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Exciting to see innovation in the note-taking and brainstorming space. Too bad I've decided that the subscription model has got to go, so I'm not interested in

Exciting to see innovation in the note-taking and brainstorming space. Too bad I've decided that the subscription model has got to go, so I'm not interested in using the 'free' side of anything with that model. How else should I fight against it? Goodnotes knows how to keep users like me happy. Pay once for core functionality and unlimited "objects," and be smarter about monetization beyond that. I started with Notability, and after barely getting the hang it was already nagging me to pay monthly. As it sits, I think developers are missing out on some of their best users and best feedback, but they do it to themselves by adopting these models without understanding the risks, and scaring away their best customers.

adamwiggins 4y ago
Enlighten us! How are people that don't want to pay for software "their best customers"? GoodNotes is great, hope they can make the one-off payment model sustainable. But the reality is that cost needs to match with value over time, and the industry is moving to subscriptions because that's a sustainable model for productivity software.
- CGamesPlay 4y ago
  Not wanting a subscription does not imply not wanting to pay for software. I bought Typora, and would buy a paid upgrade for it. Same for Things. When the software needs improvement I’ll pay for that value. I will not pay monthly for the privilege of using the software that isn’t changing. I absolutely will not even consider paying for a subscription to access my own research. When I don’t pay Typora, I can still access every document I’ve written. It’s unclear to me from the information presented if I will even be able to access my Muse boards if the company goes out of business.
  - adamwiggins 4y ago
    Totally agree on the data lock-out problem. Quoting from https://museapp.com/memos/2021-06-pricing/ https://museapp.com/memos/2021-06-pricing/ > In an ideal world, a software subscription will let you pay just when you’re getting value from a product, and stop paying when you aren't getting value any more. In practice, many subscriptions feel bad because they are hard to cancel; or worse yet, they require you to pay forever to keep accessing the content you’ve created in the app. > Muse is different. We never want to hold your data hostage. You should pay for it only when you’re getting active use out of the app. > Once you cancel your membership (after a month, a year, or ten years) all your cards will still be fully accessible. You can still navigate around, doodle on your boards and PDFs, move cards, and export a subset or all of it as a Muse bundle or PDF. You can search by label, change labels, edit text. > The only thing you can’t do? Add new content. > You never need to worry that your data is locked up. We want you to pay for the value you’re getting from the tool, not for the data storage.
    - skinnymuch 4y ago
      If Muse disappears tomorrow. Servers shut down and all. Would access to notes still work? I am not actually in fear of something happening that suddenly. I defended the general concept of subscriptions elsewhere. Still I am interested to know what happens in such a scenario
      - adamwiggins 4y ago
        In that case you'd still have full access to your documents. In keeping with local-first values the complete and canonical dataset resides on your devices (Macs/iPads). Sync service outage or total shutdown would result in your no longer being able to sync between devices, but all the devices would have whatever data they had at time the service went offline, and you can continue to make local edits until the end of time. You can test this out: just put some stuff into Muse, then turn off your wifi / go into airplane mode / shut off the network in some other way. Keep working with your data and watch the sync indicator; it will show that you have a lot of unsynced changes, but never will your ability to work be interrupted.
        CGamesPlay 4y ago
        And, just to confirm, there's nothing that would cause you to get logged out and pushed into some login screen, is there? Spotify had a nasty bug where it locked you out of all of your offline content because their server accidentally responded with a 401 when it had an outage. Thanks for the replies. I actually did try out Muse after reading them!
  - skinnymuch 4y ago
