Another one goes subscription

Posted by satis
Aug 22, 2023 at 11:56 PM

The subscription pricing for v4 of this app is considerable - $288/yr - compared to the old purchase price which I believe was around $170.

That said, it’s a little too soon to worry about v.3 incompatibility with future macOS versions, but you should make plans to export your current work before possible issues arise.

I’m a fan of subscription software, and for the most part developers migrated to this model because the old model of boom-bust with new versions (banking new features to entice upgrades) and having unpredictable cash flows doesn’t work well, and subscriptions offer the possibility of predictable revenue and constant upgrades for users, among other reasons. Here’s a good overview of the subscription business (and “affliction”):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTKuQQegNTs

But I’ve let go a lot of apps that went subscription that I was paying upgrades for but wasn’t dependent upon. I’d purchased Noteplan and Noteplan 2, but it just wasn’t worth the $72/year for it. (It *could* have been, if I’d dropped my subscriptions to Todoist and Day One, but I’m pretty happy with those apps.)

Although I think Noteplan’s price is too high for my casual use, Eduard was transparent about the poor economics of the old model:

Unfortunately, I couldn’t make the one-time
payment model work long term. Since 3+ years
I have pushed out updates every 2-3 weeks,
rewrote the whole app, tweaked the marketing
and website, but it changed nothing about the
revenue. So, as the developer, I’m
incentivized to save up all the new features
and sell them with a paid upgrade - as often
as possible (means multiple times a year if I
can) and throw in lots of time into marketing
the upgrades. And I think that’s not good for
anyone.

On top of this, the AppStore doesn’t natively
support paid upgrades. You need to do
something very complicated (internal license
validation for every feature) or confusing
(uploading multiple version to the AppStore)
to make it work. I like the Sketch model, but
NotePlan is not big enough to survive it
without the AppStore. The Sketch model
doesn’t work with the AppStore, because
updates come in without license checks.

So after considering everything, subscription
is the only viable option for long-term
sustainability.

The goal is to make NotePlan a productivity
powerhouse for pro users and $2/month
wouldn’t cut it and wouldn’t look like a
power user tool.

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I assume something similar is going on with the developer of Flying Logic.