The developer has said that Nitro is essentially an update to RAW Power.
If you move down to the questions and answers part of this post he explains (a little) more. He also explains why he felt he had to go subscription.
Great post - pretty much how I feel.
I also think there’s an issue with subscriptions being the norm and what part of the software landscape a developer operates in.
Adobe operates in a landscape where there are relevant changes and updates to dive into on a regular basis — and their size and prior practices help, as you point out.
Then there’s development houses like MindNode and Ulysses. These are both products I bought when you could buy outright and could, but didn’t have to, upgrade as new version came out. Both are now subscription (MindNode does have a free option) and are what I’d consider good software and mature.
But neither really need regular, continual updates. I think both could stop development today and still be useful as is for 5 to 10 years. Subscription pricing seems to just be a way of having a reliable, predictable stream of money.
In these cases there isn’t an obvious benefit to me for paying a subscription other than supporting software I’d like to see continue. I wonder if subscription pricing could actually be a detriment to them — at least amongst groups of people like MPU, some of who have a justifiable aversion to subscriptions.
In practice, I would update MindNode with their new release. Which isn’t really too different than paying a subscription — my outlay of money probably didn’t change much. And I do want to continue using MindNode, so I’m happy to pay the subscription cost. I definitely get my money’s worth. But will that be sustainable in the aggregate for smaller developments that don’t have a large captive audience like Adobe does?
I don’t think I have much of a point to this post, now that I’m ending it. Thank you for attending my Sunday Morning Coffee ramble. Now to decide if I should listen to the new Phosphorescent album on Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal or just buy it.
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100% this. I don’t know if it’s still possible to crack their newer software, but I bet that the old versions of Photoshop (pre-subscriptions) were one of the most pirated softwares after Windows and MS Office.
In the olden days GET OFF MY LAWN you could release a piece of software and never, ever touch the code again, it’d likely run for 10 years with no problems.
There’s no such thing these days as a piece of software which can be frozen and not developed for any form of mobile platform and remain viable for more than 3 or 4 years.
Between OS updates, new hardware, API changes, vulnerability management, platform changes… it’s just not possible to stand still.
Where the majority of Dev time is purely based on maintenance and upkeep of an App, the subscription cost should reflect this, where there will be regular improvements, that’s more expensive.
I happily pay £4 a year for the Due app, TBH I’d happily pay £12 a year for Due without a second thought, it’s key to my routine.I instabought Omnifocus 4 for a £70 upgrade (One off fee) because I trust them to be around for a while and 2 because the value for money is immense. I pay my £8.99 a month for iCloud through gritted teeth because I have to, but if Apple Music goes up to £20 a month (family plan) it’ll get the chop. I don’t use it, but my daughters do.
But as @webwalrus says, in the end, the Dev has to take their costs, add a percentage for their profit and divide it by the target audience to show how much the app costs
I should have been more specific - I was thinking freezing the features, not maintenance and future compatability. Due is a great example of that.
But your point still stands. Operating Systems change so much faster now the time needed to keep things up to date is increasing and that cost has to be factored in as well.
I also think you have to factor in what I consider the “race to the bottom” of iOS app pricing. Because the market was flooded with free or very cheap apps, most every developer had to address that in some form or another. And it simply became harder to charge a fair upfront price except for more niche apps and some games. Before subscriptions started to come in a felt I grossly underpaid for a lot of iOS apps—there’s no way that could have been sustainable for a lot of developers.
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The thing to keep in mind regarding Photoshop piracy is that a ton of it was done by kids who were just goofing around, getting to know the tools, and cultivating their interests. That’s what my friends and I did, and it took me in all kinds of directions I never would have gone otherwise, from investing in a DSLR camera to eventually getting an internship at a graphic design firm and some small gigs here and there since. These days I use Affinity software, but my familiarity with editing tools was developed in Creative Suite.
It’s my understanding that this was a common path for people to enter the graphic design/digital arts field for a long time; that many people with careers using the Creative Suite were self-taught and only started using licensed software once they’d already landed the professional gig, but that this is quickly becoming a thing of the past. The idea that my preteen self would’ve had $60-90/mo, let alone a lump sum of $700, to spend on a graphic design hobby is laughable. It simply never would’ve happened.
ETA: in some sense, the prevalence of Photoshop/Creative Suite piracy actually helped to reinforce and maintain Adobe’s position as the industry standard, since there was less incentive for non-professionals to look elsewhere, and anybody trying to get into the industry could learn to use the software on their own. Why bother with GIMP when you could just use Photoshop and develop a marketable skill?
Copyright infringement of Adobe software is an interesting subject. It’s easy, as with any sort of piracy, to fall into the trap of viewing piracy as a proxy for consumer demand, which is exactly what the businesses who hold these copyrights would like consumers to believe. In turn, it’s easy to accept the idea that Adobe kneecapped unlicensed use of their software by switching to a subscription model—after all, they reported a string of record revenues after doing so—but that leaves out a lot of the picture. One reason to conflate these effects is because we know that switching from purchases to subscriptions made a big dent in media piracy. Netflix and Spotify basically killed torrenting, right? But there are two problems with this framing:
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Media streaming owes a lot to developments in telecommunications infrastructure and consumer hardware, which aren’t meaningful bottlenecks for professional-grade software. A user downloads Photoshop once and updates it occasionally.
