Hi, OP of the linked thread about pro, I appreciate your overall handling of the situation and think this update is in the right direction! Great pace of development here and I like the changes you've made based on my and others' feedback. (I added a disclaimer to the original post since it is a bit inflammatory and I worry would be the main thing people see when searching)
For me personally the two options still don't work, I try to avoid subscriptions and the current "lifetime" price is too risky. But that doesn't mean it's a bad price!
You're seeing the classic challenge of pricing, if you sell 10 copies at $30 would you sell 20 at $15 and make the same off it? You can't tell without lowering the price, and once you do that, going back up if it doesn't work will make people angry. Sales can help gauge this if you aren't feeling confident.
Best of luck - I'm still loving the app and will likely purchase in a future sale or if things continue to go well to make current pricing right for me.
Ah, hadn't seen people mention procreate, although in general I think it's fair to reference other well-known apps at similar price points when trying to make a point about the value of $30.
I don't use Android so don't know what sync's pricing is
Which apps are you referring to? Apollo was one guy, Sync is as well
Of course not! Nobody is forcing me to use this app at all - I can just go back to Voyager or Thunder if I want. I made this post because I disagree with the pricing setup but really would like to see the dev succeed because they've done a great job. If my opinion isn't shared you're free to ignore it.
BTW some general ideas for features that justify a subscription (which consequently justifies a large one time fee if that's even offered)
- Push notifications
- Comment undeletion
- Translation
- Combine account feeds somehow (let me log into multiple accounts at one time instead of having to switch between)
- Various AI integrations: text or image generation, article summarizer, clickbait fixer for article headlines
- Text extraction from images (this can be done with an Apple API I believe for OCR, though offering GPT-4V here someday to extract text and describe images would be legitimately unique)
Attempt at neutral thoughts on pricing models aside, my suggestion for a different approach would be to offer most things for free in simple forms, and paywall advanced customization.
Using the smart comment button as an example, you could include it for free with only the core expected functionality (jump between parent comments). But if I want to change the interaction, or access advanced actions like collapsing threads or something, that's locked behind a purchase.
This way people can get a taste for everything you have to offer, and the decision to spend money is shifted from "pay you to get something that feels arbitrarily disabled" to "I like this and want more" or even just "I want to support a good developer".
As far as actual cost, I don't think I'd pay more than $10 one-time for any Lemmy app right now. If you're getting what you hoped for out of this model then don't change it on account of one angsty thread - but if any of this rings true, you could consider pricing for early adopters at a cheaper "early bird" price as one option, to build goodwill (making us more likely to want to support you down the road).
Or the other option is to follow Apollo's (RIP) model, with a one-time mid tier for upgrades of basic stuff, and a subscription/larger cost for more unique features/things we all know cost money on an ongoing basis/the subset of people who just want to support you.
I had a long response typed up but I think I accidentally discovered a bug - Avelon crashed while I was typing!
I really appreciate your reply here and I'll try to condense my thoughts, as someone who works in tech and is responsible for a product that brings in significant dollars of revenue (albeit B2B so not quite the same).
I think you are doing an awesome job at adding ease of setup and overall quality on top of the Lemmy platform. Others have noted the two sides of the longevity aspect, we all just have to deal with that.
To me the main missing piece is feature differentiation; where most people are used to apps like this paywalling things like themes and icons, I can go to several other apps for free to get the features you want a subscription fee (or large lump sum) for. The comment jump button is a good example, no it isn't necessary but for people used to having it it feels that way.
When this is all so new, you can't really expect people to trust you enough to think a big lifetime purchase is worth it, and subscriptions only feel logical when they are paying for an ongoing cost.
I'd say if you were to keep adding good features and maintaining the app, and especially if you add something like push notifications where you incur a cost I need to cover to use, I would be more likely to feel comfortable paying (and would expect you to build in a profit layer over your server costs).
And included features that clearly cost the developer money to support on an ongoing basis. And came several years into the project after the dev had established a huge userbase and healthy relationship of users that trusted him to deliver on quality and value, and wanted to support him financially.
#EDITED TO ADD CONTEXT:
The developer has responded quite a bit in the comments here, and has made adjustments to the free tier feature set based on my and others' feedback. See more info in this update thread: https://lemm.ee/post/12353243
If you're reading this post after update 1.0.7 I suggest you skim these comments and that update thread before forming an opinion.
#ORIGINAL POST:
I like this app a lot, I can tell there's been a ton of love and hard work put into it.
The strategy for monetization leaves a bit of a sour taste though.
For one, nobody wants another subscription - and $30 lifetime for a brand new app is a huge asking price compared to, say, Apollo, which was $5 or so (with a subscription tier for things that actually made sense to buy due to recurring cost).
But this app is paywalling basic stuff like a comment jump button (everyone else has this for free), content filtering, video scrubbing, and various other things that have no recurring cost to the developer.
My recommendation, take it or leave it, if you want my money make it a reasonable one time purchase for things that don't cost you money (under $10 imo, $5 would've been an easy sell).
If you want to justify a subscription model you are gonna need to build features that justify it - push notifications, stuff like that.
I've been trying to log in to use Avelon for a few days now, on both the app store and TestFlight builds, and both give the pictured error.
Guest accounts work fine, and this error happens with four different accounts on four different Lemmy instances. I can log into all of these accounts in other apps (currently posting this from Voyager).
(By the way there is definitely a password in there when I press the button, I think my phone just hid it for the screenshot)
This is something I used a ton in Apollo, and in Sync before that. Basically a floating button near the bottom that lets me tap to jump to the next parent comment.
Thunder added this recently if a current iOS example is useful