Does not recommend this product
@macguitar Flexibits has now just joined the sh*tlist of apps and services that start off with amazing problem-solving and innovation and yet still caught up in this well-known and horrendously unsustainable business operations model.
Unfortunately, it's a common milestone: the one big BIG bet: will they keep loving us?
You build something cool. You put everything in pleasing the user and in support and customer service. Everything goes in there - "we'll research and develop later" - and they love you. Slowly, you start thinking that love is all you need.. until you realise that a one-off charge doesn’t turn your business to live forever.
This is the when the sh*tlist (or sh*t-lost) moment downs: you start thinking about splitting that love and satisfaction -- that the user deposited with their first purchase -- into small strategic bits so that you can multiply against looming cash debility and unpleasant forecasts.
You then bet that people will keep loving you, so much so, that they will simply accept that. As quietly as possible. You may have even planned for some loss.
You believe that splitting everything into small parts, they will then gladly repay for a lot of it and, worse, disguised as a favour, an improvement, a GREAT thing for them.
Like other users here, I’ve been a very satisfied customer who’s paid for every incremental upgrade so far to my needs. If I'm perfectly honest, I paid for ONE functionality - natural language processing. Other than that, Apple or Google Calendar is just fine and Fantastical isn't replacing Doodle, Things, Basecamp, my Weather app, etc for me.
I’ll say it again: direct user apps and services have to stop acting as if they were high-scaled enterprise modelled solutions or even film and tv show streaming aggregators.
Subscriptions for versioning after a fixed one-off charge to cover (re)implementation is just a bad idea and the worst of practices. Why? Historically, You WILL get replaced. Quickly or slowly, but surely.
Great antagonising use case: Things.
Probably one of the best actually.
.. And you haven’t even noticed, but as soon as you put the subscription version out, I’ve already replaced you — without even blinking.
You say “I guess it wasn't really love then..”
You bet it was not.
Tada.