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How comfortable are people with subscription pricing for a Mac App? I've been seeing a lot of them are going that way. To give a developers perspective, I have

How comfortable are people with subscription pricing for a Mac App? I've been seeing a lot of them are going that way. To give a developers perspective, I have been contemplating to implement subscription based model into my app to make it more sustainable. Putting in time for development and as well as marketing (to always get more users) is frustrating.

losteric 9y ago
I will begrudgingly subscribe if the app is good enough, but vastly prefer purchasing software and paying for new versions/pro features. "Good" is a high bar... If an app costs $5/m, it has to convince me I'll see $300 in value over 5 years.
- suhastech 9y ago
  That makes sense. My app[1] is currently priced at $20. The way it's used, it can't be right to limit users with pro features. I can either increase the price or go the subscription way. If I do increase the price, I'm afraid, it might put people off. Maybe I can try a hybrid approach. $60 for lifetime or $20 a year. [1] https://thehorcrux.com/ https://thehorcrux.com/
  - wlesieutre 9y ago
    If you have some pro features that include an ongoing hosted service, that's the most justifiable way to do it IMO.
    - wlesieutre 9y ago
      One other thing that's easy to forget: you can't just look at how much it costs and how important it is to your users. You also have to consider competitors and how difficult your product would be to replace. Even if your app is worth $120/year to me, I'm still going to switch to a competitor if they'll sell it for less. TextExpander is a good example of this. They changed from a $45 license to $40/year subscription. It's a well polished piece of software, and it syncs between Mac and iOS and has an iOS keyboard to facilitate use there. Quality stuff. But when it comes down to it, some people just want simple text snippet replacements on their Mac, and you'd be an idiot to pay a yearly fee for that. Obviously I don't have TextEpander's customer/sales information, but I assume more than a few users jumped ship to aText's $5 one-time-purchase.
      - egypturnash 9y ago
        If all you need is text snippet replacements on your Mac, you can just visit the Keyboard pane of the system prefs. They'll sync to your iThings, too, albeit a little wonkily at times (like all iCloud syncing).
        wlesieutre 9y ago
        Good point, I always forget that's built in now. aText would be for more advanced stuff like including dates or customizable fields in the snippets.
  - losteric 9y ago
    I think you could raise the price to $30 at minimum. The hybrid approach is also viable. As the other poster mentioned, you could add features to justify a "pro"-labeled version... maybe pivot-searching backups, or automatic S3/rsync/etc backup. On the subscription side, an obvious option is hosted backup service that charges per GB per month (hopefully $5-10/m for the average user).
nicky0 9y ago
Personally I'm not against subscriptions model per se, but I am put off by massive price increases in the guise of a subscription. For example some apps have moved to a sub model where the annual fee is more than the original one-off purchase price of the software was.
archagon 9y ago
Personally, rabidly opposed. But I think views on the matter are very split.
jakobegger 9y ago
Subscription pricing requires the app to be so crucial you can‘t live without it. Photoshop, IntelliJ, MS Office — these apps can charge whatever they want, people just really need them to get their work done. But if your app is a simple news reader or a markdown editor or an activity viewer — you‘re gonna have a hard time convincing people to pay for it every month.
- nv-vn 9y ago
  Honestly, with Google Drive around I can't see how MS Office will remain profitable for long. Sure, it can handle some corner cases Google's product can't handle and it's the standard, but I can't see that staying the case for long. As for IntelliJ, I really have yet to understand the appeal. What does it do that other IDEs can't? Intellisense type stuff already exists everywhere (Visual Studio, so why use ReSharper?; Emacs; Vim; Sublime Text; Atom; VS Code; ...). Is it really just about being first-to-market? If so, why is it essential?
  - mnx 9y ago
    Seriously? Google docs has far, far less functionality. Have you tried, for example, to insert auto-numbered equations or images? There doesn't seem to be a way to achieve that. That's not a corner case. The spreadsheet also chokes on data that excel can handle. Google docs is fine for maybe 80% of use, but I wouldn't call 20% "corner cases", and to cover them will take way more than 20% the effort of building MS Word.
    - nv-vn 9y ago
      Google Docs is still making Office non-essential for the average user. 90% of students have been purchasing Office for years in order to essentially perform the basic formatting provided by any rich-text editor purely for the purpose of compatibility. >Google docs is fine for maybe 80% of use Which is able to undercut a good portion of Microsoft's market. Keep in mind the original comment I was replying to: >Subscription pricing requires the app to be so crucial you can‘t live without it. MS Office is on its way to becoming redundant to the majority of users. The price is going to be less and less justified in the near future as Office loses its reputation as a crucial piece of software (at least for the average student/employee who doesn't need to perform very specific formatting or perform complex spreadsheet calculations).
4ad 9y ago
I will never use a subscription app if the computation happens in the client. E.g. Photoshop, Mathematica, games, etc. Not even if the price is low. Note that I will happily pay thousands of dollars in this programs as long as they are not subscription based. I might use a subscription based app if it's just a frontend for something that happens server side, but even with that the bar is very high. It needs to fundamentally require server side computation that can't be done on the client for whatever reason. For example, the cloud Mathematica thing does not pass the bar. So far no application has passed the bar. Unrelated, but another turnoff are apps that require .pkg installers. Drag and drop should be enough for anything except perhaps kernel drivers, and I don't want to install 3rd party kernel drivers anyway. E.g. VMware should use the hypervisor framework rathet than its own kernel drivers.
- paultopia 9y ago
