[moritonal]

This is a funny case where I want there to be a business modal. The app probably is great, but without some kind of financial backing part of me just expects this will atrophy, or be sold to an ad company in a couple years. I can't think of a successful open-source app that is free, given the amount of work required to sustain an app on Android.

[StreamSphere]

I agree with you that finding a business model is difficult, but what motivates me at the moment to improve and maintain it is that I myself am a regular user of this application. I'm still thinking about it and that's why I'm still waiting to make the code open-source. Subscription is an idea, but I wonder what kind of features people would be willing to pay extra for? I don't want advertising, I think it degrades the application too much, or else voluntary advertising that users activate and in return receive money (like Brave does).

[gnicholas]

It sure is burdensome to maintain an app that constantly needs updating. But isn't this an appt that could be updated infrequently, once the basic functionality is in place? That could be sustained by a low-cost subscription ($10/yr?), or possibly even a one-time charge of $20 or something.

[StreamSphere]

Indeed, just maintaining it isn't very complicated, but finding features for which users would be willing to pay $10/month seems complicated to me, as the play store is very competitive.

[moritonal]

I should expand. Let's take two worlds, one where you charge nothing, and one where you do.

In the first, I get an app, but you get nothing but a pat on the back. I enjoy something, you don't, eventually you get resentful seeing thousands of people using what you built so you decide to make money off it. At this point, it doesn't really matter how you do it, either with ads, subscription, or secret dark-web stuff, you'll change the game and your users will not trust you as an author and just uninstall the app.

In the other, you charge a one-off £4.99. This is really quite small, but I now know the author gets some value from me and we've entered into a understandable contract. You are in the same place as before, but now ~$4.99 richer, which is nice. In the future, you make a bit of money and want to make more money. So you can now raise the price which will affect only future users. You can now also produce other apps, which I'll also look at those and think, well, the first app was good, I'll try those because I trust the author.