[Fogest]

What? I think it makes much more sense for this to be a one-time payment. I am actually surprised to see anybody advocating for a subscription over a one-time payment.

Plenty of products I have used have had one time payments and it has worked out fine. Sometimes in the future they switch to a subscription model or add other paid features but that usually doesn't happen until they start to have investors and have pressure to generate more revenue.

Pocketcasts is an example of this. They had a one time fee for each platform you bought their product on. Eventually many years later they switched to a subscription model but allowed people who had the original one-time fee to keep it forever which was nice.

[razemio]

For me it depends on the service. Since this (should) store data and use a backend, I am very skeptical about having the option for a lifetime license. Most of these services shutdown sooner or later and your "lifetime license" is gone. OP already explained that it uses Google sync to store the data across devices which is a totally different problem, there are very strict storage size limitations.

[johanznsdn]

In my opinion, it’s a pain to have recurring cost for small extensions/apps like Stringmark. But as @razemio said, it’s (most of the time) necessary when the service uses a backend.

As I said, I want to avoid recurring cost and that’s why I decided to use chrome.storage. Also, as another comment and @razemio said here, the sync storage of Chrome is limited in size: ~100kb which is roughly 370 highlights in Stringmark because the text you are able to save is limited in size (~120 characters). Also, the local storage of Chrome is unlimited in size.

It means that you can have ~370 highlights that are synced through your devices. Honestly, I think that it is enough but you guys are right I should precise it in my website, I’ll update it ASAP!

@bruth that is the reason why the product will never go away since I don’t have backend costs!

In order to attenuate this sync storage size limitation I plan to add these features: Limit the number of highlights per list; Let the users decide to save a specific list locally or using chrome sync; Export lists by email and/or in various file format in order to free up space; Import lists easily

The other solution is to add another premium plan with a recurring cost and where I would use a database backend for these users so that they can really have ‘unlimited’ highlights synced.

Tell me what you guys think about these solutions!

[bruth]

I appreciate the response! My first thought and assumption was indeed there are backend costs given the size limitations you mentioned. But I suppose if that is sufficient for some folks, then they can benefit from that without requiring a subscription.

[Fogest]

I can understand your point a bit more about wondering about one-time fee versus subscription as you were operating under the assumptions of recurring server costs.

I was aware they were using Chrome.Sync and that it did not impose a cost so that changed things in my head.