  This. I will pay a subscription for the actual ongoing use of someone else's resources, i.e., their computing capacity, their storage space. I'm not about to pay a subscription for code sitting on my machine. And I'm especially not about to pay a subscription for something I already paid for when it was a one-time payment.
- presspot 9y ago
  So, if you absolutely need the functionality in a subscription app with local processing, what do you do? And, if you're willing to pay ' thousands of dollars' for the right to use a local app, why would you not 'rent' the license for tens of dollars?
  - 4ad 9y ago
    > So, if you absolutely need the functionality in a subscription app with local processing, what do you do? I don't use it. I don't absolutely need any particular software.
TheRealDunkirk 9y ago
It's a function of the straw that broke the camel's back. What non-life-critical apps or services am I paying for every month? Quite a lot already. Cell service and cable TV & internet are already $350/mo for me. Then you have Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Sam's Club (Premium!), Google Play, some stupid app my daughter needs for $8/mo, Wolfram Alpha to help her with homework, LastPass, Apple iCloud storage, SpiderOak backup, Google apps for business... and I'm probably forgetting several others. I understand everyone wants a subscriber, not a customer, but my budget is dying a death from a thousand cuts here. I just can't keep paying for all these things, even when they're only a "few" dollars, every month. It all adds up. This is why people are saying they only pay for a subscription if it REALLY matters to them. The slots are full. If your model requires a monthly payment for something, it must literally change my life, at this point. Thirty years ago, I had a $20/mo land line, and a TV antenna, and that was it! Think about that! I'm not at all clear that my quality of life is $500/mo better than it was back then.
- fhood 9y ago
  For a late high-school, early college student, wolfram is not non-critical.
  - tortasaur 9y ago
    What? Of course it's not critical, especially not the paid subscription. You can get by just fine without it with a good textbook.
    - sitkack 9y ago
      Have you seen text book prices? https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0495559725 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0495559725 Across the board they are like this.
      - jsilence 9y ago
        Your university does not have a library?
todd8 9y ago
What bothers me about subscription pricing is how expensive it invariably turns out to be considering the amount of use I get out of a program. I would much rather purchase a program outright. Furthermore, some subscriptions seem to be intentionally hard to turn off (WSJ news and Adobe products). Professionally, I use Linux, MacOS, Windows, Emacs, programming languages, and TeX a great deal and they are all extremely powerful and end up being either free or just part of the expense of having a computer. I don't mind paying for IntelliJ, its a great product, and I get regular use out of it and JetBrain's other tools. I also don't mind paying for on-line services: Arq backup, Dropbox, etc. These seem to be worth it. My problem is that I'm a nerd and I like using software. I'm unhappy using low end software and so I end up buying crazy expensive software that gets very infrequent use: Mathematica, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Acrobat Scanner/OCR/X Pro, Adobe InDesign, Adobe Illustrator, QuickBooks, SPSS, Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Microsoft Word, Excel, the list goes on and on. It even includes games like World of Warcraft. It would make more sense if this high end software was priced per days of use not for the number of months that I've owned it. I've owned many of these products since they were installed via 3 1/4 inch floppys. Not all of these are sold as subscriptions but they might as well be because of the way the expensive upgrades work (e.g. Mathematica and Adobe products).
- chasing 9y ago
  > What bothers me about subscription pricing is how expensive it invariably turns out to be considering the amount of use I get out of a program. I wonder if the problem is you're undervaluing your software. You're expecting a certain price point but often that's too low for a business to be sustainable.
  - nv-vn 9y ago
    If the Adobe product prices aren't ridiculously overvalued, there's something wrong with the way they develop their software.
    - magnetic 9y ago
      I don't understand what you mean. You can get the Adobe Creative Suite with Photoshop, Lightroom, some other stuff I don't remember (don't use), for $10/month. Is that too much?
jetti 9y ago
I personally don't like subscription pricing for desktop software. I prefer a fixed price that I can pay up front. I like having control of when I update and if I update.
newscracker 9y ago
I hate subscriptions because, as @TheRealDunkirk said in another comment, things start adding up quick and quite expensive. For most people's personal lives, content like video (TV shows, movies) are more important than other kinds of subscriptions, like an app for productivity or workout or anything else. So that's where most of the money tends to flow (wherever people are willing to pay). If you've been following the standard "sell and charge for upgrade once every few years" model, expect a backlash from loyal users when you move to subscriptions. It's quite simple to get this if you put yourself in the user's shoes and look at things. Wouldn't you feel ripped off or locked in by a subscription? Would you prefer some app that stops working, just like utilities to (like water supply stops if you don't pay the bills)? Many companies who've been in the business still fail to understand this simple point (AgileBits is a good example I can think of in the recent times), but they also change their focus from long time/loyal users to new users who don't really care much about comparing things or using many features. They don't see losing long time/loyal users who complain about this switch as a loss (and probably see it as good riddance). If you're really anxious to get subscriptions done to get a steadier stream of revenue, my recommendation would be to price the subscription very low and aim for a large number of subscribers or price it quite high and work to get just a low number of subscribers. Both have their pros and cons, but this depends on your product, how valuable it is for users (compared to competing apps), who it's intended for, etc. As a user, my preference, if I do want an app or something, is a very low priced subscription. Maybe a dollar a month or better, a few dollars a year would be better (don't laugh, there are apps and others doing exactly this).

