bigscrankus

Appreciate it! Apologies for sounding snarky; traveling and very jet lagged.

The app has made 1.4 million dollars over 5 years. So a solid salary. Nothing near financial escape velocity, but I’m grateful for the freedom.

I think SaaS definitely won, but I would love to hear this story updated for 2025. Desktop and web apps have a lot more in common than they did 16 years ago.

I’m certainly open to charging more, but I operate in a price sensitive hobby market. If we do go for it, I’ll definitely try a higher price first. No harm in trying.

That’s true; it could be the most valuable users that switch to the OTP if they aren’t getting value from the online features.

It’s been a while since I’ve surveyed, but the last time we asked, only 40% of our surveyed userbase thought the online features were valuable to them.

Yeah I think some limited testing is in order. Appreciate the insight.

This is one concern I have: SaaS is actually a really simple business model. “Pay this month, use this month”.

Introducing things like “pay one time for perpetual offline use and a year of upgrades from the date of purchase, OR pay this month use this month.” Doesn’t roll off the tongue quite as well. Maybe bad UX from a pricing perspective.

Yes, you and many others remind me of this in my email inbox every day.

It doesn’t change the fact that software is expensive to maintain and even relatively simple apps can cost millions of dollars in human-hours to support. SaaS is the safest path to that, and if users don’t want to pay a premium (>$200ish, in my case) for offline, SaaS will stay that way.

Yes, SaaS is nice and safe. I’ve run it as a SaaS for 4 years now. However, I wonder if I’m leaving money on the table by not offering other monetization options.

This is a benefit of our current SaaS-only model I tout to my community.

But, most don’t care about such things. ;)

No; just the application itself. I’m not interested in running an open source project or teaching people how to run our server-side data sync stack. At ~$250, even just a tiny bit of high-expertise tech support for those users would put me underwater.