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Drafts 5 for iOS goes subscription
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Posted by Paul Korm
Apr 18, 2018 at 08:32 PM
Drafts 5 in-depth review
https://www.macstories.net/reviews/drafts-5-the-macstories-review/
Posted by apb123
Apr 20, 2018 at 05:09 AM
I loathe subscriptions. Utterly loathe them. If you think this used to cost $5 every 3 years for a new app version. It is now $20 a year. I work that out to be a 1200 percent increase in price..hidden in the obfuscation of a subscription. I refuse to subscribe for apps because recurring expenditure is for utilities, bills,mortgages etc.I have ditched for this reason Textexpander/Evernote/1Password/Ulysses/Dayone.. I just don’t see the cost benefit value.I dont mind buying an app though.
These companies are short sighted. They think it strengthens their business model but it actually weakens it considerably. Developers are blind to this. Because there is a 1200% increase in price, Drafts 5 can afford to loose 90% of their customers and still make more money. However people will cancel the subscription when times get tough (who is going to pay for a service of a notes app for years and years) and each one of those subscribers will be worth 10 of the old customers who bought the app, so loosing them will be 10 times the loss. (i.e more vulnerable company).
However Drafts is a very good app.Very good indeed and I am intrigued by the unlimited dictation feature. This actually is massive. Why buy dragon dictation when you have this. I will try it out..and report back…I am tempted….
Posted by satis
Apr 21, 2018 at 01:05 AM
I’m all for subscription pricing, for a number of reasons. For devs, there’s no longer any need to hold off on update features on the old sales model (where they’re stockpiling new features so as to sell upgrades). This cannot be underplayed - I can’t tell you how many devs I’ve spoken with over the years who held back on releasing feature updates because they were banking them to make appealing the sale of the next upgrade. With subscriptions devs can roll out updates to users regularly and add support new standards and features outside of the confines of a standard product cycle, and by doing so they’ll know they’re bringing all their users with them (which also reduces support costs otherwise spent on old versions).
The subscription model can fund more r&d with a predictable and constant revenue stream. And that revenue stream can grow as pirates start to buy subscriptions: in areas like Poland where piracy is historically extremely high, Adobe has found that the percentage of Creative Cloud subscribers is significantly higher than average. Why? Because offering a monthly plan makes it easier for individuals to buy products that they may have not been able to afford with an up-front perpetual license.
Ultimately for devs successful subscriptions result in a steadier, less volatile income stream so they can better plan projects and updates while having a good idea of what can be budgeted based on predicted income streams. And ultimately that’s all good for customers, who get more regular updates/bugfixes of their apps, and less of a chance the dev will stop supporting the app.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with monthly fees. We don’t bat an eye when we write checks for cable TV, Internet, phone, gas, electric, magazines, mortgage, MMORPGs, and so on. We don’t even object to paying monthly fees for digital services. Netflix, after all, has 44 million people worldwide paying monthly, and Spotify/Apple_Music have 100 million subscribers between them. And there’s still room for more, with everything from Audible to Setapp to Texture, all of which are actually gaining in popularity.
Obviously subscription fatigue can set in, and that’s where (popular) products like Setapp come in, essentially offering one-stop, all-you-can-eat app subscriptions. It’s anything but short-sighted - it’s a way to go forward with quality apps that makes continued development sustainable when it otherwise might not.
Posted by tightbeam
Apr 21, 2018 at 01:23 AM
Would I pay a low monthly fee for something I use every day? Of course I would.
Workflowy Pro costs $5/month. I’ve been paying that for quite awhile - two years? That’s $120 in Workflowy’s pocket, and I don’t even notice a fiver out the door every thirty days. Would I have bought Workflowy Pro if it cost $120 for a license? Nope. $60? Nope. (And we’ll ignore the additional cost of upgrades.) So, without the monthly subscription, Workflowy would have made exactly zilch from me. With the subscription, they get a reliable monthly cash flow. Everybody wins. What’s to “loathe”?
Posted by Paul Korm
Apr 21, 2018 at 02:51 AM
I’ve ended up subscribing to a lot of applications I swore I wouldn’t subscribe to, mainly because I wanted to use them and so I ignored my dislike of the fees.
I’ve seen the “it’s good for devs” argument before, but I’ve never seen any independent reporting with analysis of whether that sort of claim is actually borne out in practice. I certainly haven’t noticed that the subscription apps are making improvements and upgrading with new features more frequently. Some developers charging the subscriptions for Bear, Day One, etc., haven’t done anything more than bug fixing since they introduced subscriptions.
That’s just my impression — I’d rather see an industry-wide empiracal study of the effect of subscriptions.
I like the Agenda model — it’s a subscription but if you stop the subscription you get to keep all the releases given to you while you subscribed. That sort of approach seems very fair to the customer as well as the developer. Customer gets new features, developer gets an income stream.