4 ms·

Since this is the top comment as of now - hijacking this to introduce a change to pricing: ------ OP here - based on the feedback, I’ve switched boringBar to

by a-ve 6mo ago

Since this is the top comment as of now - hijacking this to introduce a change to pricing: ------ OP here - based on the feedback, I’ve switched boringBar to a perpetual license for personal use: https://boringbar.app https://boringbar.app It’s now $40 for 2 devices and includes 2 years of updates. After that, you can keep using the version you have, or choose to pay for updates again later. For businesses, I’m keeping the existing annual pricing. A lot of the comments on pricing were fair, and I appreciate people being direct about it. I still care a lot about long-term maintenance for an app like this, but I think this is a better balance. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47743992 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47743992

DrammBA 6mo ago
Given how many developers here use LLMs daily, how do you think about defensibility? Tools like this seem relatively easy to reverse-engineer and replicate with enough time and LLM assistance. Did that influence your decision to charge a subscription or the change to a personal license?
- butlike 6mo ago
  It's not the idea, it's the implementation. It still takes time and effort to reverse-engineer, LLM assistance or not.
- risyachka 6mo ago
  >> how do you think about defensibility? defensibility nowadays is app support and development. the more work you pour into it the more defensible it will be. I personally would gladly pay to have app constantly polished and improved. What I would not use is some vibe-coded alternative that was slopped with AI in a day and pushed to github with a tweet "i made a free X alternative" and then abandoned.
  - mfru 6mo ago
    how much is there to improve and polish for a taskbar? at most it will be keeping up with macOS throwing breaking changes at you and maybe one or the other weird bug. but isn't that it?
  - user34283 6mo ago
    I would not. I'm not paying $40 for a taskbar replacement. And not for two years of updates and a two device limit on top. Maybe if it was $10, I could consider it. Prices for macOS apps are insane in my opinion. Everyone wants to charge yearly or every two years now too.
    - madhacker 6mo ago
      I second this! As a lite Mac user, $40 is a bit steep. I'll manage without boringBar no matter how great it is.
    - hirvi74 6mo ago
      Honestly, I have tried to really cut down on my usage of 3rd-party dependencies when possible. In a way, it's kind of freeing. Whatever I still need, I write myself. If I cannot write it, then I try to find something FOSS. If I find nothing, then I consider purchasing something. For example, I am rolling my own window manager (that needs some much needed TLC). I ditched Alfred for Spotlight. Though Alfred is better, I will survive just fine. And the list goes on. I am not trying to take a dig at the OP. I am sure he or she put effort into this application. But I am genuinely curious -- does anybody actually need this software? Cmd+Tab, a decent window manager, and Spotlight would solve the same problems for free.
      - mitchell209 6mo ago
        I fresh install to give myself a different perspective when I feel like I have too many 3rd party solutions to problems that no longer exist. Spotlight is better and I only casually use my macbook nowadays, so I don't need the power of Alfred. I don't need dock extensions because Stage Manager is mediocre but works well enough for the browser, chat / music apps, and whatever document I'm working with at the time.
    - dangus 6mo ago
      They’re not insane. It costs $99 a year just to be able to write Mac apps at all. Any sort of buy-once app on macOS is unsustainable to the developer. They are paying Apple $99 a year forever. If you want cheap/free apps get off of Apple’s ecosystem and switch to Linux.
- a-ve 6mo ago
  That's the reason why I added a subscription in the first place - you would pay a dirt-cheap price for a "boring" product with an added insurance that someone will be there to support it. People will replicate it, sure, but supporting it regularly is another thing. I guess the majority wanted a perpetual license - so it's a win for the masses.
