I think many developers get caught in the AppStore rules and economy when they first launch not seeing through the downstream consequences when an app kicks off and scales. Hard to predict upfront if your App in a million is going to fly. Launching an unknown app for more and a few $ is suicide as people won’t try and buy.
Not many developers have companies that can scale easily and deal with that and they are not people that normally deal with these kind of entrepreneurial issues. I bet when companies choose to go the subscription model they are already massively financially committed and locked in and have no other choice to survive longer term. The AppStore economy and rules give you little alternative.
The Setapp deal is really good for its clients and given the quality developers that use it, I assume it works for them as well. It needs to scale though to keep the price acceptable and revenue sharing real. I had bought many of the apps outright before I joined and have since installed the Setapp versions. Well worth the subscription fees.
I believe the contrary is true. GoodNotes is responding to a wave going through the App Stores by lowering their price. This is not the first time there has been backlash the consumer is tired of being exploited. (And, yes, I do think exploited is an appropriate term since there is nothing being offered up to tempt the consumer),
Although I do sincerely wish that paid upgrades for iPad and iPhone were available as a viable alternative. No, Apple, there is far more $ to be made, continually charging over and over and over again.
But even the way subscriptions are presented are often suspect. I have to go surfing often enough just to find out how much $ is being asked.
I do believe when there was considerable backlash to Ulysses by the consumers when they changed to subscription. I don’t know that they ever recovered. Maybe they have!
Whether subscriptions are sustainable I’d contend really remains to be seen.
That’s true. However the App Store is designed to extract the most money possible from game companies like epic and everyone else is stuck having to play by the same rules. And then devs charging $0.99 only get $0.69. When they can’t survive with that some try subscriptions.
IMO something has to change. The App Store has to make it easier for developers to make money, we have to accept much higher prices or subscriptions, or our selection of good apps is going to get a lot smaller.
Absolutely! GoodNotes is cashing in. They have seen the opportunity. Well done! I agree 100%. It is a low hanging fruit: come to us, we offer to you a bargain. Only €3.99 for a full-blown note-taking app with exceptional capabilities! No kidding: it really is a bargain. No doubt about that.
And it won’t be the last time customers are angry and express their unhappiness. Maybe, GoodNotes will be the next app. Maybe not. Who knows?!
The question to me is how Notability will perform 12 months or 24 months from now. There are a lot of examples of apps that were able to increase their success after switching to a subscription model. It remains to be seen if there is a subscription market out there for this particular app. We will see.
I am all for bargains, but then again: apps that cost less than 10 bucks per year are teasers to me - something like that will not last 10 years. Eventually you will have to pay again. Substantially. And as long as it happens in the App Store, there will be a good chance that this will be handled via a subscription. Because …
I do not want to go into details again. Like I said, there are a lot of “x went subscription” threads with arguments going back and forth and with a lot of information about the reasons why we are experiencing what we are experiencing.
I once made such an idiotic decision. I worked on farms in the summer to pay for college. One summer I painted hip barn roofs. For my first job (I was 18) I quoted a price of $100 to paint a barm roof with a brush–the farmer would not allow me to use a sprayer! It didn’t take long in the late July heat standing on a metal roof painting it with aluminum paint by hand to realize I’d under charged! I learned my lesson but I do have a strong work ethic!
Same here. I looked at SetApp but already owned everything that was of interest to me. Once I find something that works I rarely change without a reason.
I can’t help but think about how many business models for Overcast that Marco has cycled through.
Notability came out in 2010, before subscriptions were even an option on the App Store. To say they can never change their pricing structure seems a bit extreme.
I really, really wonder if that’s true - or if Setapp is the next “App Store” where people are just jumping on the bandwagon because it’s cool.
As an example, I use an app called NotePlan. It costs $7/month to subscribe, but it’s also on SetApp. Where the total dev revenue from my $10/month is something like $7. If I use 10 SetApp apps, there’s no way the dev is getting their $7 - and I’m betting sometimes they’re lucky to get $1 from me each month.
And if I use NotePlan and Ulysses, something’s got to give - both devs can’t get their whole revenue share. And that’s not even counting the lesser-used apps.
Is that actually sustainable? I would predict that either SetApp explodes at some point in the not-too-distant future, or their rates go up considerably, or good devs wind up abandoning it.
I’d never say they can’t change their pricing structure. I’d say that for a given, paid-for app “SKU”, they either shouldn’t change their pricing structure (i.e. release a new app for the subscription version and remove the old one from sale), or find a way to do what they apparently ultimately did - grandfather in existing users to the features they’d already paid for.
I ran some math once, and for certain combos of apps Setapp can be a good deal vs. periodic upgrade fees - but you have to be a pretty heavy app user. And since they’ve added per-device pricing for the iOS versions of apps, it’s gotten to be a lot worse of a deal.
