[prepend]

This is desktop software, why is there a monthly fee?

I occasionally want to send “nice looking” emails but get asked by lots of comms people about it. Recommending a monthly fee service is a non starter, but buying some software is pretty easy to decide. “Should I pay once? Or pay forever?”

Is there anything in the functionality that takes advantage of SaaS? Other than updates and whatnot?

Of course the price/value computation is up to y’all and your customers but office365 only costs $10/month. Seems tough to value authoring email as higher value than cloud productivity suite.

It would be nice if there was a way people like me could use since our competition is an outlook template but still scale up to people who may do this all the time and be willing to pay $20+/month.

[jacurtis]

Like anything, this is a matter of perspective. The right team would find value in it. I used to manage a marketing team at a large e-commerce company and we spent tens of thousands a month in email design fees. We rotated through a group of freelancers to design emails. Even an email that was simply following one of our "tried-and-true" templates still would cost us $400 - $500 or so for a single email. That is just updating message content on an existing email.

So when you think about this for $20 a month. It's a no-brainer in that scenario. We already have on-staff copywriters, marketing devs, social media managers, and so on that could have taken over some of the emails using this.

I might still out-source major custom email designs for huge promotions and stuff. But we could easily handle smaller flash sale and other simple emails internally, using a tool like this. So $20 could be justified even if it saved us from outsourcing one email a month.

For the average blogger, $20 a month could still be worth it if it they have a decent email lists and are converting profit from that list.

If you are just running a personal blog and want to send out fun emails to your list of 100 people, it probably isn't worth it. But most ESPs also have WYSIWYG designers that would be "good enough". If you are somewhat-technical then a tool like MJML would probably offer even more than the above tool offers, while being free.

I don't think Microsoft365 is a fair comparison. One is a mass-market product, the other is a niche indie product. $20/mo isn't for everyone. But at $240 a year, that's less than the cost of out-sourcing a single email every year. So if you can make 1 email a month from it, then you are clearly coming out far ahead.

[pc86]

$500 to update the content of an email is downright robbery. Unless it's not actually "updating content" but is changing what side the images are on, tweaks layouts, adding a graph that wasn't there before, etc.

[cosmie]

I've executed my own email programs for small projects before, and had the same reaction when I started working at an agency and saw how much we charged for that type of work.

Interestingly enough, it's actually not as padded as it seems. While the update itself may only take an hour or so of time, there's a few hours of communication/procedural overhead baked into these things:

- Receive a project brief - Align with client on the contents of the brief - Provide estimate and get sign off (potentially before the brief, if this is repeat work for an existing client) - Do actual work - Client review of work - Revisions. Usually incredibly minor nitpicking, but virtually always requested. - Final client review and acceptance

Whether the work takes 30 minutes or 30 hours, that procedural overhead is standard in BigCo marketing departments, and creates a price floor of about $500 since even the tiniest requests end up taking several hours of total effort (communication/procedural stuff + actual work). If you're engaging an agency instead of a freelancer, that floor jumps to about $1,000 as the entire process gets facilitated by an account manager + PM, so you have to add in a couple hours of their time as well for the procedural/communication overhead.

---

Not to say that's a particularly efficient process, or that it should be that way. But figured I'd share that perspective, since I initially reacted the same way you did when I saw those estimates for stuff that should have taken a trivially small amount of time to accomplish.

[jacurtis]

$500 would include a few images or something. But it definitely wasn't a crazy amount of work. Swapping out text and messaging probably came in closer to the $300 mark. We mostly were paying for expertise of email developers that we trusted.

We rotated through a team of freelancers that specialize in email development. All the freelancers we worked with did email development full-time. They didn't make websites, they didn't do SEO, they just knew email inside and out. They specialize in email, and we paid a premium to them for that expertise. This is important because you want the emails to work on all platforms. So while it might seem easy to just swap out text, it can sometimes cause layout issues (email is very finicky) and we didn't want any of those glitches negatively effecting the brand. The emails generated tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue per email on average. So no one batted an eye at $500 to make the email. You are paying for the right person to do the job, not micro-analyzing their hours.

We made a lot more money from those emails than the freelancers made by making the emails. So you also want to make them happy, because good email developers are a dying breed. They are hard to find.

I should say that part of process was testing the emails. We ran email device and litmus tests for every email that had to be done as part of the development process. So when I got the finished email from the freelancer, they always submitted a link to a full litmus test result page which showed the email presented in about 30 different device, resolution, and email client combinations. That's what was required for me to approve the email and for the freelancer to get paid.