- 8avo 6mo ago
  I cannot agree with you more. Personally, I dare not replace the Dock with Windows-style task bar for fear that my OLED display might have burn-in on it. Yet, when I need an alternative, I would rather make an APP for my own.
sonofhans 6mo ago
[dead]
kstrauser 6mo ago
Feedback from a potential customer: I despise 2-device limits. I used DEVONthink for a decade but dropped it because of that exact thing. At home, I have a Mac Studio[0] set up in my office with my music stuff, and I'm writing this on my MacBoor Air[1] here on my lap in the living room. I also have a work laptop, although it's safely tucked away in my backback right now. My wife has an MBA, too, but that's hers and I don't mess with it. So I'm elbow-deep in Macs that are used solely by me, and I bounce between them regularly. The 2-device limit is a dealbreaker for me. It's where I stop reading. I don't care if it cures cancer: I won't buy an app that makes me pick and choose which of the devices in my care I can use it on. I'm sympathetic to why vendors pick that limit. I get that you don't want me to buy a single license and spread it around my friends and work circles. That's completely reasonable and understandable. And yet, it completely breaks my use case. I bet I'm far from alone in this. [0]A previous job let me keep it when I left. [1]I bought to hack on personal projects instead of using [0], which was work-owned at the time.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- carlosjobim 6mo ago
  You can purchase multiple licenses. If you can afford a dozen computers, you can afford a couple more licenses.
  - kstrauser 6mo ago
    Very true! Completely irrelant here, because I only purchased one of those computers as you correctly noted, but true!
- satvikpendem 6mo ago
  What's the alternative?
  - kstrauser 6mo ago
    Trust and respect, which is a 2-way street. I've bought some relatively expensive apps (the pro version of nearly everything Omni Group makes, Things, etc. etc. etc.) and all of them let you install and use the apps on all of your computers. They're licensed per person, not per device. I despise technical controls on this for the same reason I despise DRM on physical media: it's an inconvenience to rightful owners and a temporary speed bump to pirates. I'm not about to abuse my OmniFocus licenses, even though I could. They sold me a great product at a reasonable price, with permission to throw a copy on everything I own so I can use it no matter which chair I'm sitting at. They trust and respect me, and I trust and respect them.
harladsinsteden 6mo ago
What was your justification for the monthly fee in the first place? There is a model that worked for decades: If you spent a _significant_ amount of work enhancing an existing tool you'd release a new major version. The would be a discount for license holders of the old version. Why reinvent the world over and over again?
- Griffinsauce 6mo ago
  Simple answer right? It makes more money. Not saying that was OPs motivation but that's obviously why the shift happened.
  - dangus 6mo ago
    To me it seems like small businesses like this get squeezed by these demands to make everything cheaper while the big corporations ignore it and stick to their pricing. I’m not sure OP should have capitulated. Someone who loves this tool will probably gladly pay more.
    - cgio 6mo ago
      The question is what is the proportion of people loving it vs liking it.
      - dangus 6mo ago
        The proportion gets a lot easier to deal with as the price goes up. Is it easier to convince one person to pay $100 or 100 people to pay $1?
    - twohaibei 6mo ago
      I'm pretty sure people who give in to subscriptions are usually forced to use a tool (or adobe) for one reason or another. New tool, that does one small thing, would not force many people to go into that absurd payment model.
  - harladsinsteden 6mo ago
natpalmer1776 6mo ago
I personally prefer the monthly payments of a nominal amount where $2-8/month is my usual small app tolerance. It feels like I’m supporting the development of useful tools while having the option to discontinue my patronage when the tool is no longer relevant or useful to my workflow. This gives products a natural lifespan and aligns the developer incentives to keep the product functional and continue developing new features. Old guard will say what they will about software licensing but at the end of the day it’s all the same.
