> Subscription fatigue, yeah, I know. Hoping to write an article about this in our industry, but the reality is that this is what's sustainable for a small team that wants to avoid venture funding (and eventual acquisition "incredible journey" stuff) or monetizing by selling your personal data.
I've been thinking about this repeatedly for years, usually triggered by apps like this. I might even have written about it here or on my blog and I agree it is a hard problem.
First, for anyone who wonders why do companies need recurring revenues after the initial version has been (I didn't either a decade ago):
Releasing software into the wild is less fire-and-forget than one would think. Platform APIs change, security holes are found etc.
Second: I have been trying to look for models - hoping to find some I truly enjoy - and I'll try to summarize the ones I can remember, with examples:
- the original WhatsApp model: a tiny recurring charge. In an alternative world where they weren't bought and at about the same time - as network effects set in they could have started charging companies for API access, not to spam but tonrun helpsdesks, bots etc. Micropayments also looked promising.
- The Jetbrains model: you pay a subscription but as long as you have paid for a minimum amount of time you get to keep the last version that was released while you were paying.
- A similar model is used by the Agenda app. I almost never use it and yet I'm tempted to pay (again, I have done it before) because I love the business model.
- then you have the commercial sponsor model where someone pays to be the default choice for something the end user would probably choose anyway: this worked really well for Mozilla and Opera for a number of years.
- Then there is the old school pay one model, this often bleeds into one one of the above models as new more or less improved releases are pushed every year.
- There are freemium models which are more or less free: some charge only for superficial features (reddit), other for one time upgrades to extra tools, other charge on a monthly basis for access to extra tools.
I think I currently have 3 app subscriptions going, one for MeWe and one for Concepts and one for Paper Pro, and then there's a couple of newspapers, mandatory payments for the national broadcasting, there's Netflix and Spotify and payments to Hetzner for my hosted NextCloud instance and after that I really really don't want another subscription unless it is
- very inexpensive
- or is something I use everday,
- or it replaces one of my existing ones.
I've downloaded it to test now, but for now it looks like a OneNote competior priced at the same level as the entire Office 365 personal edition?
Edit: I've tested it a bit now this looks extremelypromising but the price is steep for an app and there is no option to pay monthly for a couple of months to test. At least you were generous with 100 reusable cards so I will continue testing it.
I've been thinking about this repeatedly for years, usually triggered by apps like this. I might even have written about it here or on my blog and I agree it is a hard problem.
First, for anyone who wonders why do companies need recurring revenues after the initial version has been (I didn't either a decade ago):
Releasing software into the wild is less fire-and-forget than one would think. Platform APIs change, security holes are found etc.
Second: I have been trying to look for models - hoping to find some I truly enjoy - and I'll try to summarize the ones I can remember, with examples:
- the original WhatsApp model: a tiny recurring charge. In an alternative world where they weren't bought and at about the same time - as network effects set in they could have started charging companies for API access, not to spam but tonrun helpsdesks, bots etc. Micropayments also looked promising.
- The Jetbrains model: you pay a subscription but as long as you have paid for a minimum amount of time you get to keep the last version that was released while you were paying.
- A similar model is used by the Agenda app. I almost never use it and yet I'm tempted to pay (again, I have done it before) because I love the business model.
- then you have the commercial sponsor model where someone pays to be the default choice for something the end user would probably choose anyway: this worked really well for Mozilla and Opera for a number of years.
- Then there is the old school pay one model, this often bleeds into one one of the above models as new more or less improved releases are pushed every year.
- There are freemium models which are more or less free: some charge only for superficial features (reddit), other for one time upgrades to extra tools, other charge on a monthly basis for access to extra tools.
I think I currently have 3 app subscriptions going, one for MeWe and one for Concepts and one for Paper Pro, and then there's a couple of newspapers, mandatory payments for the national broadcasting, there's Netflix and Spotify and payments to Hetzner for my hosted NextCloud instance and after that I really really don't want another subscription unless it is
- very inexpensive
- or is something I use everday,
- or it replaces one of my existing ones.
I've downloaded it to test now, but for now it looks like a OneNote competior priced at the same level as the entire Office 365 personal edition?
Edit: I've tested it a bit now this looks extremely promising but the price is steep for an app and there is no option to pay monthly for a couple of months to test. At least you were generous with 100 reusable cards so I will continue testing it.