Tweetbot for Mac is available in the App Store | Hacker News Reader

Tweetbot for Mac is available in the App Store

tapbots.com

$20 is a valid price given the user token situation. Tapbots will not reach the cap at the $20 price range and I expect the price to steadily drop as sales drop off. This way, rather than getting $10 x 100000, they're getting $20 x 1000 + $10 x 50000, etc.

Personally, I'm not ready to buy yet. I paid $3 and $5 for Tweetbot for iPhone and iPad and I'm happy with the value they provide me. Does Tweetbot/Mac offer more (and 4-6x more) value than the iOS versions? Probably not to me and not to a lot of other people.

That said, it's dangerous to use price as a way to protest the user token limit. You're hearing people complain about the price rather than complain about the user token limit that resulted in the price. And it gives Twitter ammo to point back to Tweetbot and say, "See, it is still possible to make money from clients despite the token limit!"

It may have been better to cap out early and have people complain that the app has been pulled, but that would result in sacrificing the product for the cause.

$20 is a pittance regardless of Tapbots cost structure. The markets for Mac and iOS software are not equivalent; far fewer people buy random applications for their Mac. The prices for these products need to make sense in the context of an actual business, or no rational developer will produce desktop software.

Why won't they reach the cap? It's only 100,000 users over the entire lifespan of the app. That seems like it could go rather quickly.

It's based on their existing token count (double), not a flat 100k.

http://tapbots.com/blog/news/dont-panic

No it's not.

http://tapbots.com/blog/news/tweetbot-mac

> hese tokens dictate how many users Tweetbot for Mac can have. The app’s limit is separate from, but much smaller than, the limit for Tweetbot for iOS. Once we use up the tokens granted to us by Twitter, we will no longer be able to sell the app to new users. Tapbots will continue to support Tweetbot for Mac for existing customers at that time.

The tokens are per client app, so for the iOS client, it's 2 x (whatever their user count was at the time), but for the new Mac app it's 100,000 max.

It's $20 for a well-done piece of software that syncs very well with the other Twitter apps you use on your iOS devices (assuming that if you're interested in Tweetbot for Mac you already use it on your iPhone/iPad).

I would've paid the same amount even if it wasn't for the Twitter token restriction issue because $20 is not that much for an app use a few good times per hour every single day.

Yikes... even given the fact that the price is justified by the circumstances, $20 for a twitter client is pretty harsh.

That said, I may buy it. I know of no other single column mac native twitter client that is retina ready. Seeing as the twitter token limit is discouraging devs from creating new clients, it may be best to fork over the 20 bucks before the token limit for tweetbot is hit.

I really just wish tweetdeck would allow for a single column layout. I keep twitter open on the right side of my screen 24/7 like a news ticker, so single column is a necessity. Tweetdeck is the only app they're maintaining and it doesn't allow for that.

Edit: Scratch that, give https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/yorufukurou/id428834068?mt=1... a try

Yikes... even given the fact that the price is justified by the circumstances, $20 for a twitter client is pretty harsh.

I have to admit blinking twice my eyes. On the other hand, if we don't want too many Sparrow episodes, developers should be compensated enough.

They won't be compensated too much though because Twitter has made auth tokens arbitrarily scarce. AFAIK they have a cap of 100,000 customers for the lifetime of the product which means they're limited to $2M in revenue on this (less Apple's fees, so $1.4M and any returns would most likely still count against tokens but offer no revenue). It's not super lucrative, if they hadn't already started when Twitter announced its plans I don't think they would have made it.

Thanks for this comment, it prompted me to read up more about Twitter's new policy for auth tokens. I had seen some headlines passing by, but didn't bother to read them. Anyway, then indeed it makes much sense for Tapbots to get the most out of relatively limited quantities.

I guess that this also makes a strong point for App.net: users won't be bothered with apps and growth of the third-party ecosystem isn't artificially restricted.

Blame Twitter for making user tokens a scarce resource.

Twitterrific was retina-ready before the retina MBP even came out.

And unified timeline!

I don't like that they ported the aesthetic. I'm not a fan of it to begin with, especially on iPad, but at least there it gets to take over the entire screen. On the desktop, the apps I use most of the time[1] still look like Mac apps, so this would stick out like a sore thumb.

I really, really like Twitter for Mac, even if it's abandoned now. I'm not sure if Tapbots has fixed it (and I'm not going to spend $20 on a client I don't like the visuals of to find out), but Twitter for Mac absolutely beat Tweetbot Alpha in scrolling (using TwUI helps quite a bit most likely). So I'll keep using that for now on my external monitor where it doesn't look blurry.

