people would like to buy a version of an app once and keep using that same version forever, platforms also make that impossible by changing the environment an app runs in in backwards-incompatible ways, so the software needs to be maintained, and that has a price.
Taking away consumer choice is never a good thing and that is exactly what subscriptions are designed to do. Not to mention that subscription pricing is always ridiculously high.
This is far too extreme. It's not repulsive. Just don't choose it if you don't want it.