#EDITED TO ADD CONTEXT:

The developer has responded quite a bit in the comments here, and has made adjustments to the free tier feature set based on my and others’ feedback. See more info in this update thread: https://lemm.ee/post/12353243

If you’re reading this post after update 1.0.7 I suggest you skim these comments and that update thread before forming an opinion.

#ORIGINAL POST:

I like this app a lot, I can tell there’s been a ton of love and hard work put into it.

The strategy for monetization leaves a bit of a sour taste though.

For one, nobody wants another subscription - and $30 lifetime for a brand new app is a huge asking price compared to, say, Apollo, which was $5 or so (with a subscription tier for things that actually made sense to buy due to recurring cost).

But this app is paywalling basic stuff like a comment jump button (everyone else has this for free), content filtering, video scrubbing, and various other things that have no recurring cost to the developer.

My recommendation, take it or leave it, if you want my money make it a reasonable one time purchase for things that don’t cost you money (under $10 imo, $5 would’ve been an easy sell).

If you want to justify a subscription model you are gonna need to build features that justify it - push notifications, stuff like that.

  • @v3rgl@lemmy.worldOP
    5•9 months ago

    BTW some general ideas for features that justify a subscription (which consequently justifies a large one time fee if that’s even offered)

    • Push notifications
    • Comment undeletion
    • Translation
    • Combine account feeds somehow (let me log into multiple accounts at one time instead of having to switch between)
    • Various AI integrations: text or image generation, article summarizer, clickbait fixer for article headlines
    • Text extraction from images (this can be done with an Apple API I believe for OCR, though offering GPT-4V here someday to extract text and describe images would be legitimately unique)