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Most people never stopped pirating anything—P2P file sharing just gave way way to illegal streaming. People are still infringing software copyrights, and pricing remains an issue—copyright infringement is much more common in countries with less purchasing power and looser enforcement of IP.
You can still circumvent the Creative Cloud DRM, it’s just not as straightforward as it was back when my friends and I were downloading Photoshop back in the 2000s. Personally, I think what’s happened is that Adobe has managed to rope in seldom or occasional purchasers of Photoshop/Creative Suite while cutting out their middle SKUs.
- In 2005, plenty of firms might have bought a single $600 license for Photoshop CS2 and been able to use it for years—at least as long as they kept using Windows XP (hell, you can still run it for free in a VM). Somewhere between $60-120/yr over a 5-10 year period. And the upgrade cost to go from CS to CS2 was only $150, so once you’d paid the initial entrance fee, the price still wasn’t that bad.
- Same goes for bulk purchasers who don’t need to remain on the cutting edge, whether those are private firms or educational institutions. As long as the .psd files are staying in-house, the core of Photoshop really hasn’t changed much in the last 20 years.
- Adobe also used to offer a wider variety of software bundles. In 2012, depending on your needs, you could pay $1300, $1900, or $2600 for the Design Standard, Design & Web/Production Premium, or Master Collection bundles of CS6.
Now, it’s either Photoshop for $275/yr, Photoshop+Lightroom for $240/yr, or the whole kit and caboodle for $720/yr. The Photoshop-only tier is a red herring, since the PS+LR combo is cheaper and comes with 10x the cloud storage. So you can either pay $240/yr for Photoshop, or three times that for everything.
Compared to the old pricing, everyone is paying the equivalent of upgrading every two to four years, and they’ve completely scooped out their mid-range offerings. Even if all you want is Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator, and InDesign, you’ll be paying for all the audio and video editing software as well. Plus, since everybody else is hooked into the Creative Cloud software, working collaboratively basically demands you get with the program.
To be fair, this is just looking at the individual pricing. I’m not sure how the old bulk license purchasing compares to their new team subscriptions. But I think Adobe’s success with the subscription model has a lot less to do with piracy than they’d like people to believe. The ‘pirated copy of Photoshop’ meme strikes me as a remarkably convenient cover story for them finding a way to better leverage their paying customer base.
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Makes sense, this is sort of what I expected and why I asked.
Jeff Johnson, developer of StopTheMadness, has a blog which among other things gives great insight into what it’s like to sell through the Mac and iOS App Stores these days.
The long and the short of it is that if your now-universal software didn’t begin life on both stores as universal software, trying to offer an upgrade path that works across platforms or modify the existing pricing model is basically out. So the only way forward is to deprecate the old software and release a whole new product.
Excited to give Nitro a shot sometime soon.
Ulysses sums up the whole subscription issue for me.
It’s one of the pieces of software that I have used regularly for years. It was essential when I was doing journalism (300-600 words for publication to a very tight deadline while out and about). I still love writing in it.
But what the developers promised when they went subscription was that it would develop: that things which could be better, would be better, that refinements would come regularly and that it would adapt to new demands. Going subscription was a response to user feedback saying “Ulysses is a great start, but it really needs further development to fulfil its potential”.
To give one, very obvious, example, lots of users have been asking for an option to hide markdown syntax for at least a decade, and similarly they have been asking the developers to sort out the difficulties around trying to re-use Ulysses documents in other markdown-savvy apps and to really get to grips with getting your documents out of the app into a robust publishable form without having to re-factor everything.
I hit frustrations with the app every time I use it, almost exactly as I always have done, but I have been paying them quite a lot every year so I shouldn’t have to.
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Like my experiment using OmniFocus and Reminders concurrently for several months (I decided to stay with Reminders), I’ve been using Ulysses and Scrivener concurrently for a while. I agree with your frustration. Regarding:
To give one, very obvious, example, lots of users have been asking for an option to hide markdown syntax for at least a decade.
Just try asking the developers of iA Writer to do that. I have. They are adamantly opposed to doing so. 
That is their prerogative and I don’t argue about it. I also stopped using iA Writer because of it and a few other missing features. I’m guessing that the developers of Ulysses feel the same way.
Ulysses has made a couple of improvements, e.g., they added the Projects area. They also have a beta for internal links:
Ulysses now adds support for internal links.
- Link to any heading in your sheet, project or library.
- Support for exporting links to PDF, DOCX, … and all common publishing platforms.
- Links will stay intact even if the heading is changed or moved.
