Comment by haute_cuisine
4 days ago
I honestly don't have anything against them moving apple sync behind the paywall. It's really hard to justify doing any kind of ongoing maintenance and rnd from one-time sales. If they ship good durable things, there might not be enough people willing to buy that stuff, they're also forced to constantly find new customers.
It's really hard to justify doing any kind of ongoing maintenance and rnd from one-time sales.
What kind of water-carrying excuse is that? Multibillion dollar companies have been created doing exactly that for decades. Withings has somehow managed to stay in business for nearly 20 years...doing exactly that.
What if their model is sustainable only when new people keep buying? Once all who would buy bought, they can't survive on existing customer base.
If they stop being able to sell new products then they can shut down the company. That’s usually how it works.
What ongoing maintenance is required beyond what would be needed to keep their app working for future sales anyway?
You need to keep paying influencers to promote it; otherwise, influencers threaten to promote other products and drop yours. Marketing is a big cost for these products.
Just like MacroFactor pays a lot of people to promote it, it has to pay people, which means the money has to come from the customers.
They do need to keep up with API changes. But that’s not that hard. Even then, they could expose a stable local API so someone else can maintain the adapter.
Why would someone else maintain the adapter? Would they be charging for maintenance (or selling data / network) as well? What company should give their business to somebody else?
I assume writing and maintaining apps across all stack of devices is real work that someone has to do full time with a decent level of quality. Unfortunately, you can't just ship software and call it done, even without adding features, new devices are getting released, new OS versions are getting released, new security updates are getting released, server infra has to be maintained and patched.
I feel that all this work isn't getting appreciated and many think that this should be offloaded to somebody else to be done for free. They already offer a free app with free CSV export.
Also, they just might have taken on too much scope and paying for all that scope isn't sustainable from hardware sales alone, unless people continue to buy, but at some point all who would buy will have their devices and scope can't be covered anymore.
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Right, but they need to keep up with those changes to support their continuing sales anyway, so it’s “free” to keep supporting the existing installed base too.
What?! How about providing value so that it is actually worth purchasing a subscription?
Subscription isn't required to use the device.