#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.
Hi, sorry for the late (and long) reply. You’re right, $30 is definitely a lot to be asking for an app. I’ll try to explain where I’m coming from, and why I’ve landed on this price & monetization model. If anyone have any suggestions on how I can improve things while considering my points as well I’m definitely open to discuss.
When I was working on this update I spent a lot of time considering which features were “essential” and which features were more convenience/nice-to-have features. Two of the bigger features I’ve decided should be free are multiple accounts & post creation, both of which have been paid features in other apps. I thought everyone having access to these was way more important than app themes or a smart jump button.
Everything that was free in the last version is still free, and of course there’s a bunch of new non-pro stuff too. My intent with this update was not to paywall “basic” features, but to offer more hardcore users some extra niceties that in turn support development. I don’t expect the majority of people to upgrade, which is totally fine. I’ll still keep improving the app for everyone regardless.
I get that the lifetime price is high, I really do. The #1 reason I’m going for this type of subscription model is that Lemmy is so small. Apps like Apollo easily had tens of thousands of users and could therefore charge way way less. For some context - if every single active Avelon user paid for a $5 upgrade, which I’m sure you’d agree is unreasonable, that’d still be barely enough to finance one month of development. That’s it. I’m not saying this justifies the price, but Lemmy is still very niche, and with such a niche market the development cost will naturally be spread among much fewer users. With the slow growth of the Lemmy userbase a one-time purchase is very risky from my perspective, and I want Avelon to make sense over a long period of time. I think the devs of both sync (which is $99) and Bean (which is $50) realized this too.
I do believe Avelon can continue to play a part in lowering the barrier of entry to Lemmy and improving the platform as a whole by pushing for more high quality apps. I hope to see Lemmy continue to become the best link-aggregator platform ever, and as that happens prices will naturally decrease.
From our perspective, dropping $30 on an app is risky because of the number of apps that have come and gone (or stagnated) since the Rexxit of 2023 just four months ago. Memmy, Lemmur, Limbo, and others (even Voyager to an extent) have either stagnated or been discontinued since then. I’ve joined numerous TestFlights during the Rexxit and am still bouncing between apps. I still don’t know which one is going to be the best.
What’s also confusing is the choice to put basic features like the jump button and blocking behind the subscription but theming and icons are free.
Yeah for sure, these things cut both ways. While subscription might suck, they do have less risk on both sides. If a dev stopped working on their app, people would just stop paying for it - no need to pay everything up front.
As for themes and app icons, they are also part of the pro upgrade. Blocking is free, but custom filters are not. My impression was that most people were happy with this setup since I didn’t get much feedback about it during the ~1 month of testing the update went through. I figured multiple account support and things like that was more important for most people.
The risk is that you’ll be out $30. It’s not a huge risk.
Hey FWIW I support your pricing model and feature decisions. I have paid for lifetime and would consider also using a tip jar feature for future releases. Thank you for Avelon!
Thanks for responding to this. That does make sense. I really enjoy this app, I think it’s better than most of the right now so I’m in favor of supporting the development. $30 is a lot to stomach though, but I do see where you’re coming from.
The other guy asked for 100 bucks (Sync) for the most expensive features. 😱
But is he getting it? (Answer is no)
That’s a big hell no
I, for one, don’t think your pricing is absurd and your explanation makes total sense.
All those paywalled features are not necessities. With the free version you’re still getting a smooth and polished app. What even is the smart jump function? I’ve been enjoying the app without it and am okay with it being a paid feature.
People using other apps’ stagnation as an argument are not realizing that stagnation occurs because devs lose steam. They lose steam because there’s no longer any incentive to develop. I don’t think it’s fair to ask devs for more features and continue to maintain apps for free.
How can you justify putting an safety feature like content filtering behind a paywall. Content filtering and blocking is an important part of the fediverse.
However, non basic features like theming and app icons are free?
Some safety features I’ve already implemented are measures against NSFW content by default and support for tools like reporting and blocking. When I added filtering I didn’t really consider the safety aspect of it until someone pointed it out a couple days ago. I thought of it more as a way for power users to tweak their feed, Apollo for instance also had filtering as a paid feature. Themes and app icons are part of the pro upgrade.
So will you take a second look at what is behind a paywall? Lemmy is a different place and people are used to being able to mute and filter. Because frankly, Lemmy doesn’t have the moderation and reporting tools that Reddit did.
Re: how much the subscription and lifetime are. Put very simply Lemmy and Avelon are not in a condition where they are worth that much.
I’m open to suggestions. What would be a better free/pro setup in your opinion?
I think I’ve already suggested that. You put extra themes and app icons or anything that requires ongoing support eg notifications, translations, enhancements (eg some apps allow comments to be unrolled) behind a paywall or subscription.
Any content moderation or safety tools are in the base.
I had a long response typed up but I think I accidentally discovered a bug - Avelon crashed while I was typing!
I really appreciate your reply here and I’ll try to condense my thoughts, as someone who works in tech and is responsible for a product that brings in significant dollars of revenue (albeit B2B so not quite the same).
I think you are doing an awesome job at adding ease of setup and overall quality on top of the Lemmy platform. Others have noted the two sides of the longevity aspect, we all just have to deal with that.
