Lars
April 10, 2016 at 9:44 pm
Text Expander wasn’t a cheap app. Not at all. There’s a text out there for $5, which has the same core functionality. I am NOT against subscription models per se. Let’s look at an example:
– Adobe Photoshop (CS6) used to cost $999, Lightroom something around $200. Significant updates came at a steep price, several hundert dollars, every 2-3 years.
– Now I pay $9 a month for Photoshop CC and Lightroom CC. They added a cloud service and some goodies. $108 a year compared to the acquisition price of over thousand dollars. Sure, you could get some discounts and save 10-20%, but I think you get the point. With the subscription model, I have a yearly rate of 1/10 the original price.
The same goes for MS Office, I get a ton of software for a modest monthly rate. I also subscribe to Backblaze, Evernote and some other stuff, because I think it’s worth it.
Now let’s look at Text Expander:
It cost $35 and major updates (every 2 years) cost $20. I gladly payed that. So, if I use TE for 6 years, it’s one purchase and two updates, adding up to $75 or ~$1 a month. so, with the $4/month model, I will have to pay FOUR times the amount. With the next version, I would do exactly the same, expand snippets. Sync service? What was wrong with Dropbox sync, it worked like a charm, so there’s absolutely no added value there. And if you look at a broken sync service, take a look at the Omni Group, they gave us OmniSync for free for their applications.
Let’s get back to Adobe: for $9 I get applications that are on the cutting edge of technology. Ever looked at the feature list and the developer team? It’s 4,5 GB of software I am getting. Text Expander is a 30MB helper app. Look at MS Office 365, for ~$10 you get several applications (Excel, Word, Powerpoint….), there’s a cloud service included and even a whole programming language. I know, economies of scale, Smile is not MS or Adobe.
Getting back to my 6-years-of-usage example, $4 dollars per month amounts to €288.