It's blowing my mind that people on here are happy to throw $100+ at a mobile app to access a free website that has multiple free and very good apps, especially when the app they're paying for is inserting ads into the experience to make people pay to remove the ads.
$20 one time for a well developed app that I use multiple hours a day is inexpensive.
I pay almost as much to multiple streaming services PER MONTH for a shitty experience and sometimes not a completely ad-free experience.
Anyway, in all honesty I chose the $1.99/mo because it gives the dev $24/yr into perpetuity. I also donate to instances. I also use Connect and Jerboa and Liftoff. It's whatever.
Yeah, it is expensive for an app. At least to people like me who almost never buy any apps.
The most I've ever spent on any app was $20 for a Carista feature unlock that allowed me to unlock hidden options in my car. Those permanent changes to my car were worth the $20 in the context of a $25,000 automobile's feature set.
$20 to get on Lemmy when it's free elsewhere is not worth it. I could easily afford it, but I don't want it.
I pay for Sync and Telegram. Telegram doesn't even have ads, I just want to throw money at the things that provide me entertainment and value on a daily basis. Just because you don't like to pay for things doesn't mean you should project that mindset onto other people.
I paid for sync for Reddit, I donated to my Lemmy instance and I'll pay for Sync for Lemmy once I decide for myself whether I take the subscription, simply ad free or one time payment for ultra. As there's still fixes to the pricing going on I'll wait out for that
I guess I'm biased with paying for software since I work at a company that makes software it also offers in its' own SaaS platform. I literally maintain the infrastructure so I'm intimately familiar with those costs. I appreciate anyone who offers software and service for free. But there's always a cost and if you want premium service you'll need to pay for it.
That is ofcourse another justification and easy one since paying for sync is almost nothing to me. I do hope the free Sync keeps being a good alternative for anyone who wants to try it.
I don't want to feel good. I DO feel good. The truth is there would be no need to justify anything were it not for all the FOSS zealots throwing shade instead of just minding their business. Stop worrying about whether we feel good, and start thinking about why you want others to feel bad.
No, reddit demanded ludicrously high fees at barely 30 days notice. It gave nobody any time at all to figure out alternative monetization strategies. Many of the third party apps had expressed their willingness to pay, but that was just absurd
Most of these apps had subscriptions already in place. All they had to do was remove the free access and maybe increase the subscription price a bit to $5/month (I'm not sure what they were charging before).
Ad revenue very often dwarfs the income from subscribing users by a huge margin. Sure, a single user subscribing pays for themselves plus a little extra, but your free users make up 70-80% of your revenue
The amount of people that subscribe would likely not pay for the ongoing maintenance costs unless he's willing to work for shit pay. Every hour he puts into maintenance is an hour he didn't put into maintenance the other version that actually pays well enough