Afternoon everyone,
I wanted to go over a few points related to pricing, stats and the roadmap
Pricing
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Sync for Lemmy is completely free with ads (the same as Sync for Reddit)
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You can remove ads in the account picker or drawer for a one time fee of ~$20
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Sync Ultra also removes ads but it’s not required
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I’ll be working on regional prices over the coming weeks
There are now 24k installed users up from 100 the previous day!
I’m going to be spending the next few days going through all of the comments / messages and fixing any crashes.
As always thanks for the support and hope you’re liking Sync!
Lj
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Yeah man…I am a dev myself but $20 to remove ads is just too much, especially without regional pricing.
I’ll be working on this full time and plan to make this the best Lemmy app possible.
I think the pricing is fine if the quality matches it. Considering how much time we spend on our phones it could be great value for money.
I’m very curious to see how the advertising option works out for you, as currently I’m not aware of any lemmy sites with sustainable finance models.
I wouldn’t call it financially sustainable. It pays for the servers, not for the labor.
No offense to beehaw, they’re doing great work.
That level of transparency is incredible, lowkey considering making an account there…
They’re defederated with lemmy.world and https://sh.itjust.works/. It’s something to consider before joining
Also worth noting at the time they said it was temporary and due to the lack of sufficient mod tools available in Lemmy. If mod tools improve that could change. But yes, right now it’s definitely something to think about with world being a massive instance that m with a lot of larger communities.
I definitely wouldn’t, you’d lose out on half the content on lemmy
They like to keep a really tight walled garden. That’s why I left, I want to decide for myself which instances to block.
Will you be supporting kbin in the future?
£100 upgrade
/s before this blows up lol
You joke but the moment Sync supports at least my kbin account to login, I’m sending you that $100 lifetime ultra upgrade with love. Posted from kbin.social on the browser, because I can’t yet login on Sync for Lemmy.
Yeah, I’m sure of it. Wishing you all the best!
$20 once, for an app you’re going to use daily for the foreseeable future mind you, is not the unreasonable take that people on here seem to think it is.
You get what you pay for, and Sync has proven it’s track record with the Reddit app already. This isn’t just some random app dev asking for money on his bejeweled clone.
Agreed. $5 MAYBE, $20 is out to lunch. And a subscription model for full features? Nah get outta here with that, that MIGHT be worth $20. The direction app development has gone over the last few years is a huge disappointment
$5 as a one-time payment is not enough for a single developer to sustain his livelihood on.
And ultimately, “worth” is based on what the market decides.
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Many of us former Reddit Sync users requested that he make the app for Lemmy, so in a sense we do have a contractor type of relationship with him. Hence why many former Sync users are comfortable paying the amount. I think a lot of people who are complaining about the price are just not the target audience for Sync.
I think you’re mistaking value for cost. ljdawson doesn’t work for us and sync is not work for hire. Lawrence is not a contractor nor do we have an employer/employee relationship so we don’t owe him a wage for the work he has done or compensation for his time. We have a customer/vendor relationship, and the only thing that matters to the customer is the value of the end product that the vendor is trying to sell.
This is a fair response, and ultimately it is incumbent on the developer to create the value-add that justifies the cost.
I suppose my comment is directed at the sentiment that the developer is “greedy” or trying to swindle consumers in an immature market.
This is by far the best app for Lemmy. By a mile. It’s a lot faster and nicer looking. That said, pricing feels a little steep. Imagine being able to sustain your livelihood on making an app for Lemmy, an otherwise free service providing no additional content. It’s not like we are paying the persons who invest in all the infrastructure for the servers running the Lemmy instances. They provide for the actual service. If a part of the money went to instance servers it would feel way better. Because if they go down, so will Sync.
Not taking anything away from the massive work Lj is putting into this, but pricing do feel a tad off. If 1500 people subscribe he has a yearly income equal to a decent job. If he gets 5000 subs he will earn almost 100 000 dollars a year. Which in Sweden equals to about 2.5 times of a well paid job. That’s excluding ad revenue from everyone who don’t subscribe or pay for removing ads. Pricing can be fairer without compromising the livelihood of said dev. That’s all.