So the freelancer wasn't just swapping text, but testing the email for us and making any fixes so it worked consistently. They would also add variables for things like %%firstname%% or whatever. We would also run "conditional emails" several times a month that were customized to a customer's location (for example New York customers got a different email than California customers) or some other segment. But conditional emails were more advanced and would run closer to the $2,000 mark. Again, conditional emails out-performed blast emails (uncustomized), so they would consistently bring in 6-figure revenues on those days from the email, so no one thought twice about the $2,000 bill from the email developer.

[D13Fd]

Honestly I have no problem with monthly fees for software you use every day, or frequently, for professional use. I'm fine paying monthly for things like Adobe Creative Cloud, Microsoft Office, and 1Password. Those are all desktop apps, albeit with a cloud component that I mostly don't use. I easily get my money back 10x over (likely more) based on the income I generate with the apps.

The pricing here seems targeted at media folks who do e-mail creation for a living. Assuming it works well, it's likely a bargain for them as well. But I have to imagine that market is rather small.

[munk-a]

I would say this - 1Password has taken a real dive in quality. If the software was a single upfront cost I'd just shrug it off but the fact that my company is paying to sustain development that's actually ruined the UX for me is quite frustrating.

(Hey 1Password, don't have your "App" open as a little window in the corner of the screen for password entry that instantly closes as soon as I alt-tab anywhere. It takes too many ms for you to render a blank window with a text box to keep my focus on you so I'm going to context switch while you're loading all the libraries you need to support your text box entry form)

[bitlevel]

Consider Bitwarden as a replacement.

[bdathi]

Adobe is shitty.

I only get lightroom in a abo which would be fine if the minimum time would be a month but it is a year.

Best if both worlds for Adobe non for the consumer

[krsdcbl]

If you work with a broad range of their softwares (ps/ai/ae/premiere power user here) the subscription system is awesome. Ends up being cheaper than buying it used to be & much less upfront costs for the business.

They could do better on many aspects but it's nowhere near "shitty".

[omnimus]

Hello Adobe marketing team.

Adobe replaced 600usd a piece software for 80usd subscription. The reason for it was because most people use like two pieces and upgraded once in 5+ years. Why? Because there are essentially no new features that have any value. Especially in print industry its basically ransom thanks to adobe's complete monopoly.

Btw it's not even monthly subscription. You can only get 1year contract that you pay of month by month. If you decide stop after two months you gotta pay rest of that 960usd. Lovely.

[GordonS]

I agree with this - for desktop software, a perpetual license and optional annual maintenance is the expected model. Moreover, this seems to me to be a tool you'd use once to create a template, and then your content gets slotted dynamically into.

As some pricing feedback, I'd personally prefer to pay something like $75-85 as a one-time fee, with $20-30 optional maintenance to get access to the latest version and continued support - $20/month is way too high; yes, creating nice emails that work across clients is a PITA, but there are some very popular OSS templates out there that work great.

[Cthulhu_]

Because if it's a one time fee, there will be no recurring income and the developer will have to stop development.

The alternative is to do what older desktop apps did: release a new paid version / upgrade, often with a load of fluff added or a redesign to try and sell that an upgrade is worthwhile to the customers.

[incrudible]

> Because if it's a one time fee, there will be no recurring income and the developer will have to stop development.

Here's a crazy idea in 2020: That's totally fine. There's a point where adding more features becomes a negative ROI. That's when you know you need to move on solving a different problem. That's the alternative.

[ncallaway]

The problem in 2021 (and 2022 and 2023, etc) is that the app will break over time.

OS updates will break a small piece of functionality. Critical security vulnerabilities will be discovered that need to be patched. If the developer abandons the application because it isn't earning new revenue, the application will eventually degrade over time.

I don't have a good answer here, because I also don't like the SASS billing model for desktop software, but I recognize that a "one-time purchase" rarely actually terminates the relationship at the time of purchase. People expect ongoing bug-fixes, and security patches even for desktop software.

[incrudible]

In my experience, Windows applications very rarely break, Mac OS apps only break with major changes, and Linux isn't worth supporting in the first place. Setting aside a little bit of money to keep the app working and patched is possible. Charging for the occasional update to make that happen is acceptable too, especially with Apple users.

[jasonfarnon]

You think those issues began in 2021?

[ncallaway]

No

[prepend]

> Because if it's a one time fee, there will be no recurring income and the developer will have to stop development.

I’ve bought software for decades and reality disagrees with you.

There’s software that I’ve bought as a one time fee years ago that still releases small maintenance patches. I don’t want to run your business for you, but there’s typically multiple products and the work developing new paid major updates or other products allows for some small amount of maintenance.

A really niche product called Moneydance has done this well, I think, and I’ve used them since 2009. I think I’ve paid $50-100 once or twice but would never pay a monthly fee. It’s software that runs on my desktop.

It’s certainly possible, but some companies think they make more money with monthly subs. And they might.

