$17/yr feels crazy expensive. After only a few years it's the price of a AAA video game which obviously has an order of magnitude more development put into it. The money wouldn't even be going towards Lemmy where the real costs are since they are the ones actually hosting it all...
Apps used to be, what, $5? Now everything's a subscription and you end up paying 10x as much money if you use the app for just a few years. I will never buy into the subscription model for services that used to be single-payment. Never.
I'd rather it be that then what we used to deal with.. 6 month old apps that never got any more updates because the dev has no incentive to keep developing it.
Ultimately if it earns more money, people will do it, and I can't blame people for wanting to earn more money because I'm sure most of us would do the same in that position. Like sure £1.99 to perma remove ads is great but I'm sure you can't retire on that as a dev lol.
$17 is almost 20% less than it will cost me to see OPPENHEIMER in 70mm IMAX. The former lasts a year, the latter 3 hours. Which will be more engaging? 🤔
How much of that ticket price went to the projectionist? I feel that would be the equivalent of Sync in this comparison since the actual hosting and creation of the content is elsewhere, Sync is just one person who shows it to you
Subscription models only make sense for an app/service that have recurring costs.
In the case of Lemmy apps, the instances are the ones with recurring hosting costs, not the apps.
If an app doesn’t have recurring hosting costs, it only makes sense to have one up front payment and then maybe in app purchases to pay for new features going forward.
Subscription models for an app that’s not hosting anything is just the dev wanting a constant revenue stream, no matter how they try to word it.