Q: Why a subscription? A: Because lifetime pricing is not sustainable. We know there are similar apps with lifetime pricing out there, but it doesn't work for long-running business. The sustainability is crucial especially for note-taking apps because you will store a lot of notes in them day by day.
Q: $5 per month is too expensive. A: It is for professional use, not targeted to the mass of people. We believe it would improve your productivity worth more than $5. This is the price we would pay as a user.
Q: If lowered the pricing, you would get more customers. A: We would like to provide good, quick and warm user support. If we got a lot of users, we won't be able to support them all.
Some people prefer to pay their services directly. I would rather pay someone to host my notes, and to build/maintain the infrastructure to host my notes, than hope Google keeps finding it profitable to give me costless storage.
I'm in the camp these days of I would much rather pay someone who does one or a few related things well and charges me for them, I'm already happy with my note taking setup, but 5$ a month doesn't seem too bad for a service I actively use and enjoy.
But it's certainly not $5/mo. Something in the ballpark of $10/yr would be better.
I can buy a private VPS for $20/yr with 30gb of storage and slap sync thing on it, and find an existing markdown editor if I wanted.
That could easily pay for itself with 4 users. And that's just scraping the bottom of the barrel of low cost servers.
Yes not everyone can set up a server, and yes this takes the burden off spending time doing that. But your average software engineer with some server knowledge could set this up in a day.
I would want to add time for a bit of stress testing, backups, etc.
If I'm building something that needs to "stand the test of time", I find a day lets me relax, meander, think it through, and not get stressed over not moving fast enough.
I've also learned from experience to always over estimate these things ;)
Q: Why a subscription? A: Because lifetime pricing is not sustainable. We know there are similar apps with lifetime pricing out there, but it doesn't work for long-running business. The sustainability is crucial especially for note-taking apps because you will store a lot of notes in them day by day.
Q: $5 per month is too expensive. A: It is for professional use, not targeted to the mass of people. We believe it would improve your productivity worth more than $5. This is the price we would pay as a user.
Q: If lowered the pricing, you would get more customers. A: We would like to provide good, quick and warm user support. If we got a lot of users, we won't be able to support them all.