Wha? A yearly ultra sub is 15 bucks. 1500x15 is 22500. 5000 times is 75000.
And that’s not ‘the same as a full time job’, not by a long shot. Google takes its cut - what, 20%? Then you have income tax, insurances etc, another 20-30% at least, and so on. So, for 5000 subscriptions, he’s left with around 42k at the end of the day.
15 bucks? So the conversion rate to Swedish kronor is messed up then. Because my yearly fee is way more than that. If I earned 42k dollars and continued to live in my house with my family we would be insanely well off.
42k/yr is basically poverty in a US city
I’m pretty sure his calculations were based on the monthly price, as for me monthly shows up as 2.99 per month. I’ll also say that including income tax in your calculation is crazy. We all have to pay income tax, but the income told us when we get a job or see a job posting is gross income.
Other than that, if you want Sync for lemmy and willing to pay for it, that’s fair. I paid 3 bucks for Nova Prime years ago and I have used it everyday. It came with me to every new phone I owned. I also redesign my layout quite often using it. It doesn’t seem reasonable to me to pay that amount monthly when Nova Prime was a one time payment.
Nope. Yearly. But I used the pricing for me, in Sweden. Seems the conversion rate is a bit off. Because my price is 19 dollars per year and the price for Lifetime is at 117 dollars.
No app is worth that, sorry.
Depends on your country, really.
Yes, in Switzerland you’re also told gross income - yet that’s not the ‘real gross income’. There’s lots of other stuff your employer pays for you when you get hired somewhere. For example, in Switzerland, we have mandatory retirement contributions (not like social security, we also have a pension fund seperately from this), that has to be matched by an employer, 1:1.
It really depends on your country, but say in Switzerland, you have to earn a good 30-40% more money when self employed compared to being employed at a company to have the same net amount of money available at the end of the day.
That’s like saying imagine someone wanting to sustain themselves by running a public transport network. All they do is help you to get to and from work. How can they have so much hubris as to believe that’s worth anything?!
Exactly. Doing anything, if it requires work and provides value to you, has a value, and thus could be expected to be charged for. Ad-supported software has kinda ruined a lot of people’s perception of money and value, expecting everything to be free.
The fair pricing is what the market will tolerate. I’m not saying it’s 100% “justified”; even the dev understands that he needs to tweak it for other regions. But the value add is from the superiority of the app experience, which right now is much better than anything else available (for me; of course this is all subjective). In the future, perhaps other apps will achieve parity with Sync, at which time market forces will cause the developer to course correct on pricing.
I’ll also add that I purchased Sync for Reddit (Pro) for USD$2 nine years ago. If I get nine years out of Sync for Lemmy that’s a bargain at even 10 times the price (which is the current offering).
If he gets 5000 subs he will earn almost 100 000 dollars a year. Which in Sweden equals to about 2.5 times of a well paid job.
If that is the case, well then in some of the larger coastal areas in the U.S. such a salary is far below what a decent software developer can expect. Cost of living is very high in those areas.
Talking about prices and costs is very difficult in a global ecosystem, because even different regions of the same country can have significant differences in market that change the value of money, even setting aside currency exchange.
Whether the pricing is appropriate is purely subjective. I paid the 20 bucks, thank you for your work. Looking forward to see this app thrive, it already works super smooth!
Hope you do not take the inevitably rude comments to heart.
Initially, I didn’t have a problem with it, but I read some good points in other threads that it is far too expensive for those in undeveloped countries, and that there should be a sliding scale instead of a straight-up currency conversion.
Yup as mentioned I’ll be setting these by region over time. But it involves me individually tailoring the price to each country usually comparing it to some metric like the cost of a take away.
You could use the Big Mac Index. Yeah, that’s a thing.
Regional pricing is coming soon, hopefully that will help!
