We went through the exact same dilemma with our product [1]. For desktop apps, one-off with a defined support window just feels right.

Users get certainty, and you still have a clear path to future revenue when that window expires.

Subscription makes a lot more sense once you’re in cloud/collaborative territory which we've just entered. Sounds like you landed in a good place with this split.

[1] https://dbpro.app/pricing

Hey! Nice to see you have updated the pricing. I really liked the idea behind your product when I first saw it but the pricing was just a non-starter. Getting work to pay for all of my little productivity tools is a PITA and I still have side projects so spending a few bucks on a license every 2-3 years personally is where I find the sweet spot.

Will be trying out DB Pro again in the near future!

What was your justification for the monthly fee in the first place?

There is a model that worked for decades: If you spent a _significant_ amount of work enhancing an existing tool you'd release a new major version. The would be a discount for license holders of the old version. Why reinvent the world over and over again?

Simple answer right? It makes more money.

Not saying that was OPs motivation but that's obviously why the shift happened.

To me it seems like small businesses like this get squeezed by these demands to make everything cheaper while the big corporations ignore it and stick to their pricing.

I’m not sure OP should have capitulated. Someone who loves this tool will probably gladly pay more.

I'm pretty sure people who give in to subscriptions are usually forced to use a tool (or adobe) for one reason or another. New tool, that does one small thing, would not force many people to go into that absurd payment model.

The question is what is the proportion of people loving it vs liking it.

The proportion gets a lot easier to deal with as the price goes up.

Is it easier to convince one person to pay $100 or 100 people to pay $1?

Well, I'm all for making money but the way it was tried here sounds like a pretty bad idea.

Developers (or power users for that matter) aren't really known to be generous with their personal money for recurring software fees. But this is the primary target group. I want value in return for my money. If you have monthly recurring costs then I can understand the monthly fee. If not then it's a rip-off.

Can you try? Of course. But I guess I'm not the only one who has been pushed away from that particular software product. Even if it's good I will not give it another try. First impressions count.

Because what you end up with is a long tail of revenue that doesn't justify working on the app.

Awesome that you were receptive to feedback. I hope most of the people who commented find out and don't just memory-hole the project.

I am all for supporting local devs/vibe-coders.

What bothers me ain't the subscription, but the lack of transparency. I'm asked to pay for future updates and support here, but I don't know what that would be.

Some visibility into the roadmap and operations (an anonymous LLC doesn't really say "Trust") is needed for me to feel good about typing my credit card number into the form.

I agree , but I only need a page dedicated to release history to see how frequently the app is updated and so I can trust it for the future

Hey great change, am now buying. It was by pure chance i came back to this thread after 3 days, which is a damn shame as Im sure there were many people put off by the pricing that missed the change.

that said - the customisation options could use some work. I also find it seems to handle some windows differently (steam for example won't show an activity window, just a dock icon)

That's the reason why I added a subscription in the first place - you would pay a dirt-cheap price for a "boring" product with an added insurance that someone will be there to support it.

People will replicate it, sure, but supporting it regularly is another thing. I guess the majority wanted a perpetual license - so it's a win for the masses.

>> how do you think about defensibility?

defensibility nowadays is app support and development. the more work you pour into it the more defensible it will be.

I personally would gladly pay to have app constantly polished and improved. What I would not use is some vibe-coded alternative that was slopped with AI in a day and pushed to github with a tweet "i made a free X alternative" and then abandoned.

I would not.

I'm not paying $40 for a taskbar replacement. And not for two years of updates and a two device limit on top.

Maybe if it was $10, I could consider it. Prices for macOS apps are insane in my opinion. Everyone wants to charge yearly or every two years now too.

I second this! As a lite Mac user, $40 is a bit steep. I'll manage without boringBar no matter how great it is.

Honestly, I have tried to really cut down on my usage of 3rd-party dependencies when possible. In a way, it's kind of freeing. Whatever I still need, I write myself. If I cannot write it, then I try to find something FOSS. If I find nothing, then I consider purchasing something.

For example, I am rolling my own window manager (that needs some much needed TLC). I ditched Alfred for Spotlight. Though Alfred is better, I will survive just fine. And the list goes on.

I am not trying to take a dig at the OP. I am sure he or she put effort into this application. But I am genuinely curious -- does anybody actually need this software? Cmd+Tab, a decent window manager, and Spotlight would solve the same problems for free.

I fresh install to give myself a different perspective when I feel like I have too many 3rd party solutions to problems that no longer exist. Spotlight is better and I only casually use my macbook nowadays, so I don't need the power of Alfred. I don't need dock extensions because Stage Manager is mediocre but works well enough for the browser, chat / music apps, and whatever document I'm working with at the time.

They’re not insane.

It costs $99 a year just to be able to write Mac apps at all.

