I’ve been purchasing software since the late 1970 (yes, before a lot of you were even a glimmer in your Dad’ eye…). I go back to the copied floppy disk in with a few paper sheets stapled together in a zip-lock baggie. Believe me a lot of software that was fantastic over the past 50 years has come and gone with very few staying around long enough to become a important part of my workflow. The business model for being able to put roof over your head, pay your employees for development, testing and support has gotten a lot more expensive.
For me, DEVONThink Pro has been one of my constants on my Mac. It’s the first application I open each day and it’s the place I put ‘my world’. In previous releases (ie. 1 & 2) the user interface was a little ‘clunky’ but in v3 it’s finally matured to the point where access to the underlying power is accessible to mere mortals.
DTTG is a similar story, good first idea but not so great then upgrades to something I also use daily on my IOS devices.
When the first subscription plan came out (if you remember, it was Adobe) I rebelled against buying in to it. I did then and still do think Adobe is incredibly greedy when there were other choices out there. They inadvertently forced me to consider their competitors. I’ve been happy to use Capture One every since and (surprisingly enough) are willing to pay them an annual fee as the product is so superior to what Adobe offers and the improvements they make all the time are incredible.
Fast forward to DEVONThink v2.0 and the very long update cycle time until v3 came out. Out of frustration I tried all the other competitors out there looking for something that worked as well. During my search, DEVONThink v3.0 came out and I have been immensely happy with the UI changes and feature improvements. There’s nothing else out there in the same league. The additions and improvements in the incremental updates since first resale have been great.
There are other applications I have agreed to support with a subscription (Ulysses, Drafts, OverCast, etc) all because (1) they are essential to my digital life, (2) they are ‘best in class’, (3) the subscription fee is not ‘in your face’ but reasonable and (4) the people behind the products are nice guys build applications that improve my day.
I can tell you with certainty and I support these applications because they are essential to me and I’ve seen lots of good applications go unsupported and finally dropped over the years. I don’t want to see that happen to DEVONThink products.
Let me ask how many of you subscribe to Netflicks? Disney+, Apple Music (for Apple One theses days), Spotify, etc.
What’s the issue with supporting a product you use all the time with a similar business model???
@BLUEFROG make the subscription reasonable, give people time to adapt, give them an incentive to subscribe, dedicate you and your team to building great new features or improvements to old features and don’t worry about the people who complain about it. They’re less likely to understand why you are taking this route.