RubyMotion is 20% off until Sunday
sites.fastspring.com
sites.fastspring.com
You get 1-year of support, and you cannot sign your apps to sell them. In order to do so - you'll need to cough up the remaining cost for a "full" license.
- Selling SaaS is very new, and almost still a "niche" especially for consumer software like Sparrow. Software without subscriptions is still 99% of what the consumers buy. It's definitely a viable market. You can't just take one example (Sparrow) and then claim the whole traditional ecosystem of software doesn't work. Of course it does.
- This is professional stuff used to build businesses on. Already it's quite risky to use this new tech made by a third party startup and invest hundres of hours of developer time to build an app. If something goes wrong in the future, for example Apple forbids RubyMotion apps, your investment (not in cost of RubyMotion but in the cost of developers which is obviously orders of magnitude higher) goes up in thin air. If you add the limitation that you need to pay a monthly fee to keep using it to that, it increases the risk that something might go wrong, decreasing the attractiveness of RubyMotion.
- They already have recurring revenue, based on the fact that after one year you need to pay half of the license fee again to get support and updates.
Which a price tag of $169 does not help. $9 a month is easy to sign up to.
> "They already have recurring revenue..."
Good, I missed that. There's a difference in how it's presented. The renewal after a year isn't as good paying every month.
> "Software without subscriptions is still 99%"
I would love to hear where this figure came from - it seems intuitively wrong. Reference?
The "added risk" of paying $169 is exactly zero. Anyone who buys this is either a hobbyist or a business. The business is about to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars into making apps using RubyMotion. The upfront cost of $169 is peanuts.
Sure, hobbyists or amateurs might find it more attractive to try out that way, but the extra cost in support and the decreased perceived value are probably too big of a cost, and not worth it.
Ask your mom, dad, brother, sister, what software they pay for every month. They'll probably answer "there is software you need to pay for every month?". Mac OS X or Windows, both "regular" software without monthly payments. Office, same thing. Almost every app in the app store, software without monthly payments. 99% of the games, software without monthly payments.
If anyone understands SaaS though, its developers, so I disagree with your last point.