I just wanted to say I’m sorry for the backslash you’re getting for charging money.
I’m also sorry people expect it to be $1 because the Reddit app was $1 back in 1825. I genuinely believe it’s children complaining, because no functioning adult would complain about a price increase when rent has tripled or quadrupled since the $1 Reddit app. It’s also annoying to see that people think that saying they bought the Reddit app for $1 and enjoyed it for 10 years is an argument. It goes to show it was severely underpriced.
It must be frustrating to have that type of response. Lemmy users seem to be really entitled when it comes to software, and the response you’re getting scares me for the future. I really hope the Boost developer doesn’t cancel his app after seeing how entitled Lemmy users are being right now.
What frustrates me more is the people complaining are continuing to use the free open source apps. Like great, you already have an alternative you prefer. Shut up. Stop bringing others down.
I wish you the best. Thank you for choosing to develop for Lemmy. I have my eyes on Boost, but I’m gladly using your free tier for the time being.
Thanks again!
I paid 5 dollars back in 2016, and I was fully expecting to pay more for this version. 20 dollars for no ads is fine by me. However, I don’t feel like the 100 dollars for lifetime ultra is worth it. Maybe someday when I feel like those extra perks are worthwhile
What bothers me with this controversy is that it’s not clear for me how one can earn a living in the lemmy ecosystem if everything is FOSS. Also, one should understand that the app is in beta, but there was so much hype around that app.
they bought the Reddit app for $1 and enjoyed it for 10 years is an argument
Can you share a link for the $1 comment. I am not aware of reddit sync being $1.
Not full price but it was on sale at times for that cost.
Yep. I stand corrected. $1.01. Just check my payment history in Nov 2012.
edit: and this was full price during the early days, I think.
Damn…I paid $1.99 in 2013.
Under AUD$2 to AUD$34 is quite the leap, and more than double what I anticipated.
I was very happy to drop AUD$10-15, and I’m aware that what I paid in 20 dickity 13 was a steal.
Quadrupled app costs would have been a bargain in my eyes.
I’m fine with a price increase, but 4 times the price is quite the increase. Haven’t made up my mind if it’s worth it for me yet, if it was 5€ or maybe 10€ I would have immediately bought it.
The people complaining about the price are the people that truly have no understanding how much love and care goes into creating good software. 20 dollars to remove ads for however many hours sync is going to save me with searching for each instance is well worth the cost for supporting development in the future.
Beta 26 is already a MASSIVE improvement over Jerboa or the web client. Thanks for making this happen so fast!
As for the pricing, I was a paid Sync for Reddit user for YEARS. $20 is nothing for the countless hours of scrolling I got out of it.
I’ll repeat what I said in some other thread:
I loved the old app, I still love the new app, it’s a pleasure to use compared to the alternatives I’ve tried, and I find the ultra subscription rate both reasonable and worthwhile to support a product I truly enjoy.
Sync is good for me. There’s plenty of other options if it’s not good for you.
Please keep up the good work!
(シ_ _)シ
I just want to say thank you for getting Sync up and running on Lemmy. Please don’t let the toxic comments sour your day. I for one is really grateful for what you do.
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I don’t have 20 dollars to spend on removing ads for a mobile app. I also previously bought Sync for Reddit Pro. Why is the price so much higher for a client to a service that definitionally doesn’t have API charges?
Lemmy has far fewer users and the previous pricing model was not sustainable for a single developer who makes a living off this app.
It’s a lot for an app, but it’s something I use for a couple hours a day so it was honestly a no brainier for me. The initial cost is higher than a lot of apps but when I look at how many thousands of hours I got out of sync for reddit, the price evens out. Just something to consider.
Could you please post a screenshot that shows how in app ads look like? I haven’t seen a single one as for now.
