It’s the greed, Dave! I don’t mind paying a flat fee and pay for an upgrade perhaps. But the never ending, bottomless money grab irks me. You own nothing!
I just paid $10 for Línea Sketch which I did like. A month later they moved to subscriptions. They brag that they are giving their old customers a year “free”. Duh: we paid! What’s free about it. At year’s end, the same customers won’t be able to get in the app AT ALL!
That’s not what I contracted for.
Apple Care was trying to give me my money back but it wouldn’t go through because of this “free” year! So once the time is up, I’ll call again.
Hell will freeze over before I subscribe to their app! Such utter contempt for the customer. Besides, it sounds illegal to me.
Subscriptions will not prevail in the long run. Everyone has a budget every month that they can spend on recurringly. You will subscribe/unsubscribe but the pool is limited. Eventually most will stick to Stock apps. As they will cull it so hard that it really needs to be earned like “Drafts, Agenda” who are on top of it. Only those will stay.
On the contrary, people don’t mind paying an upgrade fee for an app even if it’s out of their budget once in a year also they like it, want to support the developer and also will eventually use the apps. I personally feel the one time purchase pool in anyone’s budget is going to be much larger than the subscription pool.
Agreed that the developers need to make a living. No offense, I am a Software developer too. [ But I don’t develop apps on App Store or other platforms ]. But once someone goes out of subscription and stop using your app(s), thats it. You lost revenue from the client totally. Even upgrade revenue is lost. Your only hope is prevailing subscription revenue, which may not last long either unless its a killer app.
Fair enough and that’s why people get really upset at Fantastical as well. But I just don’t see their model as being that hostile to customers. Don’t do the subscription if you don’t need the features. Fantastical is catching hell on the general antipathy towards subscriptions in this thread and I just don’t think that’s fair
It’s not just that (although with 283 posts one could be forgiven for not seeing much else). There’s the terrible communication and the cost for a beefed up stock app.
I’ll make two points:
Someone upthread suggested that Felixibits have decided to focus on power calendar users, for whom the price/feature mix works well. This is supported by the very enthusiastic review on MacStroies by a guy who lives in his calendar.
This is my main objection to subscriptions. I’m a freelance, and my income varies a lot.On a one-time basis, I can buy even expensive apps when income is high, and I still get the use when income is low. Some examples of apps that are critical to me: Devonthink, Tinderbox, Curio, Omniplan, all of which I can continue to use in bad times as well as good.
The subscription model doesn’t allow me to do that. If I hit the buffers and have to cut back, I’m losing any utility (and maybe access to data).
The irony is that a major economic argument for renting rather than buying (anywhere, not just software) is that your rental costs are potentially variable - spend more when you have to, less when you need to, whereas buying (especially if you have to borrow to but) locks you into a fixed cost base. The software sub model turns that on its head - subs become fixed costs, not variable,
If sub costs are very low, maybe it doesn’t matter, but when you start adding up a wide range of subs, the numbers can get pretty large - and the more people come to depend on subscription software, the higher the subs might go.
As people go to stock apps or free apps, their budget frees up to spend more on the non-free apps they still want to use.
And as iOS becomes the primary device for more people, the amount of money they’re willing to pay to solve problems on it increases, so the budget isn’t fixed.
App complexity is also increasing over time, which means more revenue is needed to stay in business (so fewer competitors at the high end.)
As a result, I think budgets for subscriptions and expensive apps are increasing significantly.
Thats a nice analogy. But most will never go back to the apps that went in favor of a subscription model only. May be a new app users will try. But again the original app still lost the money. There are always new apps to try but retaining the old customers for a long time is a thin line.
That’s an interesting question (whether customers will return to a lapsed subscription.) I think it depends on how much of your work the service deletes when you’re not active. I could see someone using Fantastical for three months to manage something like a coaching season, paying ~$15/year. But if they had to re-add all their calendars and groups every year, perhaps not.
Another impediment is how Apple handles subscription trials. I don’t think it’s possible to trial the same subscription IAP twice. So if I paid for a year of Fantastical after a two week trial, let it lapse, and wanted to see if it was right for me again in three years, I think I’d have to pay up front instead of getting to trial again. That discourages re-use. On the other hand, it’s pretty likely I’d know if I needed it again without playing with it.
It’s not that I don’t realise it - it’s that it doesn’t matter to me. As I said, Flexibits may be banking on that segment for whom Fantastical meets a need not met elsewhere. I think that’s probably a small segment, but it might be very lucrative
I’ve reluctantly had to let the new Fantastical go. I really wanted it to work and was happy to pay for it. The calendar sets synced across devices were a fantastic timesaver. I can’t get past the performance issues, though. On iOS, I’m still having trouble with syncing and smooth rendering/scrolling. MacOS is still choking on calendar sync and their background agent is destroying my battery life when it has work to do, which I just can’t have. I realize I might be in a weird situation because I have a few dozen delegated calendars it has to handle, but that’s what I wanted to pay to manage. I’m sure they’ll be working on these issues in the next several months so my next trial will be successful.