    A lot of apps do not lock you out once you stop paying. They don’t allow any new writing, but reading and/or exporting is still allowed. I too dislike being locked out if I stop paying. Muse allows both reading and exporting still. Going out of business is a concern, but isn’t that an issue with Typora too? If it stops being updated, eventually it will stop working on newer OSes.
    - CGamesPlay 4y ago
      Typora saves Markdown files which are editable by anyone in original fidelity. I see that Muse supports exports, but the documentation about this is... light at best. If there was an open-source tool that converted a Muse export into a PDF file that looked like the Muse PDF export, then I think I'd be completely satisfied about not getting locked out.
- hatware 4y ago
  > How are people that don't want to pay for software "their best customers"? As another commenter suggested, I never said I don't want to pay for software. I would probably pay a lot for software with functionality like Muse, just never on a monthly basis. Why are you losing your best customers with a subscription model? I can give you two examples. 1. I recently started using a tool called Homechart, and I was pretty excited to use it, replacing Notion and Clubhouse for task management and organization of thoughts. It has other useful features like inventory, chores, budgeting, recipes... But I was mostly in it for task management. Unfortunately, Homechart has an obnoxious "buy premium" banner that takes up half of the page _every time you refresh or open the app._ I'm sure you can agree this is a bit too frequent. I asked nicely if this reminder could be reduced on the developer's forum, I was just told "Buy premium to get rid of the banner." It's funny, because I was on the fence with Homechart's $99 lifetime subscription. It's something I would have purchased after seeing the app develop and grow more of a user base over 3-6 months. That developer lost out on more than my $99. I was happy to contribute more than just money to the development of the app, but the developer made their impression and that was that. 2. I really appreciate your enthusiasm in helping to develop this app, but you come off closed-minded when you talk about the economics of the subscription model, or reference your own blogs in response to feedback from would-be customers. I get the need to defend your choices, you just seem not very eager to understand the blind spots that may exist within those choices. Ultimately, subscription models are lazy monetization, especially so when the product is static software. I want what Muse can offer me today, not a promise of what it could be tomorrow (next month) in exchange for more of my money. That's essentially what you're asking for with a perpetual subscription model, and it's why Goodnotes was easy for me to buy. I would go so far to say that subscription models are not transparent and frankly, not consumer centric at all. I have empathy for your situation. The subscription model is only tired because everyone and their mother is doing it. Netflix was supposed to replace cable, now every cable station has its own Netflix. It's entirely out of your control that people are fed up with adding another line item. You are missing critical feedback from the type of user who doesn't want to make a knee-jerk decision and forget about their subscription for months at a time. Users like that, who know what they want, are pretty valuable in my experience.
  - skinnymuch 4y ago
skinnymuch 4y ago
A lot of notes subscription pricing arguments rely on Goodnotes being one time payment or OneNote, Apple Notes, Google Keep being free. Goodnotes recently switched to free to download and then upgrading with iAP. Before it was always paid upfront. Coincidentally, this free to iAP switch is also a necessary switch to eventually becoming SaaS. If Goodnotes switches to SaaS, sure smaller upstart apps will be there with buy once, but if they get big, they too will become subscriptions. Notability was one time payment just a couple months ago for its entire existence. OTOH, the other big free apps are run by the enormous monopolistic big brother tech companies. I’d prefer not supporting them and pointing to them doesn’t help because their reasoning for being free is to get people into their own varied walled gardens/ecosystems. A lot of innovations are unlikely to come from these companies apps. They are there to catch the widest net of [casual] users. It’s all business for them. All of this is like how South Park[0] parodied both Walmart/big box stores, and the consumers who enable this behavior and how it is a cycle that keeps going on. 0. https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/Something_Wall-Mart_This_Way_Comes https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/Something_Wall-Mart_This_W...