[1]:

* Safari

* iTerm2

* Xcode

* Messages

* MacVim

* iTunes

* Mail

They look like Mac apps because, with 2 exceptions, they're all Apple apps. The Tweetbots apps needed to have the same design.

edit: I know about the bug you mentioned and it looks like they've fixed it.

Contacts, Notes, and Calendar are also Apple apps, and, well, yeah.

However, everything that Panic makes is incredible in both quality and Mac-ness. I use Transmit and love it, didn't think of it when making that list since it's not something you have open all of the time.

Then, look at Panic's iOS apps. They feel like iOS apps. Diet Coda and Coda are companion products, but they aren't identical. They each look and feel how an application on their respective platforms should feel (which is fairly open ended on iOS, but restrictive on OS X due to the shared desktop canvas).

Few other apps I use or have used in the past, non-Apple, fit in pretty well:

* Adium

* Colloquy

* Chrome

* NetNewsWire

* Reeder

* Sparrow

There was a lot of controversy when Tweetbot for iPhone was released and people were complaining about the same design thing, that it's not iOS-like and now a lot of people love it. But I see your point. I've been using it since it first came out as alpha and I had no problem with the design choices especially because it looks a lot like the iPad app.

I really can't see the value for Twitter in limiting 3rd party clients to slivers of the user base. I'm guessing it's because they're going to (shortly) stuff ads and other unwanted junk into peoples feeds, and 3rd party clients could easily just filter that out. Forcing people into their clients ensures the crap gets in front of eyeballs.

However, 3rd party clients were the route into Twitter for a huge amount of early adopters (and even later adopters). Most Twitter "features" (including the retweet concept, hashtags an even the word "tweet") were from the open community they started with. Moreover, their own clients are falling behind even simple 3rd party experiences. Twitter for Mac has, essentially, been abandoned. How many users will swallow an inferior experience, just for the privilege of getting adverts thrust in?

For my 2p, I certainly won't - to me, the value of Twitter has been decreasing over time, not increasing. As it moves towards "mass market", it seems to be seeking a broadcast model, where billions of users subscribe to feeds of a few celebrities. It's becoming a "send only" service - the total amount of micro-conversions I've had in the last year is much lower than even 2 years ago.

Perhaps this will work out for them as a company - a real time newswire for companies and celebs to send 140 character press releases, interspersed with adverts. Or maybe I'm wrong, and mass adoption of their web and iffy mobile/desktop clients is coming. I just can't see it, yet.

This is why alternatives such as app.net have been popping up lately, in order to appeal to the unwanted developers and the people that dislike the direction twitter is heading in.

I'm not prepared to pay this amount either, especially because I believe there is no way for this to be a combined twitter/app.net client down the road. We saw this with their their separation of the apps on the iOS platform.

If it were, on the other hand, that would make me more inclined to purchase. It'd be great to combine those experiences.

Pricing is explained in their launch post, here: http://tapbots.com/blog/news/tweetbot-mac

Essentially because there are some users who will pay the $20.00 amount, and there are limited seats, they are maximizing earnings/user.

That makes a lot of sense, they make a very good case. Personally I still don't think I can stomach it for now, as I try not to run a distracting Twitter client all day on my desktop. I primarily use it on the commute.

There's no way for a combined app because the Twitter TOS specifically prohibit interleaving timelines.

I'm happy to pay for quality software but $20 for a Twitter client is ridiculous. To me it seems like they are using this and the Twitter tokens reasoning to stir up controversy. Has a popular app actually reached this limit to see what Twitter does? I'm betting they increase your limit.

The limit was only introduced a couple of months ago and Twitter really has no reason to increase the limit once they hit it. They've made it very clear by now they want to limit third-party apps rather than try partnering with them.

Wow a little too pricy for me especially after buying TweetBot for the iPad and iPhone separately. For me there is just not another $20 worth of value there. If they can sell it at that price though more power to them. Maybe they'll do a sale eventually?

I was really excited to get it after seeing all the features. Then I loaded up the app store and was a bit surprised by the price as well. I can't find $20 of value in any twitter client personally.

Correct me if I'm wrong but as far as I know none of the Tapbots apps were ever on sale and I'm sure they won't do one now.

Just bought it. Looks like it grabbed my Muted follows as expected but it doesn't seem to be applying the filter to my timeline (or it might just be doing it from now on, rather than on tweets I received prior to installing the app). Entire interface feels better than the alphas. £13.99 is a small price to pay for a great Twitter app.

Isn't twitter discouraging client implementations? Is there a risk of TweetBot having their API key revoked ?

Not exactly. They have a limited number of tokens, read more about that on their blog post http://tapbots.com/blog/news/tweetbot-mac

At least until Twitter changes their API TOS again.

