Those are very good points…
Would you mind sharing what mac apps do you develop?
Just for this I would like to support you. What apps do you develop?
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Seems he’s the developer of Anybox.
These are good points. From a user perspective I was initially skeptical about Setapp but now I’m a convert. I hope it works for Setapp and their developers long term with this model as I find it to be a a great curated (this is key and I am happy to pay for curation) collection of apps. I find more and more apps cropping up that I can use (Tripmode was my latest discovery to limit my Mac’s data usage while on metered roaming internet) that I would hate to have to go looking for because they are not essential but great to have without going through a separate payment/subscription process.
Thinking longer term, this could allow both users and developers to benefit from more non-core apps.
The Mac AppStore, while gated, is not curated or at least not to a high standard and so I generally avoid searching there whenever I can as there’s so much junk floating around.
One thing Setapp needs to focus on is to make reviews more central. Currently there’s only a single rating that I see with limited explanation on what exactly its based on.
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Some information on motivation on the Setapp site.
Didn’t occur to me to check there.
I guess in the back of my mind, I was concerned it might be a Groupon situation where businesses have lost money.
Yes I found their “explanations” for going Subscription to be a bit unbelievable. Honestly i’m ok with Subscriptions. I would have upgraded my license from version 8 to the current version had the Sub price been around 15-20 a year. Much of what they offer is built into the OS.
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I’m not a developer, but aside from the getting users who wouldn’t necessarily pay full price for your app, you also get users who trust Setapp who might be wary to otherwise buy something from an indie developer. With the scourge of bot reviews and clones (not a Mac app, but the scourge of Wordle copy-cats for example) it can be hard to trust something without either word of mouth (shout out to this forum) or a trusted platform.
This isn’t a setapp thing, but I recently needed a PDF editor to do a specific thing and the first place I looked was this forum, where I found software that did exactly what I needed it to do. Had I found that exact same indie developer through a google search, I’m not sure I would have been willing to download it for fear of some privacy issue. Setapp, as long as it has user trust, benefits developers with that trust.
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My new app just came out one month ago. You can check it out at Introduction - Anybox.
All of my apps can be found here: https://shinystone.net/
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Thanks for asking.
All of my apps can be found here: https://shinystone.net/
The latest one is Anybox - the bookmark manager.
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Yeah, this may push me to explore Forklift more. I already use Forklift for FTP, but I was using Path Finder for local stuff. I was encouraged that Path Finder was supposedly implementing FTP support, but if it costs $3/month for it I’m less interested.
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I would never have tried PDF squeezer unless it was on Setapp. It just sounds like a gimmick. But no, it really does squish plenty of PDF file sizes by like 95% with barely noticeable loss of definition. Setapp introduced me to it and I now use it 10-20 times a week.
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Awesome tip. Thank you!
I’d been using PDFpen (also from Setapp) to do this and this seems like a good alternative. This subscription keeps getting more valuable with time.
FYI I also use PDFpen for OCR (for image PDF scans/grabs) and it seems fast and accurate.
I’m much more likely to capture a PDF for storage in EagleFiler now that I run them all thru PDF squeezer. Used to try to extract and save text to keep file sizes low. Simple workflow, too. Right-click, select Open With PDF Squeezer, CMD+S, CMD+W
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Sounds great - I have a large number of PDFs in Eaglefiler and many scanned articles and book extracts in Zotero.,. This looks like a great tool (and only £10 to buy outright)
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In case you’re still waiting to hear back, it’s worth noting that their support team is in Ukraine, so response times may be…variable.
I was unaware of this. Thanks.
Yeah. 
Source of that info, for any curious: https://twitter.com/Cocoatech/status/1499134030976983045
The downside for developers to being on SetApp is that they control the distribution channel. They recently dumped Adguard because they wrongly accused them of connecting to servers in Russia.
Of course we can cut SetApp some slack right now, but the point stands.
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Thank you very much for posting the link to AdGuard’s response regarding the SetApp situation. Very enlightening.