adamwiggins 4y ago

Enlighten us! How are people that don't want to pay for software "their best customers"? GoodNotes is great, hope they can make the one-off payment model sustainable. But the reality is that cost needs to match with value over time, and the industry is moving to subscriptions because that's a sustainable model for productivity software.

CGamesPlay 4y ago
Not wanting a subscription does not imply not wanting to pay for software. I bought Typora, and would buy a paid upgrade for it. Same for Things. When the software needs improvement I’ll pay for that value. I will not pay monthly for the privilege of using the software that isn’t changing. I absolutely will not even consider paying for a subscription to access my own research. When I don’t pay Typora, I can still access every document I’ve written. It’s unclear to me from the information presented if I will even be able to access my Muse boards if the company goes out of business.
- adamwiggins 4y ago
  Totally agree on the data lock-out problem. Quoting from https://museapp.com/memos/2021-06-pricing/ https://museapp.com/memos/2021-06-pricing/ > In an ideal world, a software subscription will let you pay just when you’re getting value from a product, and stop paying when you aren't getting value any more. In practice, many subscriptions feel bad because they are hard to cancel; or worse yet, they require you to pay forever to keep accessing the content you’ve created in the app. > Muse is different. We never want to hold your data hostage. You should pay for it only when you’re getting active use out of the app. > Once you cancel your membership (after a month, a year, or ten years) all your cards will still be fully accessible. You can still navigate around, doodle on your boards and PDFs, move cards, and export a subset or all of it as a Muse bundle or PDF. You can search by label, change labels, edit text. > The only thing you can’t do? Add new content. > You never need to worry that your data is locked up. We want you to pay for the value you’re getting from the tool, not for the data storage.
  - skinnymuch 4y ago
    If Muse disappears tomorrow. Servers shut down and all. Would access to notes still work? I am not actually in fear of something happening that suddenly. I defended the general concept of subscriptions elsewhere. Still I am interested to know what happens in such a scenario
    - adamwiggins 4y ago
      In that case you'd still have full access to your documents. In keeping with local-first values the complete and canonical dataset resides on your devices (Macs/iPads). Sync service outage or total shutdown would result in your no longer being able to sync between devices, but all the devices would have whatever data they had at time the service went offline, and you can continue to make local edits until the end of time. You can test this out: just put some stuff into Muse, then turn off your wifi / go into airplane mode / shut off the network in some other way. Keep working with your data and watch the sync indicator; it will show that you have a lot of unsynced changes, but never will your ability to work be interrupted.
      - CGamesPlay 4y ago
        And, just to confirm, there's nothing that would cause you to get logged out and pushed into some login screen, is there? Spotify had a nasty bug where it locked you out of all of your offline content because their server accidentally responded with a 401 when it had an outage. Thanks for the replies. I actually did try out Muse after reading them!
- skinnymuch 4y ago
  A lot of apps do not lock you out once you stop paying. They don’t allow any new writing, but reading and/or exporting is still allowed. I too dislike being locked out if I stop paying. Muse allows both reading and exporting still. Going out of business is a concern, but isn’t that an issue with Typora too? If it stops being updated, eventually it will stop working on newer OSes.
  - CGamesPlay 4y ago
    Typora saves Markdown files which are editable by anyone in original fidelity. I see that Muse supports exports, but the documentation about this is... light at best. If there was an open-source tool that converted a Muse export into a PDF file that looked like the Muse PDF export, then I think I'd be completely satisfied about not getting locked out.
hatware 4y ago
> How are people that don't want to pay for software "their best customers"? As another commenter suggested, I never said I don't want to pay for software. I would probably pay a lot for software with functionality like Muse, just never on a monthly basis. Why are you losing your best customers with a subscription model? I can give you two examples. 1. I recently started using a tool called Homechart, and I was pretty excited to use it, replacing Notion and Clubhouse for task management and organization of thoughts. It has other useful features like inventory, chores, budgeting, recipes... But I was mostly in it for task management. Unfortunately, Homechart has an obnoxious "buy premium" banner that takes up half of the page _every time you refresh or open the app._ I'm sure you can agree this is a bit too frequent. I asked nicely if this reminder could be reduced on the developer's forum, I was just told "Buy premium to get rid of the banner." It's funny, because I was on the fence with Homechart's $99 lifetime subscription. It's something I would have purchased after seeing the app develop and grow more of a user base over 3-6 months. That developer lost out on more than my $99. I was happy to contribute more than just money to the development of the app, but the developer made their impression and that was that. 2. I really appreciate your enthusiasm in helping to develop this app, but you come off closed-minded when you talk about the economics of the subscription model, or reference your own blogs in response to feedback from would-be customers. I get the need to defend your choices, you just seem not very eager to understand the blind spots that may exist within those choices. Ultimately, subscription models are lazy monetization, especially so when the product is static software. I want what Muse can offer me today, not a promise of what it could be tomorrow (next month) in exchange for more of my money. That's essentially what you're asking for with a perpetual subscription model, and it's why Goodnotes was easy for me to buy. I would go so far to say that subscription models are not transparent and frankly, not consumer centric at all. I have empathy for your situation. The subscription model is only tired because everyone and their mother is doing it. Netflix was supposed to replace cable, now every cable station has its own Netflix. It's entirely out of your control that people are fed up with adding another line item. You are missing critical feedback from the type of user who doesn't want to make a knee-jerk decision and forget about their subscription for months at a time. Users like that, who know what they want, are pretty valuable in my experience.
- skinnymuch 4y ago

skinnymuch 4y ago

A lot of notes subscription pricing arguments rely on Goodnotes being one time payment or OneNote, Apple Notes, Google Keep being free. Goodnotes recently switched to free to download and then upgrading with iAP. Before it was always paid upfront. Coincidentally, this free to iAP switch is also a necessary switch to eventually becoming SaaS. If Goodnotes switches to SaaS, sure smaller upstart apps will be there with buy once, but if they get big, they too will become subscriptions. Notability was one time payment just a couple months ago for its entire existence. OTOH, the other big free apps are run by the enormous monopolistic big brother tech companies. I’d prefer not supporting them and pointing to them doesn’t help because their reasoning for being free is to get people into their own varied walled gardens/ecosystems. A lot of innovations are unlikely to come from these companies apps. They are there to catch the widest net of [casual] users. It’s all business for them. All of this is like how South Park[0] parodied both Walmart/big box stores, and the consumers who enable this behavior and how it is a cycle that keeps going on. 0. https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/Something_Wall-Mart_This_Way_Comes https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/Something_Wall-Mart_This_W...