I find though that for what I’m looking for, I can get the upgrades and such I need for a better overall deal by doing things like taking advantage of devs’ early bird upgrade pricing.
That’s a possibility - but in that case, one of two things would almost have to be true:
SetApp isn’t a profitable business model for devs (well, any dev except MacPaw ) and existing, non-SetApp users of third-party apps are effectively subsidizing the SetApp user base.
Somehow, SetApp users - who already get the app as part of a SetApp subscription - are going out and buying the full version. In which case SetApp is a discovery mechanism.
The first is the opposite of what devs want, and realistically I’m wondering how often the second happens?
Or SetApp isn’t very lucrative, but it also doesn’t cut into standalone purchase revenue. Basically a bit of gravy on top of their existing business model.
I may be entirely wrong, but my understanding is that when I open an app obtained through SetApp it calls home; either that or the SetApp app itself registers my opening and it sporadically calls home to tell them which apps I’ve used. My assumption, therefore, is that my monthly subscription is split between the developers of those apps I’ve actually used; which I think this is an excellent model.
SetApp are completely up front about what they are providing – access to a curated set of applications FOR SO LONG AS YOU PAY THE SUBSCRIPTION. The benefit to developers is of being included that curated set, increasing the chance (over and above the appalling mess that is the mac App store) that I might discover their app and use it. Even a few dollars revenue is better than none …
My understanding is that Apple doesn’t make that kind of switch particularly easy. In particular, there’s no good way to give your existing customers (including ones who just bought your old app yesterday) any sort of discount or free access to the new app. If they did I think you’d see more apps releasing regular paid up front upgrades and we wouldn’t be having this discussion about subscriptions.
Regarding subscriptions in general, there is an issue here that I think Apple needs to fix. As far as I understand, you can either sell an app (strictly, a licence to use the app) through the app store(s) OR you can sell a subscription to use the app. You can’t do both.
This prohibits the long standing model where developers sold perpetual licences (you can run this app for ever, so long as the underlying hardware, OS etc. continues permit its execution – tough luck when the OS stops executing 32-bit apps or some library is deprecated) AND a separate support licence (entitling you to bug fixes, upgrades and whatever else was deemed support).
When I wrote engineering software, many many moons ago, we sold both annual and perpetual licences and a variety of separate support packages. The cheapest was basically the right to receive a set of floppies every time we shipped an updated version; the most expensive included installation, commissioning, training, first line support etc.).
The annual licence was very similar to what we’d now call a subscription. If you purchased a perpetual licence without any support (pretty much nobody did), you had to pay for upgrades, for which we charged a percentage of the then “new licence” cost. The only sting in the tail was that you could only buy a support package contemporaneously with a new license, which was purely to avoid users gaming the arrangement and buying a support package just before a new version came out.
The arrangement seemed to work pretty well then (c 1985 - 2000) and I don’t think the software development business model has changed so much since then that it shouldn’t still work; bigger markets, easier distribution channels perhaps, but fundamentally the same cashflow requirements.
Since the marginal cost of software is zero, this is only a problem for the developer if the app’s inclusion in SetApp keeps someone who would have normally purchased the app outside of that service from doing so. Otherwise, any money from SetApp at all is added revenue (and profit). Also, I think (but have no evidence to support it) that a SetApp subscriber is more likely to use an app within that service than a similar one elsewhere, so an app in SetApp stands out within its ecosystem much more than it does outside of it.
This assumes that the cost getting an app into SetApp is zero or negligibly low. If that’s not the case then things become more complicated.
ETA: I just saw that @ChrisUpchurch said the same thing much more succinctly
In the case of this app, it moves from a centrally-licensed thing (through the dev) to a per-device license administered through SetApp - so I would guess the extra dev cost isn’t negligible. But broadly speaking, I take the point.
I would agree with this in principle, but not in practice as support has a significant cost - and users expect support. In the case of this particular app, users seem to routinely petition the dev for new features and support. Obviously some of that is helpful (showing the dev how to make the app better), but support is a huge time sink. Especially dealing with users that have requests that are just…erm…insane.
I actually saw on a Linux forum a ways back (over a decade ago, when this wasn’t even remotely practical) somebody that was getting pretty insistent that the GUI people needed to allow animated GIFs as desktop backgrounds.
That’s definitely SetApp’s intention as well. They make it easy to search / discover things, and I saw a page where SetApp - when an app leaves - even points people to other SetApp apps that do the same or similar things. They clearly want you working within their ecosystem.
GoodNotes is cashing in. They have seen the opportunity. Well done! I agree 100%. It is a low hanging fruit: come to us, we offer to you a bargain. Only €3.99 for a full-blown note-taking app with exceptional capabilities! No kidding: it really is a bargain. No doubt about that.
) and existing, non-SetApp users of third-party apps are effectively subsidizing the SetApp user base.