I think the ads must either be disabled or broken at the moment. But at first, these Sponsored Content boxes were either video ads, or animated TEMU product ads. The ads are the size of the box. The first one shows up about 2 posts into your feed, with an additional ad every 15-20 posts.
in my opinion this ad format is much better than reddit or twitter or YT where they have the look of a post or video
My wishlist:
- Downvote counts
- Mod tools
https://github.com/laurencedawson/sync-for-lemmy/issues/128
https://github.com/laurencedawson/sync-for-lemmy/issues/137
I thought there was a catch all for moderator tools, but I can’t find it.
Going to have a stab at regionalising ad free now.
Reply to this with your country and I’ll regionalise the pricing there.
UK please.
😂
Canada Eh! 🍁
India.
1700 rs is just impossible to justify where the median salary is 900rs per day
Yikes. That’s as if Sync for Lemmy cost 250€ where I am.
Malaysia, because that’s 2 weeks of my lunch money.
Poland. It’s within EU but it’s not even remotely comparable to western Europe in terms of wages.
Nominally we pretty much make in PLN what Western Europeans make in EUR, except PLN is worth like 4 times less, so it’s 4 times more expensive in terms of wages and cost of living to us :c
turkey. Also while im at it could you maybe add some more font sizes? I want smth between extra large and huge. If we could select a specific number that would be even better. Props for the well designed app and can’t wait for the future (งツ)ว
Brazil
Sri Lanka, please. And thank you for your hard work. Seeing your Sync for Lemmy announcement in-app in Sync for Reddit is the reason I joined Lemmy.
Mexico
greece, also I have an idea about adding more icons to the bottom navigation Bar
Vietnam…thank u for the app :)
Philippines, thank you!
USA ;)
Mexico
France please ! And thank you so much for your work.
México :D
India please…
Ukraine
I’d say for Estonia it’s too expensive. I got it for 15 though.
Vietnam
Thailand
Brazil.
Are you also localising Ultra prices?
Germany 🙂
Chile
Austria
Portugal
Romania.
Australia
I was floored when I opened the beta and found that almost all existing features survived the transition. In a single month! You’re a monster that makes the rest of us developers look bad 😉
I know that there’s an active ongoing discussion about monetization models and I’m certain that there’s room for improvement… but at the end of the day you can’t make everyone happy. I just wanted you to know that, as a long-time fan, I sincerely appreciate what’s been accomplished here. Cheers! Don’t forget to take some well-deserved you time once things quiet down a little.
I guess a sensible question would be: What is the typical per-user income that the dev gets from ads – say in a year? Take that, multiply by 5 or 10, and it seems like that would be a reasonable one-time payment.
Maybe that’s $20. I don’t know.
But to me, twenty bucks seems high, compared to nearly any other mobile app. And there aren’t even servers to maintain, or API fees to pay. It’s just removing ads.
I paid for ad free because I want to help support this app and the developer.
However, I feel it’s going to be very hard for me to convince others to use Sync. I am a long time user and so I have loyalty and I understand the benefit and so the money is worth it to me. It’s also a nice way for me to give back after a decade of Sync for Reddit.
But I’m not sure I can convince newer folks with this price point.
That said, the app is great and I love it. Keep it up!
I started using sync for reddit a few months ago, I am convinced that this is one of the best android apps ever made.
It’s still amazing as a free app? You don’t have to convince people to pay $20 unless they want to support the dev
I try Sync since it got released, so for the past 48 h, on and off without paying any money. I haven’t had a single ad since then. I don’t use any VPN or ad blocker on my phone. Don’t know why that’s the case. Maybe because I have the appearance set to list?
Anyway, I really like the app! It really feels the most polished app by a mile to me. Yet, Voyager (as of now “only” a web app) feels also pretty polished, it just has a lot less things in the settings I can tweak.
As a former RIF user (and I really never used anything else on my phone for Reddit) it still feels a bit weird to hop apps but at the end of the day that’s the beauty of the Fediverse: there is just so much choice and if you like Sync enough you have plenty of ways to give money to the dev, just as there are ways to donate to devs of the other apps you like!
