subscriptions
Notability's subscription model is an insult
Ginger Labs’s Notability is a popular note-taking app for Apple computers. It’s a nice way for taking and organizing handwritten notes and syncing them to all your devices. This week its authors ruined it by switching from a pay-once model to a subscription rental in the most despicable way I’ve seen.
First, their only concession to existing paid users is that people who’ve bought a previous version get a year’s free subscription to the new version. After that, the app will revert to a broken “free version” which removes features those customers had paid for, like cross-device syncing and unlimited editing (more on this later). This would seem to violate Apple’s guidelines which say:
If you are changing your existing app to a subscription-based business model, you should not take away the primary functionality existing users have already paid for. For example, let customers who have already purchased a “full game unlock” continue to access the full game after you introduce a subscription model for new customers.
That’s incredibly shady. For comparison, when Day One switched to a subscription model, they respected existing customers by giving them a permanent license to use the new app in the same ways they had used the old one. Those customers wouldn’t get access to new paid features, but they could keep the features they’d purchased. I think that’s a reasonable and fair approach. Not so with Notability, though: unless you pony up for a subscription, after that first year the app will become mostly unusable.
Second, and incomprehensibly, Ginger Labs paid their engineers to incapacitate Notability in the most horrid way I know of. From the Notability Subscription FAQ:
What counts as an edit?
Edits are directly tied to your usage of the app and are counted as any changes you make in a session like handwriting, erasing, or adding text or media.Recording and modifying audio do not count as edits nor does adding or moving notes/pages.
If you’re using the free version of the app, you will be given an editing allowance each month. You can track the status of your remaining edits in the settings menu, and at any point can choose to subscribe to unlock unlimited editing.
That’s right: if someone who’d previously bought Notability doesn’t continue to pay its new rental fee, the app will count how many times they’ve made a change to a note and cut them off when they hit their limit. They are literally charging by the letter. Imagine a word processor that stopped working after you’d written too many words. That’s not a free version. It’s what we use to call “demoware” and it’s a giant insult to existing customers.
No thanks, Ginger Labs. You can keep the new Notability. There are far too many free and paid alternatives to put up with those abusive changes and limitations. I’m exporting all my notes to another system so that I can delete this abomination off all my devices.
Update: In a Fast Company article about the move, lead engineer Colin Gilboy from Ginger Labs said:
We want to make sure that people can’t just use Notability and make it all the way through med school for free. That would leave us without a business.
I have no words for the utter audacity of that statement writing off paid customers. No one was using Notability “for free”.
Update 2: Ginger Labs has announced that they’re “making some changes”:
Everyone who purchased Notability prior to our switch to subscription on November 1st, 2021 will have lifetime access to all existing features and any content previously purchased in the app.
That’s something, but doesn’t undo the damage. It takes a single terribly bad decision to lose customers’ trust. I won’t be fooled twice.
More apps lost to subscriptions
Two more apps I really like(d) have recently announced that they’re moving to subscription models: Fantastical and Paste. The Internet almost universally decided to stomp on the former’s announcement, but I’m not sure that the latter is widely popular enough to get a lot of people riled up. With rare exception, these moves are death knells for my usage of such apps. As I’ve written before, the bottom line is that apps have to offer good value to their users. To me, $40 per year for a pretty calendar does not offer good value. A clipboard manager which jumps from $15 once to $10 per year does not offer good value.
What these changes really do for me is nudge me out of complacency and into reevaluating my app choices. As it turns out, the built-in Calendar.app isn’t as pretty as Fantastical, but for $40 per year it’s gotten to be good enough. There are any number of clipboard managers - some inside apps I was already using, like Keyboard Maestro - that aren’t as nice as Paste, but for $10 per year they’re good enough. And so those moves to subscription models, which are always accompanied by long blog posts explaining how it’s really in my best interest, move me away from the apps I had liked and push me to check out the alternatives. What they almost never do is get me to switch to the desired Patreon-like financial model.
Merlin Mann described the category of little things that sit in the background and suck money or resources from you as eels attached to your neck. One is bad. Dozens are terrible. Well, I’m getting rid of my neck eels. There are very few apps I use that can’t be replaced. And when an app’s price suddenly skyrockets and stops offering good value, that’s exactly why I do.
App subscriptions must offer value
Software authors are increasingly switching to subscription models to make their work “sustainable”. Too often they’re forgetting to make a value proposition that helps their customers. Here’s a hint: if you have to write a Medium post explaining why I should support your new business model, you’re doing it wrong.
I understand why authors can’t afford to write an app and then offer free upgrades for the following decade. That’s a great way to cut off the income supply that keeps new development happening. Neither authors nor their customers want that! Creators want to be compensated for their time and users want up-to-date software with competitive features. Buying an application one time shouldn’t come with the expectation that I should get all the newest work for free, forever.
The alternative is not that purchasers are an endless font of cash and goodwill, though. A recent trend is for annual app subscriptions to cost roughly the same as buying a copy of the app each year. In the real world, no one does this and it’s not sustainable. If you want to move to a subscription model, your price has to make sense as a value proposition by itself. Customers don’t care about pretty words and guilt trips in long blog posts. They want a good deal from their own perspective.
From a customer’s point of view, the math is simple: your target annual fee is the previous price divided by the number of years I would have expected to keep a paid copy before upgrading. For instance, if your upgrades used to cost $40, and you released new paid major versions every two years, I can be convinced to subscribe at a rate of $20 per year. Anything beyond that is a price increase, and that increase must be justified exactly as if you were selling me a new copy instead of a monthly rental. That is, you can’t tack on “…and now with cloud sync!”, or “…for teams!”, or pack it with other features I won’t care about and expect that I’ll happily pay twice the old price.
1Password did this right: although their new “1Password Families” service costs more than their old software licenses, it offers lots of features that genuinely make it more useful. Smile Software did this wrong: their new annual TextExpander subscription service costs about the same as their previous one-time software licenses, but all of the new features were geared to a workflow that could not have been less attractive to me if they’d tried. They were asking me to pay a lot more and get nothing of value to me in return.
In summary, you want to make money. I want you to run a profitable business so that you’ll continue to make the software I enjoy. But you have to remember that while your app is your labor of love, for me it’s just a tool I use for work or play and it’s not my life’s ambition. It’s the one among several competitors that had the best value proposition. If that ever changes, I’ll re-evaluate and move on to one of the others. I’m frustrated that this is 101-level business class stuff, and we shouldn’t need to keep learning this lesson anew.