[GordonS]

> Because if it's a one time fee, there will be no recurring income

That doesn't have to be true - a lot of desktop software uses a perpetual license plus optional annual maintenance. It's pretty much the standard for non-SaaS apps.

[passivate]

Agreed, selling non-subscription desktop software in a retail segment is crazy crazy hard. Not to mention that people want everything for free these days, so even SaaS is super-hard for desktop s/w.

I used to be pretty anti-sub, but I just don't see any alternative and I do want talented devs to continue working on their passions.

[mschuster91]

> This is desktop software, why is there a monthly fee?

Because keeping track with the boatload of variety that email clients have and their updates is hard. You have MS Outlook in three different flavors (Windows, OS X, Android), Thunderbird on three major platforms (Windows, OS X, Linux), the various Android clients (Gmail, Samsung's custom thing they IIRC ditched for Googlemail somewhere over the last years, the custom clients by various mail providers like web.de and other), Apple Mail, iOS Mail on iPhones of various sizes and iPads of various sizes, the web clients every major provider has, I have no idea what Lotus Notes and Blackberry are offering these days... and then you have the hardcore nerds and privacy activists who have html mail turned off entirely and use commandline clients.

And literally every single client variation has a different subset of features they support or don't support, with the addition of spam filters and virus scanners randomly breaking things by injecting HTML somewhere in the message.

And then you also want your email to be forward-able without Outlook taking half a minute to think about each character.

Email is hard, cross-platform emailing is a nightmare and keeping up with all the stuff I just mentioned takes a massive amount of time to develop and to regression-test.

(In case it isn't obvious, I occasionally have to dabble in this area, and I hate it with a passion)

[alpaca128]

I don't get it either. I mean yes, I understand that making people pay regularly is nicer for daily users(sometimes) and the developer. But it completely cuts out the users who are willing to pay for products that go beyond "demo version" or "Spyware As A Service" but don't get paid for using it.

In many cases it would be absolutely possible to offer a middle tier that lacks some advanced features but also doesn't greet me with a "Get the Pro version now!"..."Sure you don't want to pay cloud storage for the 2 files you create per month?"

Or offer the full product for a one-year subscription but limited to one year of updates unless I pay again.

[prepend]

> cloud storage for the 2 files you create per month?

This is particularly frustrating because I already pay for cloud storage and don’t want another cloud store. I liked the old days when companies would layer on top of Dropbox instead of trying to sell me a “value not upsell.”

I liked the old ynab where my desktop and phone pushed files to Dropbox. When they switched to saas with their own storage they sucked so much I stopped using them.

[ihuman]

It free for non-commercial use, so it only costs money if the emails will make you money. https://mailstudio.app/pricing

[prepend]

I would use it in a commercial setting, but the emails don’t make me money. So I don’t think this license is ok for me.

Specifically, every once in a while I send out product updates to groups of people inside my org.

[gregd]

This is directly from Martin (developer of Bootstrap Studio and Mail Studio):

"You will notice that Mail Studio has a different pricing model - it is subscription based. This is necessary because the app depends on a lot of cloud features like cloud saves, sending email previews and syncing with email providers, which are not possible to provide with a one-time purchase."

I bought and paid for a lifetime license to Bootstrap Studio and I absolutely LOVE that product.

[PaulHoule]

It works for Adobe.

[onion2k]

It's what Adobe does. That's not the same as saying it works for them, and it definitely isn't the same as saying it's the optimal pricing model for them. You have no way of knowing whether they'd make more or less money by moving to a different strategy. Copying what someone does without understanding how it works for them or why they did it is literally the definition of cargo cult behaviour. That's usually a bad idea.

[nsp]

Adobe made a very successful switch from one off payments to SaaS for their creative suite, there's a pretty clear before and after to look at. https://producthabits.com/adobe-95-billion-saas-company/

[munk-a]

Photoshop is a legendary piece of software when it comes to things of a visual nature, so legendary that they essentially had an annual subscription to use it since there were frequent new releases that a lot of folks felt compelled to grab to keep with the curb.

I think they tend to get a little too much credit for the subscription switch since their users were already being abused in such a manner. Office to Office360 is the one that's always astounded me. Very few people upgraded office outside of getting a new machine and most businesses tried to pin all of their users to a particular version of office (it was more important that everyone used the same version rather than everyone using the latest version) and, additionally, people weren't actually used to "paying" for microsoft stuff with actual cash. Generally the software you got from MSFT was bundled into the system when you purchased it, and while your money certainly ended up in MSFT's pockets you didn't directly interact with them.

[prepend]

I use my pirated copy of photoshop5 (I think) from 20 years ago for my infrequent uses of photoshop. But I have friends who use photoshop every day and pay their monthly fee, and are pretty happy.