As anyone who has read my posts in this forum will know, I’m a minimalist when it comes to subscriptions. There are only a few applications I consider worth the continuing cost. 1 Password is at the top of the list.
I just found another. Ulysses. I had used Ulysses before but moved to other writing platforms for a while to avoid the subscription cost. But, I decided to give Ulysses another try after the most recent update. I’m glad I did.
There are several new features but for my money, the new grammar-style checker makes the subscription worthwhile. It is excellent. It currently only works on the Mac but I understand that the feature is in the pipeline for iPadOS as well.
I haven’t tried that feature yet, but I recently moved back to Ulysses for other reasons. It’s a great app.
I get it as part of Setapp (their deal for users in education is great for those who only need it for one Mac and don’t mind paying yearly rather than monthly).
I didn’t realize Setapp did education discounts. Their discounted price is just a little over what I am paying for the Ulysses subscription alone. I need to think about switching to a Setapp education plan.
I have not been using Setapp because I don’t want to be tempted to start embedding a bunch of subscription applications into my workflow. I realize that for the few subscriptions I have that I’m paying a bit more but I suppose I’m buying “freedom.”
That’s good to hear. I have used it only once so far but I stopped my Grammarly subscription because it’s so expensive. I then started using Pro Writing Aid which was on Setapp (which is why I could move off of Grammarly) but that seems to have been pulled recently from Setapp.
That’s my main concern about Setapp - that several useful apps found it insufficiently profitable and dropped out. If I didn’t already own many Setapp apps I’d be a subscriber now, but if I knew Ulysses would remain as part of Setapp for the next few years I’d subscribe because it would pay for itself.
But I continue to pay for my Ulysses subscription largely because I’m grandfathered in at a lower $29.99/yr rate briefly for owners of the app when it switched to subscription, and if I switched to Setapp and Ulysses got pulled from it I’d end up needing to re-up in the Mac App Store at the normal $50/yr rate.
Still Setapp pays for itself for most people - I just noticed that another app I own, AdGuard, was just added a couple of weeks ago.
And I don’t think Ulysses will necessarily drop out (though it’s not guaranteed) - it seems to be conspicuously promoted by Setapp and I suspect it garners a decent percentage of the service’s swelling revenue pool.
I’m in the same boat, I already own LOTS of apps in Setapp but then decided that if I wanted to save money in the long run, I should hop on board sooner than later. I’ll probably lose money compared to the licenses I already own the first few years, but it should get better as time goes on. I have already found lots of uses and services I hadn’t considered first; and of course, there is Ulysses. AFAIK, your grandfathered rate will not go away even if you cancel.
I’m glad to see those correction tools integrated to the Ulysses app, but for French, it doesn’t hold a candle to the most powerful tools like Antidote, unfortunately. So I don’t see myself using it much.
I’m a Setapp evangelist (self proclaimed) but I’ve been using it for 3 years and it’s been well worth it for the high quality apps like Ulysses and Mindnode.
In the 3 years i have only seen 1 maybe 2 apps removed. Pro writing aid is the one app.
Ha. MWD and Journey are both pretty decent journaling apps. Now Setapp users are left only with Diarly (another good app) but it’s a real pain to get dated/tagged journals with attachments to smoothly migrate to a competing app. (I know that if I ever leave Day One the easiest thing to do is simply output everything to PDFs and start from scratch in the new app.)
And you never know how much longer Diarly will remain in the program either.
To be fair, some of these apps are not actively developed anymore (Switchem comes to mind), which warrants the removal. (Tried going on the developer’s website and… it told me my Flash Player was obsolete. )
i’ve moved to Ulysses for journaling. i’d used it previously for that purpose so it was simple to move back. Because I already have an Ulysses subscription I don’t need to pay for the subscription for Day One.
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