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by bossyTeacher 959 days ago
Expecting not to have a subscription for a mobile app in 2023 is not realistic.

For an app to be available on the app store, even if no features are added, needs to be regularly maintained. That maintenance has a cost. If you want to have an application with no maintenance, just side load an app file and be done with it.
3 comments
pantulis 959 days ago
What are the regular maintenance costs that are specific to a mobile application? And more importanty, how does the Streaks app from Crunchy Bagel manage to do without subscriptions?

My point being that the recurring cost of a developer license can easily be diluted on one-time payments.

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bossyTeacher 959 days ago
Dependency updates, security updates, bug fixes. Yes, if your userbase is in the hundreds of thousands, the one time payments will cover a developer's lifetime of maintenance work. But if you are a random HN dev with a 20-user app, then the 100 dollars, you will not cover a 10 year period of maintenance work, unless your app has zero dependencies and doesn't use any web apis.

Crunchy Bagel is not a random HN dev making a random app. I highly dislike this attitude people have with expecting free work when it comes to software. If the app was sold as it was with 0 additional work of any kind, I bet you wouldn't buy it. You expect free work. But if I ask you to come clean my toilet for free, you wouldn't do it. This is why we have ads on the web nowadays.

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master-lincoln 959 days ago
But the dev here claimed they created this tool for themselves. If that is the case, why not let everyone else use it for free too if you maintain it for yourself anyway.

I wouldn't answer questions or read feedback then as a dev because it's not a product really, but why not go that route?

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aniforprez 959 days ago
This is very privileged. Opening an app up for public use is exponentially more effort and the developer deserves to be compensated for it
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master-lincoln 957 days ago
How is it exponentially more effort if you don't care about what the public has to say about the app? Where is the privilege in my argument?
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bossyTeacher 958 days ago
It's the difference between having an internal library at work and having an open source library in github. If you are using it for yourself, backwards compatibility, and breaking things are not necessarily issues
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master-lincoln 957 days ago
> If you are using it for yourself, backwards compatibility, and breaking things are not necessarily issues

It's also not an issue if you publish it. External users might complain, but that is their problem if you make it clear this is a personal project

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pantulis 958 days ago
> You expect free work.

Now that's a stretch.

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j1elo 959 days ago
Try to look a bit further than the simplest things. An app can be provided for free if the app itself is not meant to make money but as a funnel to bring more customers to other related business.

For a design company, just getting the exposure and being talked about [1] (i.e. nothing tangible) can already be worth enough giving some work for free.

So you might work for free giving away muffins on the street if that might make people want to come to your cake shop and buy some other stuff. But it's silly to think that you should give your pastries away if you don't have other products and pastries is the only thing you do for a living.

Crunchy Bagel also have HealthFace, Hexiled, and Streaks Workout apps, all monetized. See the pattern? IMO, Streaks is just their way to show off their good design and coding practices.

[1]: https://www.triplezero.com.au/ designers of Streaks, winners of Apple Design Awards 2016.

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bossyTeacher 958 days ago
Maybe you should look further into things.

"An app can be provided for free if the app itself is not meant to make money but as a funnel to bring more customers to other related business."

You are assuming that a random HN dev has a business at all which is not necessarily the case. App <> business

"So you might work for free giving away muffins on the street if that might make people want to come to your cake shop and buy some other stuff. But it's silly to think that you should give your pastries away if you don't have other products and pastries is the only thing you do for a living." You are just agreeing with me here. Making stuff available for others is more work and software is not different unless you just drop the zipped app file in mediafire and leave people to do with it whatever they want.

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j1elo 958 days ago
Ok deal, but I'm not sure what was to discuss then...

Patterns, the app discussed here, is definitely a business. They are asking for a subscription fee because presumably they want to make a living out of it. Also, it is the only product they have to offer (it doesn't look to be the case of being a free goodie intended to bring customers to other business the author might have).

Thus, my point was that it is not reasonable to compare it to a free offering like "how does the Streaks app from Crunchy Bagel manage to do without subscriptions". They are just whole different categories of products (or maybe to nitpick, the intentions and financials behind them are totally different).

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mirzap 959 days ago
A lifetime with 1 year of free updates is an optimal model. You buy a "support package" of one more year of free updates to receive future updates. You can continue to use it for a lifetime, but don't expect lifetime-long updates for a fixed price.

However, devs must build an app with feature flags in mind from the start (or at least from the point of introducing a lifetime plan).

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sneak 958 days ago
Why does the App Store support pay-once apps, then, if it is not realistic?

The majority of small developer apps are not subscriptionware. Many developers have for decades successfully run a business without recurring perpetual income from completed sales.

Resist the drip feed demand that developers be paid in perpetuity for work they did once. Not all software is SaaS.

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