- a-ve 6mo ago
  I get it now that folks absolutely loathe the idea of subscriptions - that too for a taskbar. In hindsight I too find it hideous but I wanted the pricing to reflect the effort that went into this - wrestling with the Window Server and Xcode for multiple weekends over the past months. But hey, the masses have spoken - and a perpetual license it is. Vox populi, vox dei.
  - ibejoeb 6mo ago
    I don't think the notion of subscription is off-putting. It's just not a very natural fit for something that isn't a function of time or resources. This is just a better model for upgrades. If you make improvements later on, people will pay again. For this particular situation, your risk probably isn't that people will stop paying. It's more likely that people like it enough that a free alternative pops up (it's not so different from rectangle and alttab.) You're probably better off taking the money up front.
- butlike 6mo ago
  Who maintains the list of all of these a la carte subscriptions? Your credit card company? Seems like a pain to have to review it every month and discern the service from the ACH transaction name. Additionally, it would be a reactive approach, as you would already need to be charged for the month you didn't want in order for it to show up on the ACH ledger. I don't have a problem with paying subscriptions, I have a problem with the subscription list itself becoming untenable.
alsetmusic 6mo ago
Awesome that you were receptive to feedback. I hope most of the people who commented find out and don't just memory-hole the project.
- jaequery 6mo ago
  I am all for supporting local devs/vibe-coders.
upmostly 6mo ago
We went through the exact same dilemma with our product [1]. For desktop apps, one-off with a defined support window just feels right. Users get certainty, and you still have a clear path to future revenue when that window expires. Subscription makes a lot more sense once you’re in cloud/collaborative territory which we've just entered. Sounds like you landed in a good place with this split. [1] https://dbpro.app/pricing https://dbpro.app/pricing
- yurishimo 6mo ago
  Hey! Nice to see you have updated the pricing. I really liked the idea behind your product when I first saw it but the pricing was just a non-starter. Getting work to pay for all of my little productivity tools is a PITA and I still have side projects so spending a few bucks on a license every 2-3 years personally is where I find the sweet spot. Will be trying out DB Pro again in the near future!
teiferer 6mo ago
C'mon, why not just open source it? Do you really expect to gain a sizeable following to get substantial cash flow? Most shareware went the way of oblivion. If you'd open source it then there is at least the chance of gaining a community. And you'd be giving back to the community that you have benefitted from for decades.
- nagisa12321 6mo ago
  I just make an open source version https://github.com/nagisa77/OpenBoringBar https://github.com/nagisa77/OpenBoringBar
  - shadyabhi 6mo ago
    Amazing, that's what I thought, this one should be easy to vibe, thanks for the effort.
selkin 6mo ago
What bothers me ain't the subscription, but the lack of transparency. I'm asked to pay for future updates and support here, but I don't know what that would be. Some visibility into the roadmap and operations (an anonymous LLC doesn't really say "Trust") is needed for me to feel good about typing my credit card number into the form.
- randomeel 6mo ago
  I agree , but I only need a page dedicated to release history to see how frequently the app is updated and so I can trust it for the future
bloqs 6mo ago
Hey great change, am now buying. It was by pure chance i came back to this thread after 3 days, which is a damn shame as Im sure there were many people put off by the pricing that missed the change.
- bloqs 6mo ago
  that said - the customisation options could use some work. I also find it seems to handle some windows differently (steam for example won't show an activity window, just a dock icon)