Sorry for the tangent!
True. The free version was fine. I tried it for a few hours. And when using list/compact view, I noticed I didn’t even see any ads lol.
But figured I would pay anyways because I wanted to support.
Once the ads are back up & running, the fact that many of them are video ads (at least they were before they disappeared) could be problematic for people on low-cost data plans.
What is the typical per-user income that the dev gets from ads – say in a year? Take that, multiply by 5 or 10, and it seems like that would be a reasonable one-time payment.
Pennies. People think you’re making a ton because some YouTubers make millions, but the reality is you get paid $0.006 per ad click.
I’m sure that’s true.
I mean, pricing at $20 right now for ad-free was probably 100% the right thing to do for the dev. There are clearly longtime hardcore fans who are happily running to pay much that for the app.
But at some point, those fans will all have paid their money. And that leaves people like me who’d gladly pay $5-10… but $20 just seems a bit too steep on principle. Until the price is slightly less steep, the dev only gets my pennies, instead of years-to-decades worth of my pennies all in one shot.
$20 did seem like a bit of a steep price at first, and took me a little by surprise, but I think the price is a little more than just for removing ads. The dev has spent a lot of time creating this app, and he will continue to work on it and update it in the future. We shouldn’t expect him to do it for free.
I think what makes the $20 is it’s to remove ads that the app itself puts forth. And like you said, $20 is pretty high compared to ad removal in other apps.
Apart from adding missing functionality (posting and searching), these are my top missing features at the moment:
- Setting to increase font size of replies you are typing
- Support for the link format [ Community Name ] ( /c/community @ instance )
- Support for full Markdown (
codeand spoiler don’t work well, for example) - Support for connecting to an unfederated community on a remote instance via search (like you would with ! community @ instance . tld on browser)
- Support for browsing all communities on a specific instance
There are more nice-to-haves I can think of but these seem pretty important.
I have one more thing I forgot to add actually: refresh rate of new replies in the inbox as well as how it is displayed. Sync seems to be quite slow when it comes to refreshing inbox. I’ve been jumping between apps a lot today comparing stuff like markdown support, and often I get an alert on another app, but have to manually refresh the Sync inbox to see I have replies.
I’d also like a ! indicator somewhere in the UI for new replies in your inbox that is visible no matter where you are currently (such as to the left of the Search 🔍 icon in the top bar).
I think the biggest complaints are about the tracking stuff. That was a surprise to me as a long time user.
Sync for Lemmy has the same privacy policy as Sync for Reddit.
I’d like to pay for an app where I’m not the product
Is there a possibility of a paid app which doesn’t include the sharing of my data?
To be fair it’s not like the dev himself is tracking you guys, it’s just how Google ads works. Nothing out of the ordinary.
Same. Glad it gets completely disabled once ads are gone.
Thanks for your work on converting Sync to use Lemmy! I’ve tried just about every App for Lemmy, and Sync seems to certainly be the most feature-filled one so far.
As far as pricing goes, I don’t see a problem with experimenting on price and seeing what people are willing to pay. To the people saying $20 is too much… we are talking about removing the main source of revenue in the app, forever. That’s a pretty tough thing to figure out the ‘right’ price for, and might take some experimentation. If I was the developer, you can bet I’d start the price high though, rather than too low.
Glad to see it live!
I agree that $20USD for ad-free is a bit high, but on the other hand I used Sync for Reddit for roughly 10 years and paid $2.50 at the time.
So I consider it a way to give back for the great experience I had in the past.
And we got used for mobile apps being dirt-cheap, but most of us don’t have any issue paying even more for sitting in a dirty movie theater for a 2½ hours movie with a popcorn and soft drink.
Yep - I bought sync way back in the day and paid less than $5 for it. Used it for years and years across multiple devices until I switched to iOS. I got my moneys worth for sure - $20 seems like a bargain.
That was my reasoning too. The $0.99 I paid for Reddit Sync Pro (before reddit made him change the name) in 2014.
