4 ms·

Can a monthly subscription support a collection of open source apps? Netflix style. Maybe give donors the option to vote on features. I am interested in testin

by acover 9y ago

Can a monthly subscription support a collection of open source apps? Netflix style. Maybe give donors the option to vote on features. I am interested in testing if there is a market for this. I've started writing clone android apps without the ads and freemium.

scribu 9y ago
> Can a monthly subscription support a collection of open source apps? Kind of. In the WordPress world there are several companies that ask you to pay $50/year to get access to their entire portfolio of themes and plugins. In theory, you’re only paying for support, since the code has to be licensed under the GPL.
ken 9y ago
It might depend what you mean by "support", but in general, I don't see it. For a non-open-source example, there's https://setapp.com/ https://setapp.com/, but nobody has been able to explain to me how the economics are supposed to work. They're bundling thousands of dollars of software for $10/month, and then paying creators based on usage. Instead of $50 (a common price for these apps), once, developers will get a fraction of $10, repeatedly. You'll break even if someone uses your app 1/2 of the time (of the Set) for about a year. If they use more apps or don't subscribe that long (which are pretty much the main reasons to use this), you're worse off. Bundling, open-source, subscriptions -- at the end of the day, users simply don't want to (directly) pay what it costs to create software.
- acover 9y ago
  I think it is about lowering the price to increase users. The user experience is also improved as you just install and go. Thanks for the info.
fspacef 9y ago
I think it can, and to your second point, Steam had a great system with Greenlight which let potential customers vote on what their games would look like before hand
newsat13 9y ago
For web apps, there is https://cloudron.io https://cloudron.io. Pay 15 per month to install apps and get automatic updates.

by acover 9y ago

scribu 9y ago

> Can a monthly subscription support a collection of open source apps? Kind of. In the WordPress world there are several companies that ask you to pay $50/year to get access to their entire portfolio of themes and plugins. In theory, you’re only paying for support, since the code has to be licensed under the GPL.

ken 9y ago

It might depend what you mean by "support", but in general, I don't see it. For a non-open-source example, there's https://setapp.com/ https://setapp.com/, but nobody has been able to explain to me how the economics are supposed to work. They're bundling thousands of dollars of software for $10/month, and then paying creators based on usage. Instead of $50 (a common price for these apps), once, developers will get a fraction of $10, repeatedly. You'll break even if someone uses your app 1/2 of the time (of the Set) for about a year. If they use more apps or don't subscribe that long (which are pretty much the main reasons to use this), you're worse off. Bundling, open-source, subscriptions -- at the end of the day, users simply don't want to (directly) pay what it costs to create software.

acover 9y ago
I think it is about lowering the price to increase users. The user experience is also improved as you just install and go. Thanks for the info.

fspacef 9y ago

I think it can, and to your second point, Steam had a great system with Greenlight which let potential customers vote on what their games would look like before hand

newsat13 9y ago

For web apps, there is https://cloudron.io https://cloudron.io. Pay 15 per month to install apps and get automatic updates.