[harladsinsteden]

What was your justification for the monthly fee in the first place?

There is a model that worked for decades: If you spent a _significant_ amount of work enhancing an existing tool you'd release a new major version. The would be a discount for license holders of the old version. Why reinvent the world over and over again?

[Griffinsauce]

Simple answer right? It makes more money.

Not saying that was OPs motivation but that's obviously why the shift happened.

[dangus]

To me it seems like small businesses like this get squeezed by these demands to make everything cheaper while the big corporations ignore it and stick to their pricing.

I’m not sure OP should have capitulated. Someone who loves this tool will probably gladly pay more.

[twohaibei]

I'm pretty sure people who give in to subscriptions are usually forced to use a tool (or adobe) for one reason or another. New tool, that does one small thing, would not force many people to go into that absurd payment model.

[cgio]

The question is what is the proportion of people loving it vs liking it.

[dangus]

The proportion gets a lot easier to deal with as the price goes up.

Is it easier to convince one person to pay $100 or 100 people to pay $1?

[harladsinsteden]

Well, I'm all for making money but the way it was tried here sounds like a pretty bad idea.

Developers (or power users for that matter) aren't really known to be generous with their personal money for recurring software fees. But this is the primary target group. I want value in return for my money. If you have monthly recurring costs then I can understand the monthly fee. If not then it's a rip-off.

Can you try? Of course. But I guess I'm not the only one who has been pushed away from that particular software product. Even if it's good I will not give it another try. First impressions count.

[ymolodtsov]

Because what you end up with is a long tail of revenue that doesn't justify working on the app.