#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.
Thing is, Apollo was a rather proven app that had been developed for years. On a site that had been growing for even more years. Thus we could pay knowingly that we’d very likely get a couple of years out of it.
We have no idea if Lemmy will be a viable option in a year or two (basically all Reddit clones have failed, so it’s likely this will as well). And even if it succeed, we have no clue the developer will stay at it and develop the app. Looking at other Lemmy apps, most have stopped developing, basically just pushing out simple fixes.
This unfortunately has to be considered when it comes to app price. I’m not ready to pay as much for this, as I did for Reddit. I miiggt be down the line, but not yet.
Right. But we have the monthly pro sub at $3. I’ve paid this much to this dev after liking the app enough during test phase.
If lemmy and this app sticks around, I’ll keep paying $3 for their damn coffee.
Yeah, that’s fair enough.
The platform is tiny and has hardly any users. This is when apps need more financial support, not less.