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On the other hand - their software is incredibly expensive. Let's take Omnifocus... It's $99 for Omnifocus Pro on Mac. If you want to see your tasks on your iP

• bartvk 6y ago
  Incredibly expensive compared to what? These are specialized tools, and the cost of organizing the engineering of these tools is easily running into the millions. These costs need to be recouped.
  • Closi 6y ago
    Compared to the competition. Buying Things 3 for iPad ($9.99), iPhone ($19.99) and Mac ($49.99) is half the price of OmniFocus. I actually migrated from Omnifocus 2 to Things 3 and personally think its the better app, but I get that some people might like the bells and whistles. OmniGraffle is $249.99 USD compared to Sketch at $99. The subscription model cost is roughly the same as Figma (although figma also has a free-forever tier). Omni Outliner is probably closest compared to OneNote which comes included with any Office 365 plan above $4.00 per month. OmniPlan is cheaper than Microsoft Project to be fair, although Project for Web is catching up at $10 per month and there are alternatives like QuickPlan at $50. Full disclosure: Of all these apps, I do REALLY would want to use OmniPlan. It's definitely the best Gantt chart software for Mac but it's useless for me without MSP support, my work aren't going to pay $400, and QuickPlan is $50 and supports Microsoft Project, so I'm not forking out an extra $350 from my own pocket to use it.
• b3kart 6y ago
  Jesus, at these prices anything less than perfect is unacceptable.
• aprdm 6y ago
  Why do you feel it’s expensive though? As a software engineer making 100k in the USA it is a couple of hours of work to pay. It will save you a lot more time than that. I’ve paid from my own pocket and used in all companies I worked for ...
  • benhurmarcel 6y ago
    "I'm quite rich so those prices don't seem very expensive to me"
    • aprdm 6y ago
      A software developer making 100k in the USA isn’t rich I don’t think? And that’s their target market. Happy to pay for good software.
      • throwaway3699 6y ago
        100k is filthy rich by global standards. It's definitely top 10%er territory.
        • aprdm 6y ago
          So a software company based in the USA, paying USA salaries for developers, targeting USA customers should price according to what ... ?
        • brazzy 6y ago
          Uhh, try 0,1%. Ín the USA, 100k already puts you in the top third of household incomes.
          • throwaway3699 6y ago
            Ah I meant 10% just in the US.
        • ben_w 6y ago
          I don’t know what USA tax rates are like, but assuming 40%? $100k gross ($60k net) is the top one percent worldwide: https://howrichami.givingwhatwecan.org/how-rich-am-i?income=60000&countryCode=USA&household%5Badults%5D=1&household%5Bchildren%5D=0 https://howrichami.givingwhatwecan.org/how-rich-am-i?income=... And the top 20% for just the USA: https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/ https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/
• mywacaday 6y ago
  I have tried so many task managers, I have always wanted to try the Omni apps but I am firmly in with windows world and have never found an application or company that seems to compare to the omni group.
  • Closi 6y ago
    Did you try Todoist? That's pretty good. I'm an ex-omnifocus user. Omnifocus has lots of bells that make you feel productive, but ultimately I now use Things 3 as it is better designed and also gives me more confidence that things don't get missed (i.e. things can get hidden in a perspective in omnifocus if you aren't careful). I suspect this is why Omnifocus's latest apps are actually reviewed quite poorly on iOS - 3.8/5 compared to Things 3 at 4.8/5
• pornel 6y ago
  They're priced right. They are unusually expensive, but they know they have a good product. I've tried many other GTD apps, and I keep going back to OmniFocus. It works well and has been supported for years. In the meantime, many $5 apps I've tried have been abandoned or did the "our incredible journey" flip.
  • Closi 6y ago
    I agree on Omnifocus - it is one of the best, although when I was on OF2 and OF3 got bad reviews I made the switch to Things 3 rather than OF3 and never looked back :) The one issue I used to have with OF2 was that sometimes I could miss something because of the context filter, which liked to hide to-do's with dependencies or that were set for the future. After moving to Things 3 on reflection I think OF tried to be a little too clever and because of that I didn't have as much confidence in the system as I now have in Things 3. I did like that it was heavily opinionated though, including things like enforcing weekly reviews for projects.