The black UI looks totally out of place on OS X. I hope you can change it to graphite (you couldn't on the alpha client).

Not having used TweetBot before, I struggle to justify the price based on the feature set. No scheduled tweets, no short link analytics, etc.

Personally, this app falls into a weird space between the native Twitter client (consumer) and HootSuite (professional). I can't bring myself to label TweetBot as pro-sumer, due to lack of features.

I'm happy to pay $20 if I like the software, but if not I'll be pretty annoyed.

Is there any way to test before you purchase? I didn't find a demo.

Because of the token limit, I'm sure they don't want to offer a demo because that could cost them a token they might never get back.

Unfortunately, Apple is not allowing "demo" option for apps :/

They had a public beta for a while.

Milking the loyal fan base - if they can sell at this price, why not?

Charging the same price as the Mountain Lion upgrade.

Mountain Lion's price has nothing to do with anything. Office for Mac sells for $199, is it worth 10 Mountain Lions? Adobe Photoshop sells for $699, is it worth 35 Mountain Lions or Tweetbots?

Or we can think of it in an equally useless point of view: over a year it's just $1.67 a month. That's less than the cost of a cup of coffee!

I think you've just invented a new form of currency!

ML1 - Mountain Lion

Getting paid isn't milking your fan base. This is the same price, near enough, as a new movie on iTunes, or a new album. Users will get subsequent updates to the app until Tweetbot 2 comes out (or Twitter finally do what they clearly want to and round up all of the 3rd party twitter software engineers and put them into a big rocket destined to be fired into the heart of the sun).

Apple can rely on the fact that Mountain Lion is a yearly update, they can afford to market and promote the product, and it doubtless has a lead-in for hardware sales too.

Tweetbot on iOS is, when you consider the relative size of installation bases for iOS devices and Macs, comparably priced. You can sell an iOS Twitter client at a reduced cost because there are just so many more iOS devices out there. To justify maintaining a Mac codebase you need to charge more.

Twitter caps devs at a 100,000 token cap for new apps.

At $20 a pop, the devs clear $14, and that means Tweetbot for Mac's lifetime revenue cap is a measly 1.4 million dollars.

On a site lite hackernews, you presumably know something about the very high price of software engineering skills. Are you seriously asserting, with a straight face, that an app representing as much engineering time investment and polish as Tweetbot does is a scheme to price-gouge users, when the most revenue the devs will ever see from it is $1.4 million, lifetime, which needs to cover not just initial development costs but also ongoing maintenance and development?

If anything it's a labour of love on their part.

Tapbots are two developers. Tweetbot was released as an alpha in July, and at least from the blog, was started in 2012.

So for approximately 10 months work, $1.4M divided by 2 developers, so, annualized, about $1M/yr/developer.

That's not including the fact that during the same time frame, they're developing and releasing more applications (sources of revenue).

That's some labour of love, even if you factor in 3 more years of ongoing maintenance and development.

I'd love to have a labour of love that nets me around $250,000/year income as a base.

> So for approximately 10 months work, $1.4M divided by 2 developers, so, annualized, about $1M/yr/developer.

$1.4 million is the all-time, sell out all your tokens maximum, assuming 0 piracy (because every pirate takes away from that 100k token ceiling), not for 10 months of work but for 10 months of work + all work going forward. Very, very few products are sustainable when their absolute all time revenue ceiling is a paltry $1.4 million. To argue that that ceiling is too high, that they should be selling for, what, $9.99 (all time revenue ceiling: $700k) or $2.99 ($210k lifetime max) is nuts.

> I'd love to have a labour of love that nets me around $250,000/year income as a base.

Then I'd suggest building good software and charging what you're worth. By playing the "a very polished piece of software is overpriced because it costs as much as the price of having a pizza delivered" game, you're only participating in the devaluation of your own skills.

Not to forget that it is 1 token per Twitter account. Many people have more than 1 user account.

There are a lot of apps out there more expensive than Mountain Lion that you might not even use as often as a Twitter client [1] and because ML was so cheap it doesn't mean that every Mac app should be under %19.98 from now on.

[1] http://smilesoftware.com/TextExpander/index.html

Where did I say that every app should be cheaper than Mountain Lion?

If you can sell a twitter app for 20 bucks, by all means, do it!

why not offer a discount to the alpha/beta users who've already claimed tokens from twitter

I don't think there is a way in the MAS to differentiate between who gets the discount and who doesn't.

I'd expect it to be $3.99 in a few weeks, no need to hurry.

Their iPad app was $5 so you should recheck your expectations.

Deleted comment

Your comparison is ridiculous and you know it.

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