USD$164.99 One-off payment | excl. tax
Get Version 2 of Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo and Affinity Publisher on
all operating systems, including iPad, for one low bundle price.
How about Cleanshot?
$29 One-Time Payment
One year of updates
Now let's look at Expressive:
Enjoy the benefits of our lifetime license and get access to all features and
upcoming updates with a one-off payment.
A business has continual costs, which at the minimum may just be the ability to support a single developer's adult life. This app is selling itself once per major version, which judging by some comments here is somewhat unappealing. Many people are justifiably sick of subscription payments. I am also assuming many people would not appreciate e.g. an ad-supported version of something like this app.
So, what does that leave in terms of realistic business options? Are there any examples out there of a software business that succeeds in supporting its own development while helping its customers feel like they are getting their money's worth?
This avoids games about what is or is not a "new version" or shipping minor updates as versions or any of that nonsense, it's just updates generally.
So... is it the real lifetime license? What about the next versions?
A new term such as 'All version [n] updates included' (or something less clunky) needs to be found. At least one could Google it and understand the proposition, if its meaning was not clear - but 'lifetime license' is massively deceptive.
[1] https://reddit.com/r/4kdownloadapps/comments/1hbmdpn/really_...
From the pricing page:
"Enjoy the benefits of our lifetime license and get access to all features and upcoming updates with a one-off payment"
msarca - it might be worth looking at the wording on CleanShot’s pricing page. I notice they avoid the word “lifetime” entirely. I wonder how much confusion they still get.
My product was originally offered as “one time purchase, one year of updates”, and the customer confusion/anger didn’t show up until I offered a discounted early renewal over Black Friday a few years back.
You keep talking past people.
The feedback they're sharing is very simple. It's not super clear from your sales copy if my purchase gets me access to all updates forever, or if those are limited to the current major version. The way you're intending it to work is simple, yes, but your sales copy doesn't reflect that.
It seems like an easily solvable problem, tweak your sales copy to clarify, but instead you keep digging your heels. Fine, it's your company. I'm not a lawyer, but generally I'd be worried about making a bunch of sales if its not clear to my customers what exactly their buying. I don't get why you'd take such a chance when the fix is so simple, but again, it's your company.
I think the pricing page is misleading, due to how prominent the "lifetime license" verbiage is, without also clarifying what the "lifetime" includes.
I know the terms of the license are clarified in the "Will I receive free updates" FAQ, but that text is hidden in a accordion, third item down, on the bottom half of the page. Whereas "lifetime license" is mentioned twice above the fold, and "pay once, use it forever" is the H1.
Not having a subscription is definitely a selling point. I bought the Affinity suite because of it. But IMHO "lifetime license" is not the way to communicate that.
In comparison check out the pricing page of Sublime Text, Ableton Live and Bitwig Studio. All of these apps have a similar pricing model. (one time payment with updates included for a period of time). https://www.bitwig.com/buy/ https://www.ableton.com/en/shop/ https://www.sublimehq.com/store/text
Sublime Text uses the words "once off purchase" and immediately clarifies "comes with 3 years of updates".
As a software buyer, the words "lifetime license" for anything non-trivial is actually a turn off. We all know software takes effort to maintain. I actually scrolled down to the FAQ to read the fineprint hoping to see Expressive wasn't a true "lifetime license" product because I think it increases the likely hood of software becoming unmaintained
Of course, in the meantime, they brought new features and regressions, but the core technology remained the same, so I have an excellent insight into that product. I would say that the main differentiator is the team behind the product. Ours is better, and your experience as a customer will also be better with us.
Maybe it would also be cool to allow 1-time download (many times, people just need to animate 1 SVG, but they don't wanna pay for full software). So let's say $10 for 1 SVG would be a great deal
iddan•6d ago
msarca•6d ago