• aseerdbnarng 6y ago
  It just sounds like there is a small group of people who are very happy to pay eye-watering amounts of money for (what sounds like at least) really well-crafted productivity software. Good on them for showing there is a market for it
• vvillena 6y ago
  That's expected, as it's not a mass-market product, and the niche is small and cluttered with free alternatives. The amount of people that would buy a 40-50$ app is about the same the buys the 100$ apps now. And turning their apps into 5$-a-piece software is an incredible risk, as it alienates part of their current customer, and the increase in sales might not be enough to offset the lowered per-sale profit. Their position as luxury software is a safe bet.
• fakedang 6y ago
  So just like Apple innit?
• ballenf 6y ago
  My only issue with those prices is how hard it is to figure out what your total outlay will be upfront. If you just hear good things about the iOS app and think '$75 seems high, but ok', you'll be very frustrated later when you realize the companion app prices.
• danbruc 6y ago
  A hundred dollars, that's on the order of one hour of development time. I have never seen those apps and have no idea of how much effort went into them, I don't know how many customers they have, but you probably have to sell a bunch of licenses to cover the development cost and all other costs that went into making those apps.
• rfrey 6y ago
  This feels like what software used to cost before the subscription model became ubiquitous. Their prices are certainly high, but I suspect that range is close to what a "just let me buy a perpetual license" world looks like.
• misnome 6y ago
  Not to mention the really short support lifecycles. I bought OmniGraffle for iPad for the not insignificant £35 - used a few times - about a year later, on the very next iOS version - it stopped working completely, and the only response they gave to people was "Sucks to be you, buy Omnigraffle 2". I won't touch Omni for anything now.
• ubermonkey 6y ago
  Their prices on OF are kinda throwback-y, but the pricing for OmniPlan is probably VERY influenced by how expensive MSP is, or traditionally was. It's topic drift, but MS Project has done to the critical-path scheduling world what IE did to the browser world. It's worse than the incumbents in lots of material ways, but it's a LOT cheaper and much easier to learn, and so it's sucked up all the oxygen. I work in enterprise project management / earned value. It USED to be that there were lots of contenders for critical path project management software. Now the last non-MSP product standing is Primavera, and it's somewhat neglected by its new corporate master -- the original owner sold his company to Oracle years ago and Oracle hasn't really done much with it. So the world at large is, increasingly, stuck with MSP if they want this sort of creature. And MSP, instead of using their position to encourage good practices, or adopt widely-supported features still unaccountably lacking from the product, has instead introduced "features" like Manual Tasks. What's a Manual Task? It's a task in a schedule that has its dates hardcoded and thus will not move, which is really insanely wrongheaded. A scheduling tool like this is, at a basic level, all about assembling a list of tasks with durations (and, ideally, assigned resources and work and costs) that are connected by a chain of logic. If an early task is delayed 3 weeks, you'll see that in later tasks that depend on the first task. A "Manual Task" just ignores all that. If this doesn't make immediate sense to you as a horrible idea, let me explain it by way of example. Imagine Excel introduces a feature called Manual Math that allows you to override the rules of arithmetic. If you want the total to say 10,000 but the column has entries that sum to 12,234, just turn on Manual Math!
  • wtallis 6y ago
    > What's a Manual Task? It's a task in a schedule that has its dates hardcoded and thus will not move, which is really insanely wrongheaded. It sounds like a Manual Task is simply a way to acknowledge that your project has a dependency on something in the outside world that is beyond your control, and that seems like a useful feature. Why are you so vehemently opposed to having that capability?
    • ubermonkey 6y ago
      See my other comment, supra. There are other constructs that exist in the project management world to model what you refer to. A "manual task" that appears to be part of the critical path, but is in fact NOT, is a time bomb waiting to go off, because its failure to show real forecast information will absolutely lead the schedulers to think all is well when it's not. IOW, trust me when I tell you this is a bad idea not grounded in anything like project management best practices.
• egypturnash 6y ago
  Before moving to the subscription model, Adobe’s stuff was all in the low hundreds of dollars range too. With a pretty robust set of student discounts, and not a ton of work done to stop people pirating it.
• m463 6y ago
  I'm sorry, but your point is completely lost on me. I literally run my life on omnifocus. I have done so since it came out around 2007. My data is private and on my webdav server. The software has been: useful and pleasant to use. (well, except that OF1 was better than OF2 and compounded with ios 7 the transition sucked) (also, this is in a thread regarding Adobe!)