by a-ve 6mo ago

DrammBA 6mo ago

Given how many developers here use LLMs daily, how do you think about defensibility? Tools like this seem relatively easy to reverse-engineer and replicate with enough time and LLM assistance. Did that influence your decision to charge a subscription or the change to a personal license?

butlike 6mo ago
It's not the idea, it's the implementation. It still takes time and effort to reverse-engineer, LLM assistance or not.
risyachka 6mo ago
>> how do you think about defensibility? defensibility nowadays is app support and development. the more work you pour into it the more defensible it will be. I personally would gladly pay to have app constantly polished and improved. What I would not use is some vibe-coded alternative that was slopped with AI in a day and pushed to github with a tweet "i made a free X alternative" and then abandoned.
- mfru 6mo ago
  how much is there to improve and polish for a taskbar? at most it will be keeping up with macOS throwing breaking changes at you and maybe one or the other weird bug. but isn't that it?
- user34283 6mo ago
  I would not. I'm not paying $40 for a taskbar replacement. And not for two years of updates and a two device limit on top. Maybe if it was $10, I could consider it. Prices for macOS apps are insane in my opinion. Everyone wants to charge yearly or every two years now too.
  - madhacker 6mo ago
    I second this! As a lite Mac user, $40 is a bit steep. I'll manage without boringBar no matter how great it is.
  - hirvi74 6mo ago
    Honestly, I have tried to really cut down on my usage of 3rd-party dependencies when possible. In a way, it's kind of freeing. Whatever I still need, I write myself. If I cannot write it, then I try to find something FOSS. If I find nothing, then I consider purchasing something. For example, I am rolling my own window manager (that needs some much needed TLC). I ditched Alfred for Spotlight. Though Alfred is better, I will survive just fine. And the list goes on. I am not trying to take a dig at the OP. I am sure he or she put effort into this application. But I am genuinely curious -- does anybody actually need this software? Cmd+Tab, a decent window manager, and Spotlight would solve the same problems for free.
    - mitchell209 6mo ago
      I fresh install to give myself a different perspective when I feel like I have too many 3rd party solutions to problems that no longer exist. Spotlight is better and I only casually use my macbook nowadays, so I don't need the power of Alfred. I don't need dock extensions because Stage Manager is mediocre but works well enough for the browser, chat / music apps, and whatever document I'm working with at the time.
  - dangus 6mo ago
    They’re not insane. It costs $99 a year just to be able to write Mac apps at all. Any sort of buy-once app on macOS is unsustainable to the developer. They are paying Apple $99 a year forever. If you want cheap/free apps get off of Apple’s ecosystem and switch to Linux.
a-ve 6mo ago
That's the reason why I added a subscription in the first place - you would pay a dirt-cheap price for a "boring" product with an added insurance that someone will be there to support it. People will replicate it, sure, but supporting it regularly is another thing. I guess the majority wanted a perpetual license - so it's a win for the masses.
8avo 6mo ago
I cannot agree with you more. Personally, I dare not replace the Dock with Windows-style task bar for fear that my OLED display might have burn-in on it. Yet, when I need an alternative, I would rather make an APP for my own.

sonofhans 6mo ago

[dead]

kstrauser 6mo ago

Feedback from a potential customer: I despise 2-device limits. I used DEVONthink for a decade but dropped it because of that exact thing. At home, I have a Mac Studio[0] set up in my office with my music stuff, and I'm writing this on my MacBoor Air[1] here on my lap in the living room. I also have a work laptop, although it's safely tucked away in my backback right now. My wife has an MBA, too, but that's hers and I don't mess with it. So I'm elbow-deep in Macs that are used solely by me, and I bounce between them regularly. The 2-device limit is a dealbreaker for me. It's where I stop reading. I don't care if it cures cancer: I won't buy an app that makes me pick and choose which of the devices in my care I can use it on. I'm sympathetic to why vendors pick that limit. I get that you don't want me to buy a single license and spread it around my friends and work circles. That's completely reasonable and understandable. And yet, it completely breaks my use case. I bet I'm far from alone in this. [0]A previous job let me keep it when I left. [1]I bought to hack on personal projects instead of using [0], which was work-owned at the time.

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
carlosjobim 6mo ago
You can purchase multiple licenses. If you can afford a dozen computers, you can afford a couple more licenses.
- kstrauser 6mo ago
  Very true! Completely irrelant here, because I only purchased one of those computers as you correctly noted, but true!
satvikpendem 6mo ago
What's the alternative?
- kstrauser 6mo ago
  Trust and respect, which is a 2-way street. I've bought some relatively expensive apps (the pro version of nearly everything Omni Group makes, Things, etc. etc. etc.) and all of them let you install and use the apps on all of your computers. They're licensed per person, not per device. I despise technical controls on this for the same reason I despise DRM on physical media: it's an inconvenience to rightful owners and a temporary speed bump to pirates. I'm not about to abuse my OmniFocus licenses, even though I could. They sold me a great product at a reasonable price, with permission to throw a copy on everything I own so I can use it no matter which chair I'm sitting at. They trust and respect me, and I trust and respect them.

harladsinsteden 6mo ago

What was your justification for the monthly fee in the first place? There is a model that worked for decades: If you spent a _significant_ amount of work enhancing an existing tool you'd release a new major version. The would be a discount for license holders of the old version. Why reinvent the world over and over again?

