#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.
As someone coming from ApolloApp, the prices are fine.
Apollo didn’t require a subscription for the jump button. Sure, you had to pay to post, but that was a one-time fee of like $5, which was reasonable.
Apollo Ultra Lifetime was $A38.99 when I bought it 4 years ago. When was it $US5?
Ultra wasn’t necessary to post, filter, or use the jump button.
You can post without paying, and if you use Lemmy enough that you need to filter or find the lack of jump button annoying… $3/month isn’t unreasonable. If the best Lemmy client on iOS isn’t worth that to you, there are other options.
That’s debatable.
No, it isn’t. Subscriptions suck.
Cool. Don’t subscribe and use Avelon without the pro features, or use something else.
I think that’s exactly what people will do.
Thing is, Apollo was a rather proven app that had been developed for years. On a site that had been growing for even more years. Thus we could pay knowingly that we’d very likely get a couple of years out of it.
We have no idea if Lemmy will be a viable option in a year or two (basically all Reddit clones have failed, so it’s likely this will as well). And even if it succeed, we have no clue the developer will stay at it and develop the app. Looking at other Lemmy apps, most have stopped developing, basically just pushing out simple fixes.
This unfortunately has to be considered when it comes to app price. I’m not ready to pay as much for this, as I did for Reddit. I miiggt be down the line, but not yet.
Right. But we have the monthly pro sub at $3. I’ve paid this much to this dev after liking the app enough during test phase.
If lemmy and this app sticks around, I’ll keep paying $3 for their damn coffee.
Yeah, that’s fair enough.
The platform is tiny and has hardly any users. This is when apps need more financial support, not less.
I know, right? The lifetime subscription for Apollo Ultra was something like $50.
And included features that clearly cost the developer money to support on an ongoing basis. And came several years into the project after the dev had established a huge userbase and healthy relationship of users that trusted him to deliver on quality and value, and wanted to support him financially.
No one is forcing you to pay the lifetime fee.
Of course not! Nobody is forcing me to use this app at all - I can just go back to Voyager or Thunder if I want. I made this post because I disagree with the pricing setup but really would like to see the dev succeed because they’ve done a great job. If my opinion isn’t shared you’re free to ignore it.