losteric 9y ago

I will begrudgingly subscribe if the app is good enough, but vastly prefer purchasing software and paying for new versions/pro features. "Good" is a high bar... If an app costs $5/m, it has to convince me I'll see $300 in value over 5 years.

suhastech 9y ago
That makes sense. My app[1] is currently priced at $20. The way it's used, it can't be right to limit users with pro features. I can either increase the price or go the subscription way. If I do increase the price, I'm afraid, it might put people off. Maybe I can try a hybrid approach. $60 for lifetime or $20 a year. [1] https://thehorcrux.com/ https://thehorcrux.com/
- wlesieutre 9y ago
  If you have some pro features that include an ongoing hosted service, that's the most justifiable way to do it IMO.
  - wlesieutre 9y ago
    One other thing that's easy to forget: you can't just look at how much it costs and how important it is to your users. You also have to consider competitors and how difficult your product would be to replace. Even if your app is worth $120/year to me, I'm still going to switch to a competitor if they'll sell it for less. TextExpander is a good example of this. They changed from a $45 license to $40/year subscription. It's a well polished piece of software, and it syncs between Mac and iOS and has an iOS keyboard to facilitate use there. Quality stuff. But when it comes down to it, some people just want simple text snippet replacements on their Mac, and you'd be an idiot to pay a yearly fee for that. Obviously I don't have TextEpander's customer/sales information, but I assume more than a few users jumped ship to aText's $5 one-time-purchase.
    - egypturnash 9y ago
      If all you need is text snippet replacements on your Mac, you can just visit the Keyboard pane of the system prefs. They'll sync to your iThings, too, albeit a little wonkily at times (like all iCloud syncing).
      - wlesieutre 9y ago
        Good point, I always forget that's built in now. aText would be for more advanced stuff like including dates or customizable fields in the snippets.
- losteric 9y ago
  I think you could raise the price to $30 at minimum. The hybrid approach is also viable. As the other poster mentioned, you could add features to justify a "pro"-labeled version... maybe pivot-searching backups, or automatic S3/rsync/etc backup. On the subscription side, an obvious option is hosted backup service that charges per GB per month (hopefully $5-10/m for the average user).

