Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tommasongr 795 days ago
Hi there! Thanks for your opinion. We get that for some people the current price tag is too high. Honestly we think that going forward with everything we planned to add will be justified. However, we admit that maybe is hard to ask people to pay upfront for some benefit they will get in the future.

You don't have to pay an annual subscription for updates. If you decide to not do that you can continue using the app. Was it clear in the copy or not? Maybe we can make it even clearer. Thanks

1 comments

I think the issue might be that in this model it’s not guaranteed that I’ll be able to run this on my system in x years.
Okk I get it but a lot of other apps do the same… consider that from our perspective the alternative would be to run a standard subscription. Is that preferable? Personally I would say no, but maybe it’s just me.
honestly the main issue is just that the value provided by a gui for a package manager i can already make use of isn't worth $49 to me (and many others i'd wager), and it certainly isn't worth paying multiple times for. i'm sure the features you have planned are cool but it's still just a front end for homebrew whichever way you look at it.

i don't mean to diminish your work at all - it really does look great and i mean that, and hopefully you'll prove me wrong, but i don't think you've properly considered what value this actually provides to the people you want to buy it.

you might say that $49 + an annual subscription (and it is a subscription by the way, you can call it what you like but that's objectively what it is) is what you need to charge in order to make the time/effort you spent on development worth it for you, which is fair, but consider it from the POV of a potential customer: it's $49 + an annual subscription for a prettier way to achieve something that they probably use quite rarely, something they can already do, and something which there are already free alternatives to.

consider something like bettermouse (https://better-mouse.com). macOS is borderline unusable without it, i'd sell my computer and switch to linux that same week if bettermouse disappeared. i make use of it for 100% of the time i use my computer, and it costs $7.99 one time, forever. the developer could double or even triple the price, and it still wouldn't even be half of what you're asking for.

> i'd sell my computer and switch to linux that same week if bettermouse disappeared

Off topic, but can you tell me exactly why?

macOS's weird mouse + scrollwheel acceleration is a dealbreaker for me, i only find it usable with a trackpad