[adamwiggins]

Well, I would hope that purchase of a product or service is a mutually beneficial business transaction. So in this sense how the product is priced is the problem/concern of both parties.

Quoting from https://museapp.com/memos/2021-06-pricing/ :

> You might be used to software from growth-at-all-costs startups: free at the start (funded by venture capital) but eventually your attention in monetized with ads, your personal data is monetized by selling to third parties, or the personal product takes a back seat to the “enterprise” product.

> Muse is following a different path: personal software, made for you and your unique tastes and needs, and funded by direct payment from you and other members. Because our funding comes from you, the customer, rather than investors with their sights on mass-market adoption, our incentives are better aligned with yours.

> By paying for Muse, you help us stay niche, opinionated, and focused on your needs over the long term.

I think it's worth thinking about where the products and services we consume in our daily lives come from and how the incentive models work. And that definitely includes software.

[mantas]

What if mine and Muse’a opinions diverge along the way? Then I can’t keep the old version I like. But I either loose access to what I don’t like anymore. Or pay what Forcwhat I don’t like and hope in future I’ll like it again.

[adamwiggins]

Yes, good point. I'd certainly like software where it's easy to run any version you like.

In the Apple ecosystem that's tough because they roll out breaking API changes in the OS every few years. So if you buy a new computer, upgrade your OS, or otherwise try to keep up with a changing world your software will stop working.

My thoughts on software longevity and why it's a problem for our industry: https://museapp.com/podcast/49-software-longevity/

[mantas]

I’m ex-iOS dev so maybe things changed in the last couple years. But Apple was pretty good at keeping old APIs around for a loooong time. Deprecated apis would stay around for quite a while.

New architectures do break old apps once in a while. But even then apps do survive several years without touching. And if someone wants to keep using apps after that… IMO it’s fair to put some burden on user - they have to stick to old OS too.

But if app is subscription, then Even sticking to old OS won’t help…

[pvg]

These are perfectly good arguments, I think somewhat undermined by the usage rather than feature based price segmentation. It ends up feeling artificially nickel-and-dimey, in a local-sync tool.

[adamwiggins]

Yeah, pricing is really tough. I've experimented heavily with feature-based pricing, most notably in Heroku, and people absolutely hate it. When you put your best features behind a paid upgrade, you're preventing people from evaluating the most important part of the software.

Free trials are another solution, but time also ends up being a bit arbitrary.

In the end, storage is a good metric that doesn't require complex feature gates. We borrowed this model from Notion: they had 1000 blocks free in their original product, but once they started getting those sweet enterprise dollars they were able to give more away for free to individuals. Dropbox and GitHub are two other examples.

Our service still does a lot of work proportionate to data size, so in that sense it's still SaaS and has the same cost dynamics at work. But in the end the real cost of software is engineering salaries, not infrastructure, so that whole discussion is sort of a red herring.

Obviously it remains a problem to solve that our industry can't find a pricing model that is both (1) healthy and sustainable for the business and (2) people find amenable.

[pvg]

It's definitely tough and you're right, it's also easy to make feature-based segmentation infuriating. But (as you know and as this thread amply demonstrates) for pro-sumerish apps, it's as much (if not more) about vibes as it is about price. The 'we're simple software artisans asking an honest price for a quality product' vibe just clashes with the nickel-and-dime vibe of that pricing structure, that's all.

[adamwiggins]

Yeah, truly an unsolved problem. Obsidian seems to have found a good path--free for the core product, $10/mo (standard price for prosumer apps) for sync.

But we felt like sync is a core feature and we really want to give it away for free so that people can experience it. Time will tell if that was a good call.

[ptato]

Do most people have multiple devices they're going to use this in? I only have one iPad, I don't need sync!

[adamwiggins]

A core concept is the idea that creative professionals live a multi-device life. Desktop computer for focused productivity, tablet for relaxed reading and thinking, phone for capture and lookup on the go.

https://museapp.com/how/ipadmac/