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Comment by cube00 | Hacker News Reader

> There is an option to buy a lifetime licence but it costs a whopping £44.99.

I've given up trusting lifetime anything from the app stores now.

Mobile OSs seem to evolve so much faster, add new layers of security, lock pro features behind app store billing APIs that require the developer's account remains in good standing.

I've been burnt by three apps cutting and running now. One where the developers got their prize jobs at Microsoft and AWS [1], another where they sold the app off to another company that gave up maintaining it [2] and finally EA (enough said) [3]

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46768909

[2]: https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/04/16/beyondpods-first-pu...

[3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20190116224256/https://answers.e...

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My weightlifting app sold me a pro unlock to get weight calcualors years ago. Then they introduced a subscription model to get that plus some features I didn't want, they promised my purchase would be respected for all time.

Last September they declared that the app was "too valuable to give away for free" and told me I had to subscribe to use it. Even though it hadn't been free, I'd paid for it, and nothing about it had changed in the decade since I paid for it. Everything else was already locked behind a subscription I didn't find value in.

Seems like a lot of companies these days think "lifetime" means "until we really really want more money"

That is rough. I assume this is a web application?

I went through a previous thought experiment about what would happen when we moved a paid up front feature behind a subscription. This was the outcome I came to. Unless the user bought and installed a physical app, on the desktop, outside of an app store, they were going to get the rug pulled out from under them.

No, its the stronglifts app. But I switched to hevy and I'm happy with it. But I did paper for a while and liked it until I missed mu graphs

Ugh, that happened to me too. But instead of researching other apps and waiting for them to decide to go premium too, I built my own workout app. Been using it for a couple months now and it's working great, but the hassle of publishing it to the app store means that it will only ever be a solution for me and I can't share it with anyone.

Have you considered making it into a PWA?

I've always thought of cloning the old Zero fasting app into one, when I have a bit more time to point my Claude at building something else.

I actually started with it as a PWA, but ended up rewriting it in react-native. I wanted a couple features (heart rate monitor, lock screen integration) that afaik don't work with PWAs.

To add another datapoint: My weightlifting app used to be a one-time purchase a few years ago and have since switched to subscriptions. As a result I have received a lifetime pro license. They’re still selling lifetime licenses for almost a hundred dollars (yearly subscription is ~$30). I still have access to every pro feature. Not bad for a $5 I got ten years ago

Simple hack for yourself: Simply disbelieve all "lifetime" claims, presumptively. I do.

Also, the more and more every {expletive deleted} app thinks that the simple features are worth a $14.99/month subscription, the more sense going to open source makes. Yeah, it can be a bit annoying. But "a bit annoying" starts winning out over "a cumulative $200/month set of subscriptions" eventually.

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