You can download the beta here: https://ulysses.app/beta](Ulysses › Ulysses Beta)
I also agree with your frustration with exporting and using Ulysses-generated documents. This is one of several reasons why most of my work at this point is in Scrivener.
the difficulties around trying to re-use Ulysses documents in other markdown-savvy apps and to really get to grips with getting your documents out of the app into a robust publishable form without having to re-factor everything
For me, Scrivener has a different set of frustrations. I am hoping the “simplified” Scrivener currently in private beta (I was too late to enrol) will finally be what I want from a writing app, but given Scrivener’s typical rate of development it might be a year or more before we can see.
Absolutely! But I’ve decided I just have to pick which set of frustrations and frictions are the “lesser of two evils” and then go with that app. And, of course, I dislike subscriptions with an unhealthy passion. Thus, virtually all of my writing is now in Scrivener and, when appropriate, transferred to Pages to “pretty it up.” I also routinely export all of my writing in Scrivener to markdown and then archive those files. I can do this in bulk, so this works well and allows me to work with those files in a markdown editor as needed or desired.
The bottom line is that when it comes to apps, sometimes, one has to pick one’s poison. This has been a slow lesson for me to learn.
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Just noting that this is remarkably good advice for life in general, not just software. 
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That is pretty much my approach to recent elections. 
Markdown Guide has a good resource when considering these sorts of things, though it could use some updating. Here’s their blurb on Ulysses:
Unfortunately, using Ulysses to write in Markdown is an exercise in frustration. The application supports a subset of the Markdown syntax, but support for many syntax elements is notably absent. Even worse, support for some elements is provided using non-standard notation. Ulysses might not be your first choice if you’re wanting to write exclusively in Markdown.
Honestly I can look past a lot of the custom syntax difficulties if all it requires is figuring out a way to programatically convert files. There’s lots of information available from people undertaking serious writing projects using Ulysses with pandoc.
What bugs me to no end is the lack of feature parity. I think you were the one, actually, who posted on here 3 or 4 years ago about the inability to view glued sheets together on the iPad. I emailed them last month to follow up about it and got the same canned response back, which has kind of soured me on Ulysses since. It speaks to some deep-rooted issues with their code if they haven’t been able to implement that kind of feature parity in a number of years. Glued sheets are really the feature that keeps me coming back and it stinks to not be able to use the same workflow on iPad.
Unfortunately, the pickings for a robust, customizable Markdown editor suitable for long-form writing with feature parity on Mac and iOS are less than slim.
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First, regarding Pandoc, I’m not up to the complexities of dealing with Pandoc. It is too much overhead for me.
Second, as to feature parity, both Ulysses and Scrivener lack feature parity between the Mac and iOS devices. However, Scrivener comes closer to dealing with glued sheets, what Scrivener refers to as “Scrivenings mode.” Here is a link to their explanation. The limitation is not Ulysses or Scrivener but iOS/iPad. This may explain why "the pickings for a robust, customizable Markdown editor suitable for long-form writing with feature parity on Mac and iOS are less than slim.
Given the lack of feature parity, I’ve concluded that I have to do my heavy organizational work on the MBP and use the iPad for extensive writing sessions confined to a sheet (Ulysses) or document (Scrivener).
Since neither app has feature parity, I’ll not pay to rent Ulysses when Scrivener is a one time purchase.
Have you tried Obsidian? Curious about what problem stops you from using it.
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I do! Obsidian is an invaluable tool in my research toolkit. For a variety of reasons, I prefer having a separate application dedicated to writing, but it’s usually open alongside Obsidian and DEVONthink.
I have been meaning to take a closer look at the Longform plugin, but find the creative writing metaphors a bit distracting.
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I did a little digging on their forum and it seems like the primary concern is that memory limitations on iOS will cause problems for users who like to put a lot of images in their documents. Otherwise, I’m not familiar with Scrivener, so I suspect their other interface considerations might be more impactful, but the Ulysses UX is nearly identical between Mac and iPad.
In any case, if image embedding is the real hangup, it seems… secondary… when considering Ulysses’s goal of being a minimal writing environment (though they do have embedded image support). Nothing a simple toggle between “Display embedded images OR Display glued sheets together” shouldn’t be able to solve.
I guess what I find most frustrating is getting the runaround from developers who say “it’s not currently supported but it’s on our roadmap.” Bullshit. If you’re a well-resourced developer that simply hasn’t gotten around to basic feature parity after four years, it’s not meaningfully on the roadmap. If implementing said feature is out of your control, quit stringing me along—tell me why it’s not supported and what Apple would need to change for it to be feasible. Even the bog-standard, undetailed, “Thanks for the feedback!” canned responses feel better.
I appreciate the honesty a hell of a lot more. Actually, I pulled the trigger on Obsidian Sync last week specifically after reading a sincere explanation from @ryanjamurphy as to why Obsidian Mobile is practically unusable via iCloud Sync and why changing that is out of their control. Knowing what I can expect and why I can expect it is worth a lot, especially when developers are asking for long-term partnerships with paying customers. Which, I guess, kind of brings us back to the topic at hand.
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+1 The Obsidian people are very open
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