Comment by bellowsgulch
3 days ago
I would rather software companies sell at more realistic prices so that they have a sustainable business, and signal to others in the industry that it's still possible to build a sustainable business.
No, we should not praise software companies for hobbyist practices like selling $1 app on the App Store, which say, 30% goes to a digital distribution store, and then of your after distribution fees, about 20%+ percent goes to the federal and local government.
Pay for updates, and charge rightfully like you're supporting an engineer's salary, and that you have a commercial real estate lease to pay, and the compensation packages of full-time employees with benefits.
And boo people who say otherwise. No other professional field do I know of exists where cheap bastards abound while the entire industry is dependent on monopolies to pay the high wages of engineers.
No other professional field I know of lets workers invent and alter their own tools, collaboratively, for free, and share them for free with all their colleagues.
If surgeons could wiggle their fingers and make a better scalpel, at no cost, and give a copy to all their friends, also at no cost, I bet they'd have some pretty spiffy scalpels going around soon and many docs would stop paying for them.
Your comment is hilarious, because of the people most suited to manufacture a better scalpel, it's people in healthcare because of their income being in the 1% of individual compensation distribution.
Amazingly, software does not have zero cost. You pay for hardware, software licensing, hosting, leases, fees, and administrative costs.
Where is this mythical no cost software you're talking about? Is it in the room with us right now?
Where does your income come from again? Is it this same zero cost software we're talking about right now? The same zero cost software that an employer pays you a salary and benefits for, or...?
> Your comment is hilarious, because of the people most suited to manufacture a better scalpel, it's people in healthcare because of their income being in the 1% of individual compensation distribution.
Yeah, but takes nation-state amounts of money to bring new medical devices to market.
> Amazingly, software does not have zero cost. You pay for hardware, software licensing, hosting, leases, fees, and administrative costs.
Buy a laptop, Linux, self, Linux, Linux, Linux. There, zero cost for an individual person to write software on the laptop they already owned for other reasons.
Put another way, my kid can sit down at their computer and write a web browser without paying a single additional penny.
I don't owe it to anyone to pay them money instead of writing an equivalent version myself. I choose to pay some vendors money because they've done nice work and I'd rather slip them cash than spend the time to re-invent their particular wheel. That's the category BBEdit's in for me and why I buy their apps. But I don't have to. And yes, I give away literally 100% of my off-work software for anyone else to use who wants to. I wrote those things with free tools for free languages to run on free operating systems, so why not give back? I have a day job to put food on the table. My hobby projects are entirely in the FOSS world that you seem to have forgotten exists.
> No other professional field I know of lets workers invent and alter their own tools, collaboratively, for free, and share them for free with all their colleagues.
Blacksmithing, metal working?
Did I miss blacksmiths gaining the ability to infinitely duplicate and teleport their finished pieces into people's hands? Can one learn this power?
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To a point, although you can't make your own kiln for free. The tools in those trades consume a significant amount of resources, where computing is basically free once you pay for the hardware. Something like GCC is the software equivalent of a steel mill. Even if you could design one and give out the designs for free, you'd still have to pay for the raw materials to construct one.
Unfortunately Apple doesn’t allow paid updates short of releasing a whole separate app, and you can’t do upgrade discounts for current owners except via weird bundle discounts by sticking the new and old versions together as a package. So Apple is to blame for all the subscriptions.
Unfortunately Apple doesn’t allow paid updates short of releasing a whole separate app, and you can’t do upgrade discounts for current owners except via weird bundle discounts by sticking the new and old versions together as a package. So Apple is to blame for all the subscriptions.
We're talking about a macOS program, where companies don't have to bother with Apple's rules to sell their software, so your comment is off-topic.
Panic is good example of this kind of pricing.
Nova is $99 (last I checked), and gets updates for a year. After that, it's $75 for another year of updates.
If you don't want to update, you don't have to. You can even update every second or third year or whatever you want and catch up with all the missing features and updates.
Let's not just throw up our hands and say, "Oh, well. Apple makes me do this, so there's nothing I can do." Innovate.
I don’t think subscriptions for every single thing would have taken off the way it did if it hadn’t been for Apple forcing it on mobile where normal people use the most software. I do support software that isn’t subscription as much as I can. Alibre 3D is another good one, though not on Mac yet.
BBEdit did release through the Apple Store, for a while, but it didn’t work out.
The app is most useful, when you can point it at any file in the system, and sandboxed apps can’t see certain directories.
This resulted in an awkward “two-tiered” approach, for a short time, then BareBones just abandoned the App Store.
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BBEdit is a small private company, no VCs. They probably make a ton of cash (by normal standards) for the owners at this point and doing right by their customers and not rocking the boat through profit maximization strategies is a long term play that VCs could not put up with.
Plus, BBEdit has a heritage and extremely well rounded and polished codebase. They would not betray their stable business, quality and heritage for some short term gain.
They are building a good product for the fun of it and making good money out of it, which they deserve squarely.
Implying that one of the oldest still actively developed commercial text editors is not doing sustainable business practices kinda misses the mark. They’ve been at this since 1992, 34 years ago. I think they know their business.
Yeah, I think I know their business, too. Remember 12 years ago when BBEdit left the Mac App Store only later to come back with subscriptions? Boo.
[1]: https://x.com/smorr/status/521033038713880576
[2]: https://www.barebones.com/company/press/bbedit_back_to_mas_p...
The app store doesn’t allow for any kind of upgrade pricing, so offering a subscription allows them to operate in the app store sustainably. A shitty compromise, but i don’t blame them for making. 12 years later you can still buy without subscribing - which is what counts for me
Eh. I think that was a fine thing to offer for people who wanted it. You can still buy a perpetual license for the full version from their website.
> No, we should not praise software companies for hobbyist practices like selling $1 app on the App Store, which say, 30% goes to a digital distribution store, and then of your after distribution fees, about 20%+ percent goes to the federal and local government.
For hobbyists with revenue less than $1 million per year, the App Store commission is 15%.
Customer acquisition and retention is so very hard and expensive. It’s a tough equation.