I do as well, that is free enterprise. But, it is not a price I’m willing to pay. I hope him well as he is a nice developer who was very responsive to me when I was testing NotePlan. He went the extra mile in answering my questions. The problem he may face is demand elasticity. Given the number of substitutes in the market, the degree of necessity for note taking apps and the “breadth of definition” of particular types of note taking apps, I suspect that demand for his app will have a high elasticity.
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If I remember rightly the jump from v2 to v3 doubled the price at which point I dropped the app. Once the app had gained traction the price quickly increased so maybe v4 is round the corner with a similar price increase pending.
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I would tend to agree that if you’re handing out discounts all willy-nilly for anybody that asks you directly, it creates a lack of legitimacy for the higher price. It’s like the numerous stores where nobody smart pays full price. Always a coupon, always a discount, so the value of the products is diminished.
I get that pricing is challenging in the best of times. But I think that if one is going to increase the price, one needs to have relatively firm criteria for doing so. And if you’re going to make exceptions, I think it’s bad form to post publicly that you’ll make an exception for basically anybody that asks. It’s sending a signal that the new price can’t be justified economically.
There’s also the matter of this being available in SetApp. Instead of paying $120 for NotePlan, I can buy SetApp for 1 Mac for $108 per year, or 1 Mac + iOS for $135 per year, or the huge 4 Mac + iOS plan for $162 per year.
I used NotePlan for awhile, and ultimately landed in Obsidian because certain things in NotePlan were either unintuitive or flaky. That said, I like NotePlan’s, and had a few things (like recurring tasks) been non-wonky I think it would’ve been well worth the $60/year subscription, or possibly even a bit more, with some of its features slightly polished. But even with everything working properly I couldn’t justify $15/month or $120/year.
this is one of the reasons that stops me from subscribing to setapp. I just do not know when and which app will be dropped from the collection. The other reason is that I found out setapp too late, I already owned and paid for half of the apps I wanted.
The downsides of the subscription world that we are being forced to exist in. Besides a much higher expense, the risk is entirely on the customers with little or no respite if the subscribed apps shut shop or don’t receive updates.
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I’ve been wondering how much it costs a developer to maintain CloudKit linking between our Macs and iPhones for all of their customers. I’m not dependent on this feature but I like it a lot now that I have it. There are probably many factors involved. Some rather unsatisfactory Google searching claims that CloudKit is basically free to Apple developers. However, a schedule of overage charges also appears to exist.
I tried to get a look into this a couple of years ago, and as far as I remember, those costs are covered by the annual fee the developer has to pay for his account, and the charges apple is getting for every App-Store (and so on) purchase.
I was just about to pull the plug on a year subscription for Noteplan when this announcement came through. I know he’s offering old pricing for folks, but unless it’s some sort of locking pricing, this makes me nervous.
Very cool app, and I want it to be successful, but the pricing is a bit rough right now.
“Pull the plug” sounds like you were quitting or giving up? Did you possibly mean you were going to “pull the trigger” and sign up for a year of NotePlan? (Idiom can be confusing at times. 
)
I woke up faaarrrrrr too early this morning.
Yeah, I meant pull the trigger.
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As Ulli alluded to, CloudKit is included in the 99 USD/year fee charged for developers in the Apple Developer Program. According to this page we get up to a petabyte (1 million GB!). I’m not sure what happens if you go over that, whether you get charged, shut down, etc, but for many use cases I’m sure a petabyte is practically infinite.
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Thank you for that link. So, besides taking 30% for the first year of a subscription and 15% in subsequent years, Apple has not come up with any recent ways to squeeze additional money out of developers. Maybe NotePlan is just trying to join the crowd of other fairly expensive apps: Roam, Notion, Evernote, Craft, DEVONthink, and even Obsidian if you were to include syncing.
One of Eduard’s explicit comparisons is Obsidian with Publish and Sync. NotePlan has at least rough analogues built in (not as extras), but Ive never used Obsidian’s versions, so I don’t know how they compare.
NotePlan sync has been rock solid for me (CloudKit now, iCloud before that), and NotePlan’s implementation of Publish strikes me as very clever.
I already subscribe, so I’m fine as long as he doesn’t change his mind about that part. All my notes are plain text, and I don’t use many of the NotePlan-only syntaxes (and those that I do use, don’t break anything in other apps).
Fwiw, on the Discord, it sounded like he’s being liberal in supplying the old pricing if people ask, not just for existing subscribers.
Still, the sudden price hike does make it harder to recommend to others.
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+1 for upgrade pricing in the Mac App Store! Apple’s subscription model clearly does not fit all situations.
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Right…but isn’t that what subscriptions are for? I.e. if I’m paying a subscription, isn’t the idea that the dev puts in ongoing work to improve the product? The dev gets recurring revenue, I get feature updates.
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Unfortunately, these can be, at times, contradictory.
This was my thought too. If the reason is that Noteplan has changed or the developer’s living situation has changed or whatever, it’s all fine, but doubling a subscription because of new features feels odd.
Of course, if the old price remains in place for previous subscribers, then that’s fine. Then the model works as you describe, and what we’re talking about is a perceived value increase for new customers. That feels most likely to me.
Trying to put this NotePlan price increase into some kind of perspective, my increasingly feeble memory recalled buying the BBEdit programmer’s editor at one time for about the same cost. This link confirms that BBEdit v9.5 went for $125 back in 2010. BBEdit 9.5 brings Live Search bar, scripting improvements
Sure. Value is relative, though. It would never occur to me to compared BBEdit and Noteplan, or Noteplan and Nova, etc. Different markets, different tools. Only thing they have in common is that they’re both apps for Apple platforms.
Folks shouldn’t forget that loss of customers isn’t always a bad thing. If NotePlan has half the customers at double the price, it’s the same revenue with half the service burden.
Plus it gives the dev a more specific audience to develop for.
Not defending the increase; the systemics of subscription pricing is just interesting.
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