Yes! Well said. The early MPU operated as a voice for the users, nowadays it operates more as a voice for the vendors. That in itself is not an issue, but I really struggle with the idea that MPU makes one believe they are still on the users side - IHMO they are not. The “all is well, you lose nothing” message was clearly wrong and I would have expected MPU to point this out.
I outlined that Fantastical is increasing it’s price by +300%. Did any of the usual suspects (podcasters, “influencers”, …) address this? A while ago I also calculated that Adobe LR+PS is getting CHEAPER through subscription, so kudos to Adobe for getting great software out there at a great price. Remember the initial pricing of TextExpander subscription? I don’t recall what the increase was, but it was also several times higher than before. Well, they rowed back on the pricing.
MacSparky wants us to keep cool and not get emotional. Well, at least we are addressing the steep price increases hidden in the “switch to subscription”. By dismissing our opinion as being “emotional”, and failing to even address the steep price increase, he will have to deal with us being more skeptical on recommendations given in the show. BTW: i addressed several times that major FOSS products were never mentioned.
The “cancelled my New Yorker subscription” argument is also not valid IMHO. Or did they try to slip a +300% into their customer base?
Personally, I couldn’t care less about €5 a month. I might say that I am in the same income league as MacSparky (lawyer+side show). But there are users out there that for whom 10 subscriptions is just too much. Now, if we start to count how many ScanSnaps, Hazels, Omnifocus and whatever were bought because being presented during the show as being great tools, it’s a lot of impact. And I think the (long-time) listeners of the show (and often buyers of "Field Guides) deserve a more objective (if not critical) stance of hidden price increases.
I share my fellow posters opinion (voice of customers vs. voice of vendors) and there are already some podcasters I stopped listening to. “New version of X, great new features Y, enter code Z to support the show, blah blah”
I can cancel a magazine subscription and still get a copy at a newsstand if I want one.
My New Yorker subscription isn’t paying for a tool I use in day-to-day work. A better analogy would be DeWalt moving from sales to a rental model. You can’t buy a drill any more, but you can subscribe. Let your sub lapse and your drill no longer works.
I also agree with the general point - none of the reviews I’ve seen deal with the impact of a sub on existing customers, nor has any of them address the dreadful communication of the change, nor the “you’ve been upgraded, isn’t that great” delivery of the change
You guys/gals need to chill. Put your pitchforks down. We may not all agree on things but to say that MPU is intentionally misleading users is a bit much. What do they gain from doing that? Cancel the subscription and move on…
I don’t think anyone has accused MPU hosts of intentionally misleading us. But this thread has made me realize that I have gradually lost interest in the recommendations for products made on the show. I listen for tips, but don’t remember the last time I considered buying something based on an MPU ad.
Having said that, it could be that I have just bought or subscribed to everything I need already. Or maybe it’s just some other shift in my thinking. But I do realize (thanks partly to this thread) that host recommendations carry less weight with me than they used to. Smile Sofware, Fujitsu, and now Fantastical have left me skeptical.
Not that it’s intentional on the part of the hosts, but I am increasingly unsure that they and I share the same priorities regarding when and how to get work done. And that’s okay. It used to be that MPU and I were almost a 100% product/service match. Now we aren’t, and I find Mac Geek Gab’s hosts tend to share my priorities more often. FWIW, no other tech podcast even has my ear anymore, so MPU is way ahead of the curve.
I worry that the growth in app prices that will come from a subscription boom will hurt the ecosystem. (It will certainly limit access to good software for, say, students.) I am surprised that it hasn’t been discussed on the shows I listen to, hence my posts on this subject here. I am suspicious that the lack of discussion comes from hosts unintentionally avoiding the topic because they can afford it (survivorship bias) and because these products fund the shows.
I see no malice here. A lack of malice isn’t going to prevent me from commenting on the pattern, though, because I think the issue is going to become a fundamental driver of app ecosystem development, and I want to understand that. David, Stephen, and co. are some of the best people to help us figure out what it all might mean.
I basically wont do any subscription. It is similar to Newspapers who go behind pay walls. The vendor only needs a fraction of the previous users to maintain or exceed profit. A lot of newspapers in the UK have gone behind paywalls. The online readerships has plummeted to perhaps 5% of the previous readership but because of recurring income the Newspaper makes money. I understand they are making actually much more based on much less “subscribers”
Similar in the app economy. The developers chases business or high spending subscribers and basically ditches of ordinary users. What they often fail to factor in is that those remaining users are like gold and loosing them is like loosing 30 previous users. Therefore the business model is inherently unstable. I would not expect any many developers who have gone subscription to survive long term.
I think people have valid points and I think the commentary here has been pretty respectful with people making their points either way. It highlights the depth of feeling over this issue.
With the greatest respect telling people “to chill” when they are making a valid point is not particularly helpful.
