Hacker News Reader

Comment by k-mcgrady | Hacker News Reader

The "It's business" attitude has been popping up a lot. Nobody seems to be making the distinction between good business and bad business. Everything I've seen around the Sparrow sale has been bad business. The told users they were working on push notifications and an iPad app. They had a half price sale last weekend! And even though they were charging a premium price and clearly had a sustainable business (they were one of the top grossing apps and were highly rated and publisised) they still screwed their customers.

There was a good way to do this. Finish push notification and iPad support before discontinuing development (i.e. keep your promises). Don't have a half price sale days before you are acquired without informing the users the product will be discontinued.

View on HN

As someone who bought Sparrow during their sale last week, I feel ripped off. I don't think they owe me free updates forever, but I would have liked to have known that it was a fire sale.

I paid full price for Sparrow and used it for two months. I didn't like it and switched back to Mail.app. But I don't feel ripped off because I got my money's worth from using it.

The app works, so I don't know why you would feel ripped off, fire sale or not. It's an overglorified EMAIL client for heaven's sake. How much more can you expect from an app that does e-mail?

Did you use a credit card (likely)? Charge-back.

I got it through the Mac App Store.

Many people have reported getting refunds

You feel "ripped off"...over $10? As in three cups of coffee?

Would you have bought it last week if you had known they were being bought by Google and effectively killing the product line?

It continues to function as-is (albeit with no updates) regardless of whatever happens to the company, right? And if it really is as useful as people are saying, on email, which most people spend hours of their day on, then I'd definitely still have bought it.

How much do you value your time? For most software professionals, $10 is not even rounding error.

Premium price! It was ten bucks!

This whole episode has further reinforced my complete lack of faith in humanity. How people can get so upset at so little and be so entitled when they are owed nothing just disgusts me.

It's a premium when you look at the average price of software on the Mac and iOS App Stores. It's also premium considering my computer comes with a free email client and Google provides a free webmail app.

This says a lot more about the absurdly unrealistic prices on the app stores than it does about the actual value you get from your $10 purchase.

When I look at the top paid apps in the App store, I see at least as many >$10 apps as I see under $10.

If I look at my own App store purchases, $10 is easily on the cheap side.

It's amazing how so many people are complaining about the EOL'ing of a software app that's equivalent to the price of two lattes (one if you're talking about the mobile version), especially when the Sparrow guys said they'll be providing bug fix releases as required.

> It's amazing how so many people are complaining about the EOL'ing of a software app that's equivalent to the price of two lattes

The value of productivity software that is integrated to your workflow cannot be determined by its cost of purchase. Try taking Microsoft Word off an author's set of tools, and telling them that they only lost $120 and shouldn't be complaining.

Moral of the story: don't bet your digital life on cheap, cool, transient, proprietary, made-for-App-Store software built by enthusiastic young startup founders or "indie" developers.

They could legitimately complain, but anyone without a service contract who says that Microsoft owes them further updates is being a jerk.

By 'free email client' do you mean the one funded by paying for your OS (Outlook Express), your hardware (Mail.app), or maybe Google (Thunderbird)?

What is the average price of third-party e-mail clients, or other productivity software of similar scope?

And how did anybody get "screwed" here, as you stated in your original post?

It's disturbing that someone's faith in humanity is so fickle that it is perturbed by something like this. Human behaviour isn't exactly something new.

Fickle? Where did you get that idea? My lack of faith in humanity is as constant as the terribleness of humanity on which it is based. I merely said that these things reinforce it, not that it changed my mind.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com