Any sort of buy-once app on macOS is unsustainable to the developer. They are paying Apple $99 a year forever.

If you want cheap/free apps get off of Apple’s ecosystem and switch to Linux.

> It costs $99 a year just to be able to write Mac apps at all.

$99 costs publishing apps for profit.

Anyone can compile and run for free.

Seconded. $10 for 2y and Id buy.. otherwise it feels too steep a price.

Agree

how much is there to improve and polish for a taskbar? at most it will be keeping up with macOS throwing breaking changes at you and maybe one or the other weird bug.

but isn't that it?

I cannot agree with you more.

Personally, I dare not replace the Dock with Windows-style task bar for fear that my OLED display might have burn-in on it. Yet, when I need an alternative, I would rather make an APP for my own.

It's not the idea, it's the implementation. It still takes time and effort to reverse-engineer, LLM assistance or not.

I personally prefer the monthly payments of a nominal amount where $2-8/month is my usual small app tolerance. It feels like I’m supporting the development of useful tools while having the option to discontinue my patronage when the tool is no longer relevant or useful to my workflow. This gives products a natural lifespan and aligns the developer incentives to keep the product functional and continue developing new features.

Old guard will say what they will about software licensing but at the end of the day it’s all the same.

Who maintains the list of all of these a la carte subscriptions? Your credit card company? Seems like a pain to have to review it every month and discern the service from the ACH transaction name. Additionally, it would be a reactive approach, as you would already need to be charged for the month you didn't want in order for it to show up on the ACH ledger.

I don't have a problem with paying subscriptions, I have a problem with the subscription list itself becoming untenable.

I have a budget, which is an excel file, that lists my fixed expenses. I add a row, select the frequency, and let the formula I wrote a while back work out how much discretionary funds are left. There are dozens of other software products out there that also serve this purpose as well as actual paper ledgers you could use instead.

Ahh but there's the rub. If I buy the software one time, I never have to think about it again and I never have to add it to a spreadsheet/peripheral software.

I get it now that folks absolutely loathe the idea of subscriptions - that too for a taskbar. In hindsight I too find it hideous but I wanted the pricing to reflect the effort that went into this - wrestling with the Window Server and Xcode for multiple weekends over the past months.

But hey, the masses have spoken - and a perpetual license it is. Vox populi, vox dei.

I don't think the notion of subscription is off-putting. It's just not a very natural fit for something that isn't a function of time or resources. This is just a better model for upgrades. If you make improvements later on, people will pay again.

For this particular situation, your risk probably isn't that people will stop paying. It's more likely that people like it enough that a free alternative pops up (it's not so different from rectangle and alttab.) You're probably better off taking the money up front.

Feedback from a potential customer: I despise 2-device limits. I used DEVONthink for a decade but dropped it because of that exact thing.

At home, I have a Mac Studio[0] set up in my office with my music stuff, and I'm writing this on my MacBoor Air[1] here on my lap in the living room. I also have a work laptop, although it's safely tucked away in my backback right now. My wife has an MBA, too, but that's hers and I don't mess with it. So I'm elbow-deep in Macs that are used solely by me, and I bounce between them regularly.

The 2-device limit is a dealbreaker for me. It's where I stop reading. I don't care if it cures cancer: I won't buy an app that makes me pick and choose which of the devices in my care I can use it on. I'm sympathetic to why vendors pick that limit. I get that you don't want me to buy a single license and spread it around my friends and work circles. That's completely reasonable and understandable. And yet, it completely breaks my use case. I bet I'm far from alone in this.

[0]A previous job let me keep it when I left.

[1]I bought to hack on personal projects instead of using [0], which was work-owned at the time.

You can purchase multiple licenses. If you can afford a dozen computers, you can afford a couple more licenses.

Very true! Completely irrelant here, because I only purchased one of those computers as you correctly noted, but true!

What's the alternative?

Trust and respect, which is a 2-way street. I've bought some relatively expensive apps (the pro version of nearly everything Omni Group makes, Things, etc. etc. etc.) and all of them let you install and use the apps on all of your computers. They're licensed per person, not per device. I despise technical controls on this for the same reason I despise DRM on physical media: it's an inconvenience to rightful owners and a temporary speed bump to pirates.

I'm not about to abuse my OmniFocus licenses, even though I could. They sold me a great product at a reasonable price, with permission to throw a copy on everything I own so I can use it no matter which chair I'm sitting at. They trust and respect me, and I trust and respect them.

C'mon, why not just open source it? Do you really expect to gain a sizeable following to get substantial cash flow? Most shareware went the way of oblivion.

If you'd open source it then there is at least the chance of gaining a community. And you'd be giving back to the community that you have benefitted from for decades.

I just make an open source version https://github.com/nagisa77/OpenBoringBar

Amazing, that's what I thought, this one should be easy to vibe, thanks for the effort.