[acover]

Can a monthly subscription support a collection of open source apps?

Netflix style. Maybe give donors the option to vote on features. I am interested in testing if there is a market for this. I've started writing clone android apps without the ads and freemium.

[ken]

It might depend what you mean by "support", but in general, I don't see it.

For a non-open-source example, there's https://setapp.com/, but nobody has been able to explain to me how the economics are supposed to work. They're bundling thousands of dollars of software for $10/month, and then paying creators based on usage. Instead of $50 (a common price for these apps), once, developers will get a fraction of $10, repeatedly.

You'll break even if someone uses your app 1/2 of the time (of the Set) for about a year. If they use more apps or don't subscribe that long (which are pretty much the main reasons to use this), you're worse off.

Bundling, open-source, subscriptions -- at the end of the day, users simply don't want to (directly) pay what it costs to create software.

[acover]

I think it is about lowering the price to increase users. The user experience is also improved as you just install and go.

Thanks for the info.

[fspacef]

I think it can, and to your second point, Steam had a great system with Greenlight which let potential customers vote on what their games would look like before hand

[scribu]

> Can a monthly subscription support a collection of open source apps?

Kind of. In the WordPress world there are several companies that ask you to pay $50/year to get access to their entire portfolio of themes and plugins.

In theory, you’re only paying for support, since the code has to be licensed under the GPL.

[newsat13]

For web apps, there is https://cloudron.io. Pay 15 per month to install apps and get automatic updates.