#EDITED TO ADD CONTEXT:
The developer has responded quite a bit in the comments here, and has made adjustments to the free tier feature set based on my and others’ feedback. See more info in this update thread: https://lemm.ee/post/12353243
If you’re reading this post after update 1.0.7 I suggest you skim these comments and that update thread before forming an opinion.
#ORIGINAL POST:
I like this app a lot, I can tell there’s been a ton of love and hard work put into it.
The strategy for monetization leaves a bit of a sour taste though.
For one, nobody wants another subscription - and $30 lifetime for a brand new app is a huge asking price compared to, say, Apollo, which was $5 or so (with a subscription tier for things that actually made sense to buy due to recurring cost).
But this app is paywalling basic stuff like a comment jump button (everyone else has this for free), content filtering, video scrubbing, and various other things that have no recurring cost to the developer.
My recommendation, take it or leave it, if you want my money make it a reasonable one time purchase for things that don’t cost you money (under $10 imo, $5 would’ve been an easy sell).
If you want to justify a subscription model you are gonna need to build features that justify it - push notifications, stuff like that.
I’m paying $2/month for bean, solely for push notifications. Though I’m using Avelon. That’s one of the most important features for me, who wants to have interactions with people.
But also, what ever happened to on-device polling for notifications, are iOS apps incapable of that?
They are capable of that. But it is resource intensive (think battery) to have the app running in the background polling lemmy every x minutes.
It wasn’t great for battery life back in the day, like 10 years ago, but I’d imagine with modern processors, it’d be quite feasible to do without absolutely ruining battery life.