Afternoon everyone,
I wanted to go over a few points related to pricing, stats and the roadmap
Pricing
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Sync for Lemmy is completely free with ads (the same as Sync for Reddit)
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You can remove ads in the account picker or drawer for a one time fee of ~$20
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Sync Ultra also removes ads but it’s not required
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I’ll be working on regional prices over the coming weeks
There are now 24k installed users up from 100 the previous day!
I’m going to be spending the next few days going through all of the comments / messages and fixing any crashes.
As always thanks for the support and hope you’re liking Sync!
Lj
Edit: testing edit
Yeah man…I am a dev myself but $20 to remove ads is just too much, especially without regional pricing.
$20 once, for an app you’re going to use daily for the foreseeable future mind you, is not the unreasonable take that people on here seem to think it is.
You get what you pay for, and Sync has proven it’s track record with the Reddit app already. This isn’t just some random app dev asking for money on his bejeweled clone.
It’s $100 once. The $20 option is a yearly subscription.
Edit: Some misunderstanding. It’s $20 to remove ads, and $100 to get all features. Maybe the $20 subscription is for full features and removing ads?
You have completely misread the app. The “Sync Ultra” is not the same as the one-time “Remove Ads” option.
If you want “Sync Ultra” for a lifetime, it’s $100 or w/e it’s listed as, that comes with all the extra features listed in the app. If you just want to remove ads and use the app without the Ultra features, you only have to pay $20 once.
Agreed. $5 MAYBE, $20 is out to lunch. And a subscription model for full features? Nah get outta here with that, that MIGHT be worth $20. The direction app development has gone over the last few years is a huge disappointment
$5 as a one-time payment is not enough for a single developer to sustain his livelihood on.
And ultimately, “worth” is based on what the market decides.
This is by far the best app for Lemmy. By a mile. It’s a lot faster and nicer looking. That said, pricing feels a little steep. Imagine being able to sustain your livelihood on making an app for Lemmy, an otherwise free service providing no additional content. It’s not like we are paying the persons who invest in all the infrastructure for the servers running the Lemmy instances. They provide for the actual service. If a part of the money went to instance servers it would feel way better. Because if they go down, so will Sync.
Not taking anything away from the massive work Lj is putting into this, but pricing do feel a tad off. If 1500 people subscribe he has a yearly income equal to a decent job. If he gets 5000 subs he will earn almost 100 000 dollars a year. Which in Sweden equals to about 2.5 times of a well paid job. That’s excluding ad revenue from everyone who don’t subscribe or pay for removing ads. Pricing can be fairer without compromising the livelihood of said dev. That’s all.
If that is the case, well then in some of the larger coastal areas in the U.S. such a salary is far below what a decent software developer can expect. Cost of living is very high in those areas.
Talking about prices and costs is very difficult in a global ecosystem, because even different regions of the same country can have significant differences in market that change the value of money, even setting aside currency exchange.
Wha? A yearly ultra sub is 15 bucks. 1500x15 is 22500. 5000 times is 75000.
And that’s not ‘the same as a full time job’, not by a long shot. Google takes its cut - what, 20%? Then you have income tax, insurances etc, another 20-30% at least, and so on. So, for 5000 subscriptions, he’s left with around 42k at the end of the day.
I’m pretty sure his calculations were based on the monthly price, as for me monthly shows up as 2.99 per month. I’ll also say that including income tax in your calculation is crazy. We all have to pay income tax, but the income told us when we get a job or see a job posting is gross income.
Other than that, if you want Sync for lemmy and willing to pay for it, that’s fair. I paid 3 bucks for Nova Prime years ago and I have used it everyday. It came with me to every new phone I owned. I also redesign my layout quite often using it. It doesn’t seem reasonable to me to pay that amount monthly when Nova Prime was a one time payment.
Nope. Yearly. But I used the pricing for me, in Sweden. Seems the conversion rate is a bit off. Because my price is 19 dollars per year and the price for Lifetime is at 117 dollars.
No app is worth that, sorry.
Depends on your country, really.
Yes, in Switzerland you’re also told gross income - yet that’s not the ‘real gross income’. There’s lots of other stuff your employer pays for you when you get hired somewhere. For example, in Switzerland, we have mandatory retirement contributions (not like social security, we also have a pension fund seperately from this), that has to be matched by an employer, 1:1.
It really depends on your country, but say in Switzerland, you have to earn a good 30-40% more money when self employed compared to being employed at a company to have the same net amount of money available at the end of the day.
That’s like saying imagine someone wanting to sustain themselves or running a public transport network. All they do is help you get to and from work. How can they have so much hubris as to believe that’s worth anything?!
Exactly. Doing anything, if it requires work and provides value to you, has a value, and thus could be expected to be charged for. Ad-supported software has kinda ruined a lot of people’s perception of money and value, expecting everything to be free.
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You make valid points, however, I’d like to point out that most games on the play store don’t cost a lot because the real costly transactions are in-app purchases. It’s common, in my experience, for the popular free apps to have IAPs upwards of $100 for in-game currency.
There’s also that matter of the no-cost version of the app. It seems perfectly usable, making the ad-removal an optional purchase.
Considering the smaller user-base and the finite economic value of life-time purchases I’d say $20 is fair. But that’s my stated opinion and I have yet to put my money where my mouth is.
I used it for nearly a decade for $2, so I figure it’s worth it.