I would pay $20 one time for it. But a subscription is a deal breaker.
My guess is you'll make a lot more revenue by doing one time fees tied to a specific AirPod version. So each time I upgrade my AirPods, I pay a new one time fee instead of the subscription.
On the other hand perpetual license for $20 is something I would definitely consider. You can release V2 after 2-3 years and people can choose to upgrade if they find the value.
Best of luck!
Unfortunately I don't see how 20$ one time fee will works for such a niche app. After commissions and taxes $20 becomes $10.
Anywhere in the developed world the money required only to survive is at least 2000$, which means I will need to be selling 200 copies every month as long as the app exist only to get basic level of income and accumulating customers that I will have to support the years to come. What happens if the next year sales drop to 100 a month? It will become an abandonware and make me enemies or eat up all my time for nothing. Many years ago I purchased Halide and later it become a subscription app, I felt deceived and still hold grudge and I don't want to be that guy. It's subscriptions right away and have only the people who think that 2$ a month is a fair compensation for the service.
One time payment is either paying for abandonware, charity or scam. With subscriptions, it's a service. It's the best for everyone. Some people associate it with greed but I don't agree that expecting getting paid for work is greedy.
First of all, it's probably an unrealistic expectation that a small utility like this should be able to provide you with a basic level of income.
Second, in terms of pricing, you seem to be trying to make moral arguments about greed and scams here. But you should simply be realistic about the demand curve, and try to maximize your profit. If there are a lot more people who would buy this as a one-time purchase than as a subscription, you'll be losing money going the subscription route.
With this said, I have many subscriptions that "costs less than a coffee per month", to use a popular excuse. The problem is that I pay $3 here, $5 there, $7 for this, $10 for that... and when I add it all up, it's a lot of coffee, if you know what I mean. And at this point I don't see why I should pay for a program that will work without your intervention while I'm running this macOS version (or even across multiple macOS versions). I'm not using any of your resources/time or costing you any money.
I completely understand that you want to be paid for your time if something breaks and you have to fix it, but you don't need a subscription for that. Some apps give you x years or x macOS updates for X dollars. After that, if you want a new update, you pay for another x years/pay for the latest major update (or something like that).
If this used any server side stuff or required regular updates, then I would understand the subscription. As it is, it's a bit like Adobe software... I don't need it enough to pay for the subscription.
I know, I actually like that model too. It's just that there's no straightforward way to implement it. If Apple offered such model, I would pick it at heartbeat.
Currently, such a thing will add so much needless implementation complexity to such a simple app. It's just too much of an effort for a side project-turned-commercial-product.
This isn't a service, though. It either does what it says, in which case why do I need to keep paying for it? Or it doesn't, in which case it's just like a warranty claim or similar. There's no ongoing expectations here. It's a product that you're charging service fees for, that's just completely out of whack.
Like this genuinely would be better as "abandonware" (read: product) with a single $5-10 charge.
I'm not saying it's not, I'm actually curious.
If it is indeed a full time job I don't think it's worth the time investment required to be perfectly honest. :\
You can calculate your expected baseline yearly sales from this, based on how many hours you expect to work bugfixing and improving things on average per year.
You can timebox the work- having a half-dozen services like this is exactly how Panic Inc. came to mass prominence.
Everything depends on the actual amount of time you have to spend on the app, nobody is asking for minimum wage work, that's totally not fair; but perhaps expecting this single project to support you full time is unlikely.
The upshot is that if you're more successful than your baseline, that's "profit", and it's unbounded.
I’d recommend stepping away for a while and coming back with fresh eyes. Imagine that we’re all being honest and not trying to bring you down- because genuinely we’re not.
There have been a lot of comments about the pricing, specifically the subscription, so its best to see what you can take from that. But that cant happen if you’re emotional about it because you will naturally be defensive and your mind wont let the constructive elements in.
This is the problem with subscriptions for apps without services - If I stop paying, I lose access to what I already have. That sucks. So begins the treadmill of money leaving my pocket and entering yours (and Apple's) for no good reason. I will find it even more grating when whatever features you do add to the app I don't care about and will never use.
Just let me pay you for your work and we'll go our separate ways.
I'm unsure how much time would go into general upkeep and management. Could some of the others suggestions here work, asking users to pay for future updates?
I'm in the same camp as most of these users. I have this problem while using Discord and a game on STEAM (Counter-Strike). The mic quality is degraded heavily and I would be more than happy to pay a one-time fee. But I do not like adding too many subscriptions, no matter the cost, especially for apps that I could see myself requiring no serious updates unless I upgraded my physical products.
People now believe apps should be free, or cheap enough that they don't cover the actual costs for people who are doing the actual development costs.
I'm not sure what the real path forward for developers in this environment - if you charge the necessary amount you're undercut by separately funded products or ad supported apps, if you charge a "competitive" amount you can't live off it, if you have a subscription that supports ongoing dev people say "I only want to pay a single time".
None of this helped when you then have asshole game devs that sell games for $100+, but then throw in constant in app purchases and DLC for basic functionality that used to be part of the game.
When the VC money was sponsoring everything, everything's price has become free and today they are recouping their investment and people begin talking about "enshittification". Free(as on free beer) software was simply a predatory practice to shape the market in certain way and prepare it for exploitation.
I used to make free apps, browser extensions and so on. Dropped everything because it becomes full time job and if its going to be a full time job I must be compensated accordingly.
I'm no longer a teenager and my time is no longer paid by my parents. It's possible to have other business models where the software is "free" but on this particular case I don't see how it can be. Transcribe all the user audio and share it with advertisers? Please no.
It makes sense that a collection of apps, extensions, etc would become a full-time job that demanded full-time compensation. I think the disconnect people are having would be, how could a single app demand that?
Either way, it's your prerogative to do as you'd like with your app. I wish you the best of luck as it's a really neat sounding app.
This is not a VC funded project, this is something I made for myself and got the idea to put it on the AppStore.