nicky0 9y ago

Personally I'm not against subscriptions model per se, but I am put off by massive price increases in the guise of a subscription. For example some apps have moved to a sub model where the annual fee is more than the original one-off purchase price of the software was.

archagon 9y ago

Personally, rabidly opposed. But I think views on the matter are very split.

jakobegger 9y ago

Subscription pricing requires the app to be so crucial you can‘t live without it. Photoshop, IntelliJ, MS Office — these apps can charge whatever they want, people just really need them to get their work done. But if your app is a simple news reader or a markdown editor or an activity viewer — you‘re gonna have a hard time convincing people to pay for it every month.

nv-vn 9y ago
Honestly, with Google Drive around I can't see how MS Office will remain profitable for long. Sure, it can handle some corner cases Google's product can't handle and it's the standard, but I can't see that staying the case for long. As for IntelliJ, I really have yet to understand the appeal. What does it do that other IDEs can't? Intellisense type stuff already exists everywhere (Visual Studio, so why use ReSharper?; Emacs; Vim; Sublime Text; Atom; VS Code; ...). Is it really just about being first-to-market? If so, why is it essential?
- mnx 9y ago
  Seriously? Google docs has far, far less functionality. Have you tried, for example, to insert auto-numbered equations or images? There doesn't seem to be a way to achieve that. That's not a corner case. The spreadsheet also chokes on data that excel can handle. Google docs is fine for maybe 80% of use, but I wouldn't call 20% "corner cases", and to cover them will take way more than 20% the effort of building MS Word.
  - nv-vn 9y ago
    Google Docs is still making Office non-essential for the average user. 90% of students have been purchasing Office for years in order to essentially perform the basic formatting provided by any rich-text editor purely for the purpose of compatibility. >Google docs is fine for maybe 80% of use Which is able to undercut a good portion of Microsoft's market. Keep in mind the original comment I was replying to: >Subscription pricing requires the app to be so crucial you can‘t live without it. MS Office is on its way to becoming redundant to the majority of users. The price is going to be less and less justified in the near future as Office loses its reputation as a crucial piece of software (at least for the average student/employee who doesn't need to perform very specific formatting or perform complex spreadsheet calculations).

4ad 9y ago

I will never use a subscription app if the computation happens in the client. E.g. Photoshop, Mathematica, games, etc. Not even if the price is low. Note that I will happily pay thousands of dollars in this programs as long as they are not subscription based. I might use a subscription based app if it's just a frontend for something that happens server side, but even with that the bar is very high. It needs to fundamentally require server side computation that can't be done on the client for whatever reason. For example, the cloud Mathematica thing does not pass the bar. So far no application has passed the bar. Unrelated, but another turnoff are apps that require .pkg installers. Drag and drop should be enough for anything except perhaps kernel drivers, and I don't want to install 3rd party kernel drivers anyway. E.g. VMware should use the hypervisor framework rathet than its own kernel drivers.

paultopia 9y ago
This. I will pay a subscription for the actual ongoing use of someone else's resources, i.e., their computing capacity, their storage space. I'm not about to pay a subscription for code sitting on my machine. And I'm especially not about to pay a subscription for something I already paid for when it was a one-time payment.
presspot 9y ago
So, if you absolutely need the functionality in a subscription app with local processing, what do you do? And, if you're willing to pay ' thousands of dollars' for the right to use a local app, why would you not 'rent' the license for tens of dollars?
- 4ad 9y ago
  > So, if you absolutely need the functionality in a subscription app with local processing, what do you do? I don't use it. I don't absolutely need any particular software.

