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Comment by malfist | Hacker News Reader

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"

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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.

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

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