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I think the bigger issue is that you can't afford a $20 one time fee for a highly polished app that will get a massive amount of usage. I know it's a tough economy but $20 isn't a crazy amount of money.
Here's the thing. I don't know if it will get a massive amount of usage. Lemmy is fine right now but not having the userbase that reddit has is brutal. I want to talk sports with people but all the sports communities are dead. If I look at an Orioles community the game threads have 12 comments all by bots giving pitching/scoring updates.
Give it time. What's important is that lemmy has hit critical mass and has many great clients that are far better than the Reddit ones. It will grow and not shrink. It's the long game, doesn't matter that it's not big enough to support sports communities yet, it will get there and it's still very early days on this platform.
Lemmy is already significantly more active than when I first joined, and that was only 2 months ago.
It's so weird how it DOES seem expensive for an app feature. But like you said in the grand scheme it's actually incredibly cheap. It's a meal at McDs!
A lot of apps charge money for barely anything at all, but in sync's case, think how much you use the app. I expect to get a ton of value out of lemmy clients.
The most I've ever paid for an app is $15 for a highly-featured launcher that is now literally the core element of my phone use. This pricing just does not make sense when compared to the rest of the Android ecosystem.
Additionally, I don't know if I would call it "highly polished." I'd say it looks fine and browsing feels, well, like browsing, but I used it for a couple days and comments seemed to be totally bugged. They were appearing out of order, disappearing seemingly randomly and I think some where even attaching to the wrong parents, because there were things I was reading that just didn't make any sense.
It's 22€ (24.50 USD) here. To the commenter who said that's "one MacDonald,'s meal", every single large McMenu here is under 10€. With the usual coupons, you're looking at the cost of McDonald's for my entire family, not just one meal.
I can still, comfortably, afford blowing that much money on an app. But it doesn't even get me any of the many "Ultra" features (that's 110€). Looking at the Ultra page, ljdawson has already made clear that almost all planned Lemmy quality of life features will be pay-gated.
It's also a huge gamble: we have no idea how financially viable Sync will be in a much smaller and far more hostile to non-FOSS apps, community. Heck, I opted out of tracking (like most EU-members of Lemmy would have) and the app isn't even loading any ads at all, the revenue generated for ljdawson is zero.
Ljdawson has already suspended development of the original Reddit client on at least one occasion even though it was massively successful. Don't think for a second he won't cut his losses and run if he doesn't consider the Lemmy client a financial success. The "lifetime" purchase might buy you another 10 years of maintained and polished usage, it might buy you six months. It's a gamble.
Instead of blowing the cost of a small (McDonald's) or a large (Amusement Park) family outing on my second-favorite former Reddit client, I'm waiting for Boost to come out, with hopefully slightly more sensible pricing.
I reckon since he mentioned the lack of regional pricing, he's probably from a developing country where 20 USD is a crazy amount of money for a Lemmy app. Whatever "side" you're on, I think regional pricing is an extremely reasonable request.
it is more than 20 for me
"highly polished"