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Day One gives itself a "Premium" service
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Posted by Paul Korm
Jun 28, 2017 at 12:08 AM
Jumping on the subscription bandwagon, the journaling app, Day One, announced a premium version for $49.99/year (a discount is available for the first year for new users—a bigger discount for certain existing users).
http://help.dayoneapp.com/day-one-2-0/day-one-premium-faq
If you are a Day One user you’d need to read the blog to sort out what this means for you. What it means for me is “forget it”. I like Day One a lot. I migrated to it from MacJournal because Day One was well designed. But now for the same price, MacJournal might be a much better option since it offers far more features than Day One.
I don’t mind subscription software if the developer is offering a significant difference for the increased price. On first glance, that’s not the case with Day One.
Posted by Luhmann
Jun 28, 2017 at 02:15 AM
While I too suffer from subscription fatigue, it should be noted that “All 2.0 features remain available for purchasers of the 2.0 apps. Day One Classic users are also unaffected. All Day One users will continue to receive maintenance and non-Premium updates, as needed.” Hard to know what this means long term, but seems it will be some time before anyone will feel pressured to go premium if they don’t want to.
Posted by Paul Korm
Jun 28, 2017 at 11:18 PM
Yeah, well they lied.
Mac AppStore and iOS AppStore updated my DayOne macOS and iOS apps. As soon as they launched I was locked out of all but one journal (I have numerous) and sync was locked up. The FAQ Luhmann quoted claims “all 2.0 features remain available for purchasers of the 2.0 app”—multiple journals and sync are 2.0 features, and now they are locked out. The FAQ also claims 2.0 users can “lock in” a Premium subscription for $24.99. There is no setting in 2.0 to do so. The only option provided in the macOS and iOS version is to subscribe for $34.99 the first year and $49.99 per year thereafter.
There is no way to export my data because the app has locked it out. The only access possible is to pay the $34.99 ransom.
So BEWARE—don’t let the AppStore update your DayOne apps until you have exported everything. Unless paying ransom to rapacious developers is your thing.
Luhmann wrote:
While I too suffer from subscription fatigue, it should be noted that
>“All 2.0 features remain available for purchasers of the 2.0 apps. Day
>One Classic users are also unaffected. All Day One users will continue
>to receive maintenance and non-Premium updates, as needed.” Hard to know
>what this means long term, but seems it will be some time before anyone
>will feel pressured to go premium if they don’t want to.
Posted by Luhmann
Jun 29, 2017 at 02:55 AM
While it is true that it appears that way at first after the upgrade (they really did not handle this well), it does not appear that they were lying. After carefully exporting all my entries I allowed the app store to update my app. When I first opened it all but one journal was greyed out (as Paul reported), but after I went into the preferences and saw that it did a sync, those journals were no longer greyed out and everything seemed to be working again as normal. I then opened my iPhone and ran an update there as well. Sync was disabled, but I was able to turn it back on in the preferences. When I looked at the preferences I also saw “account status” which said “Plus.” I clicked on that and it had text very similar to the FAQ text I posted earlier. You can see it here:
In short, it did appear at first to have disabled everything, but in the end everything is working as it was before. It may be that it takes a while to verify your “plus” account with the server, especially if a lot of people are upgrading all at once.
Posted by Paul Korm
Jun 29, 2017 at 09:18 AM
It’s good that you got your installation working. No luck over here—my data is still held hostage to the demand to pay. My advice stands: don’t let the app upgrade. If there’s a bug, let them fix it. If not, find a way to migrate your data somewhere else.
>In short, it did appear at first to have disabled everything, but in the end everything is working as it was before. It may be that it takes a while to verify your “plus” account with the server, especially if a lot of people are upgrading all at once.