TheRealDunkirk 9y ago

It's a function of the straw that broke the camel's back. What non-life-critical apps or services am I paying for every month? Quite a lot already. Cell service and cable TV & internet are already $350/mo for me. Then you have Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Sam's Club (Premium!), Google Play, some stupid app my daughter needs for $8/mo, Wolfram Alpha to help her with homework, LastPass, Apple iCloud storage, SpiderOak backup, Google apps for business... and I'm probably forgetting several others. I understand everyone wants a subscriber, not a customer, but my budget is dying a death from a thousand cuts here. I just can't keep paying for all these things, even when they're only a "few" dollars, every month. It all adds up. This is why people are saying they only pay for a subscription if it REALLY matters to them. The slots are full. If your model requires a monthly payment for something, it must literally change my life, at this point. Thirty years ago, I had a $20/mo land line, and a TV antenna, and that was it! Think about that! I'm not at all clear that my quality of life is $500/mo better than it was back then.

fhood 9y ago
For a late high-school, early college student, wolfram is not non-critical.
- tortasaur 9y ago
  What? Of course it's not critical, especially not the paid subscription. You can get by just fine without it with a good textbook.
  - sitkack 9y ago
    Have you seen text book prices? https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0495559725 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0495559725 Across the board they are like this.
    - jsilence 9y ago
      Your university does not have a library?

todd8 9y ago

What bothers me about subscription pricing is how expensive it invariably turns out to be considering the amount of use I get out of a program. I would much rather purchase a program outright. Furthermore, some subscriptions seem to be intentionally hard to turn off (WSJ news and Adobe products). Professionally, I use Linux, MacOS, Windows, Emacs, programming languages, and TeX a great deal and they are all extremely powerful and end up being either free or just part of the expense of having a computer. I don't mind paying for IntelliJ, its a great product, and I get regular use out of it and JetBrain's other tools. I also don't mind paying for on-line services: Arq backup, Dropbox, etc. These seem to be worth it. My problem is that I'm a nerd and I like using software. I'm unhappy using low end software and so I end up buying crazy expensive software that gets very infrequent use: Mathematica, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Acrobat Scanner/OCR/X Pro, Adobe InDesign, Adobe Illustrator, QuickBooks, SPSS, Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Microsoft Word, Excel, the list goes on and on. It even includes games like World of Warcraft. It would make more sense if this high end software was priced per days of use not for the number of months that I've owned it. I've owned many of these products since they were installed via 3 1/4 inch floppys. Not all of these are sold as subscriptions but they might as well be because of the way the expensive upgrades work (e.g. Mathematica and Adobe products).

chasing 9y ago
> What bothers me about subscription pricing is how expensive it invariably turns out to be considering the amount of use I get out of a program. I wonder if the problem is you're undervaluing your software. You're expecting a certain price point but often that's too low for a business to be sustainable.
- nv-vn 9y ago
  If the Adobe product prices aren't ridiculously overvalued, there's something wrong with the way they develop their software.
  - magnetic 9y ago
    I don't understand what you mean. You can get the Adobe Creative Suite with Photoshop, Lightroom, some other stuff I don't remember (don't use), for $10/month. Is that too much?

jetti 9y ago

I personally don't like subscription pricing for desktop software. I prefer a fixed price that I can pay up front. I like having control of when I update and if I update.

newscracker 9y ago

I hate subscriptions because, as @TheRealDunkirk said in another comment, things start adding up quick and quite expensive. For most people's personal lives, content like video (TV shows, movies) are more important than other kinds of subscriptions, like an app for productivity or workout or anything else. So that's where most of the money tends to flow (wherever people are willing to pay). If you've been following the standard "sell and charge for upgrade once every few years" model, expect a backlash from loyal users when you move to subscriptions. It's quite simple to get this if you put yourself in the user's shoes and look at things. Wouldn't you feel ripped off or locked in by a subscription? Would you prefer some app that stops working, just like utilities to (like water supply stops if you don't pay the bills)? Many companies who've been in the business still fail to understand this simple point (AgileBits is a good example I can think of in the recent times), but they also change their focus from long time/loyal users to new users who don't really care much about comparing things or using many features. They don't see losing long time/loyal users who complain about this switch as a loss (and probably see it as good riddance). If you're really anxious to get subscriptions done to get a steadier stream of revenue, my recommendation would be to price the subscription very low and aim for a large number of subscribers or price it quite high and work to get just a low number of subscribers. Both have their pros and cons, but this depends on your product, how valuable it is for users (compared to competing apps), who it's intended for, etc. As a user, my preference, if I do want an app or something, is a very low priced subscription. Maybe a dollar a month or better, a few dollars a year would be better (don't laugh, there are apps and others doing exactly this).