> the company switched to a $40 a year annual subscription, and as the dozens of angry reviews and comments illustrate, that price is vastly out of proportion from the cost of providing the software
As a software (SaaS) developer, I find this comment outright bizarre. I find it is hard to make a living with $50/month subscriptions, if you write niche software (and believe me, you DO write niche software, you are not Dropbox), much less support an entire company.
Have you actually done the numbers before writing that "price is vastly out of proportion"? Just take the total cost (roughly 2x salary) of several people, divide by that $40/year and see how many subscriptions you come up with. I'm getting ~25000 subscriptions for 5 employees, just to break even, and we haven't even touched the marketing required to get 25000 subscriptions.
> that price is vastly out of proportion from the cost of providing the software
Furthermore, only devs complain about the "proportion of providing the software". Didn't especially Indie devs here on HN take their time to learn the lessons of value-based pricing?
I do charge monthly for my app. It's 30 bucks a year for a B2C app. Expensive some might say, fair for others. But I can at least confidently tell that most users use my app every single day. And people who won't use it for more than a few months came away way cheaper than if the one-time-fee was 30-40 bucks to start with.
Oh and providing an app as a one-time-fee for $5 or some ridiculous undervalued price that is considered "acceptable" simply doesn't work in niches.
I think that most armchair-businesspeople underestimate the costs of running a business and overestimate the number of paying customers. It is particularly ironic, because they both do not want to pay for software themselves, and also think that masses of other people do want to pay for software.
People tend to think that the costs of a software business are just the time of the single developer that writes the software. And they also calculate the cost of that time as what developers actually get as their salary. But this is not how you run a business, not by a long shot.
This gap in understanding has been widening recently, because of the completely unsustainable app store pricing.
Have you considered that perhaps a fucking text editor doesn't need a team of five employees? This isn't a brain-surgery guidance program, it's a Markdown text editor that uses a sync system written and operated by somebody else.
Users are balking at the price because it's garbage to expect them to support some gigantic business for a simple thing. This is very common (1Password has over 75 employees!!!) and the sense of entitlement developers have to try to force their users to support a grandiose business, no matter how bloated and unnecessary the people are, isn't sustainable.
It seems to me that you haven't written an application of similar complexity. Also, Ulysses is not one app, it's a Mac app and two mobile apps, for iPhone and iPad, yes they are quite different. Have you actually used the app? Seen the customizable theming system? The export to PDF/Text/ePub/docx/HTML? The way you can rearrange and group sheets? The smart folder system? And most of that is present in the mobile apps, too.
You are underestimating the complexity of writing, maintaining, documenting, supporting and marketing apps of this size. I think my guess of ~5 people is about right, they might be able to do it with a smaller team, but probably not less than 3. I'd say 2 developers and one person to do marketing/support is a minimum.
As a software (SaaS) developer, I find this comment outright bizarre. I find it is hard to make a living with $50/month subscriptions, if you write niche software (and believe me, you DO write niche software, you are not Dropbox), much less support an entire company.
Have you actually done the numbers before writing that "price is vastly out of proportion"? Just take the total cost (roughly 2x salary) of several people, divide by that $40/year and see how many subscriptions you come up with. I'm getting ~25000 subscriptions for 5 employees, just to break even, and we haven't even touched the marketing required to get 25000 subscriptions.