Griffinsauce 6mo ago
Simple answer right? It makes more money. Not saying that was OPs motivation but that's obviously why the shift happened.
- dangus 6mo ago
  To me it seems like small businesses like this get squeezed by these demands to make everything cheaper while the big corporations ignore it and stick to their pricing. I’m not sure OP should have capitulated. Someone who loves this tool will probably gladly pay more.
  - cgio 6mo ago
    The question is what is the proportion of people loving it vs liking it.
    - dangus 6mo ago
      The proportion gets a lot easier to deal with as the price goes up. Is it easier to convince one person to pay $100 or 100 people to pay $1?
  - twohaibei 6mo ago
    I'm pretty sure people who give in to subscriptions are usually forced to use a tool (or adobe) for one reason or another. New tool, that does one small thing, would not force many people to go into that absurd payment model.
- harladsinsteden 6mo ago

natpalmer1776 6mo ago

I personally prefer the monthly payments of a nominal amount where $2-8/month is my usual small app tolerance. It feels like I’m supporting the development of useful tools while having the option to discontinue my patronage when the tool is no longer relevant or useful to my workflow. This gives products a natural lifespan and aligns the developer incentives to keep the product functional and continue developing new features. Old guard will say what they will about software licensing but at the end of the day it’s all the same.

a-ve 6mo ago
I get it now that folks absolutely loathe the idea of subscriptions - that too for a taskbar. In hindsight I too find it hideous but I wanted the pricing to reflect the effort that went into this - wrestling with the Window Server and Xcode for multiple weekends over the past months. But hey, the masses have spoken - and a perpetual license it is. Vox populi, vox dei.
- ibejoeb 6mo ago
  I don't think the notion of subscription is off-putting. It's just not a very natural fit for something that isn't a function of time or resources. This is just a better model for upgrades. If you make improvements later on, people will pay again. For this particular situation, your risk probably isn't that people will stop paying. It's more likely that people like it enough that a free alternative pops up (it's not so different from rectangle and alttab.) You're probably better off taking the money up front.
butlike 6mo ago
Who maintains the list of all of these a la carte subscriptions? Your credit card company? Seems like a pain to have to review it every month and discern the service from the ACH transaction name. Additionally, it would be a reactive approach, as you would already need to be charged for the month you didn't want in order for it to show up on the ACH ledger. I don't have a problem with paying subscriptions, I have a problem with the subscription list itself becoming untenable.

alsetmusic 6mo ago

Awesome that you were receptive to feedback. I hope most of the people who commented find out and don't just memory-hole the project.

jaequery 6mo ago
I am all for supporting local devs/vibe-coders.

upmostly 6mo ago

We went through the exact same dilemma with our product [1]. For desktop apps, one-off with a defined support window just feels right. Users get certainty, and you still have a clear path to future revenue when that window expires. Subscription makes a lot more sense once you’re in cloud/collaborative territory which we've just entered. Sounds like you landed in a good place with this split. [1] https://dbpro.app/pricing https://dbpro.app/pricing

yurishimo 6mo ago
Hey! Nice to see you have updated the pricing. I really liked the idea behind your product when I first saw it but the pricing was just a non-starter. Getting work to pay for all of my little productivity tools is a PITA and I still have side projects so spending a few bucks on a license every 2-3 years personally is where I find the sweet spot. Will be trying out DB Pro again in the near future!

teiferer 6mo ago

C'mon, why not just open source it? Do you really expect to gain a sizeable following to get substantial cash flow? Most shareware went the way of oblivion. If you'd open source it then there is at least the chance of gaining a community. And you'd be giving back to the community that you have benefitted from for decades.

nagisa12321 6mo ago
I just make an open source version https://github.com/nagisa77/OpenBoringBar https://github.com/nagisa77/OpenBoringBar
- shadyabhi 6mo ago
  Amazing, that's what I thought, this one should be easy to vibe, thanks for the effort.

selkin 6mo ago

What bothers me ain't the subscription, but the lack of transparency. I'm asked to pay for future updates and support here, but I don't know what that would be. Some visibility into the roadmap and operations (an anonymous LLC doesn't really say "Trust") is needed for me to feel good about typing my credit card number into the form.

randomeel 6mo ago
I agree , but I only need a page dedicated to release history to see how frequently the app is updated and so I can trust it for the future

bloqs 6mo ago

Hey great change, am now buying. It was by pure chance i came back to this thread after 3 days, which is a damn shame as Im sure there were many people put off by the pricing that missed the change.

bloqs 6mo ago
that said - the customisation options could use some work. I also find it seems to handle some windows differently (steam for example won't show an activity window, just a dock icon)