To me the main missing piece is feature differentiation; where most people are used to apps like this paywalling things like themes and icons, I can go to several other apps for free to get the features you want a subscription fee (or large lump sum) for. The comment jump button is a good example, no it isn’t necessary but for people used to having it it feels that way.
When this is all so new, you can’t really expect people to trust you enough to think a big lifetime purchase is worth it, and subscriptions only feel logical when they are paying for an ongoing cost.
I’d say if you were to keep adding good features and maintaining the app, and especially if you add something like push notifications where you incur a cost I need to cover to use, I would be more likely to feel comfortable paying (and would expect you to build in a profit layer over your server costs).
Attempt at neutral thoughts on pricing models aside, my suggestion for a different approach would be to offer most things for free in simple forms, and paywall advanced customization.
Using the smart comment button as an example, you could include it for free with only the core expected functionality (jump between parent comments). But if I want to change the interaction, or access advanced actions like collapsing threads or something, that’s locked behind a purchase.
This way people can get a taste for everything you have to offer, and the decision to spend money is shifted from “pay you to get something that feels arbitrarily disabled” to “I like this and want more” or even just “I want to support a good developer”.
As far as actual cost, I don’t think I’d pay more than $10 one-time for any Lemmy app right now. If you’re getting what you hoped for out of this model then don’t change it on account of one angsty thread - but if any of this rings true, you could consider pricing for early adopters at a cheaper “early bird” price as one option, to build goodwill (making us more likely to want to support you down the road).
Or the other option is to follow Apollo’s (RIP) model, with a one-time mid tier for upgrades of basic stuff, and a subscription/larger cost for more unique features/things we all know cost money on an ongoing basis/the subset of people who just want to support you.
Please can I just add to this.
At the moment pricing doesn’t account for different values of money as it’s not been localised.
Two examples, at the moment lifetime is £29.99 in the UK which is $37.80.
Also, the average Indian worker earns the equivalent of $3 per day.
So localised pricing is essential for any app.
Most devs (me included) use the standard Apple localization since we don’t have the knowledge/capacity to manually manage the 175+ regions available. Not sure about this particular case, but it could have to do with taxes in the UK or something like that
Sorry for the late response but I guess this situation is a good example of some of the points I’m going to address.
First, I am an avid Unix/Linux user and professional, having started using them in the early 90s as a kid. I basically grew amidst Linux going from a pet project to what we all see today, and the reason I’m bringing this up is to try and set aside any notion that I don’t like Linux or any of its related projects. I do, I use Linux and related projects daily, both for personal and professional reasons.
But there are things I don’t like about it. One of the biggest is the community behavior where someone (or a group) disagree with something, then the “”“solution”“” most people default to is to split off and start a parallel project, that is very similar to the previous one and that maybe addresses the disagreement that spawned it in the first place.
The Federated network is just yet another example of this behavior. I understand how Twitter and Reddit drove many people out of their respective platforms and created the opportunity for a new thing, but I also see Mastodon and Lemmy doing the same thing dozens if not hundreds of Linux distros, Android versions, etc have and still do: they keep fragmenting things over and over and over.
There is the mindset that the niche is more important than the broader audience, there is very little focus on non-technical users and instances come and go like it doesn’t matter if someone spends hours, days, weeks finding communities they enjoy, then all of a sudden they have to figure out a way to redo all that on a new instance because the previous one decided to shut down.
Lemmy is still only a tiny fraction of Reddit in terms of userbase and especially content. I browse these platforms for these reasons, not to brag about being “OG”, or because a small community for some very specific niche migrated over. This ends limiting my time around here way more than I’d like. Lemmy just “runs out” of stuff I feel interested in much faster than Reddit does.
The second “big point” is more directly related to Avelon and the other apps for Lemmy.
I’d say that even though Avelon has been getting better and better, my “main” Lemmy app is still Memmy because it’s the app that managed to put together the bigger number of features that I am particularly interested in - gestures navigation first, several tiny QoL bits later, such as reblurring NSFW content after opening it.
A lot of the apps have some of these features but lack many others. Avelon gets closer to Memmy for me, but the gestures always pull me back towards Memmy because I just don’t like doomscrolling through anything and having to reach around the screen to do stuff.
All of the above said, these are the reasons why I don’t feel inclined to paying for any Lemmy apps yet. No matter if it’s a subscription or lifetime payment of any kind, none of the currently available apps are at a point where I feel like paying for something to access a platform that at any moment might fragment itself further and have even less content for me to access with said paid app(s).
I don’t mean any offense or attack, especially on you. You seem interested in making Avelon better every update and I respect that. But even the “ancestral” history on Reddit and Apollo added to this position of mine. I was an early adopter of Apollo Pro and Ultra Lifetime, and even though I used that app for years, often hours daily, I suffered with many bugs that never got properly addressed. So I’ve learned the lesson of putting money on what I will get whenever the payment goes through, not the promise of future updates. And finally I think I can conclude my position: I’ll consider either subscribing or getting lifetime whenever both Avelon and Lemmy are at a stage where I feel it’s worth the money. Otherwise I’ll keep an eye on both and hoping they get there.