Avelon App

Hi, sorry for the late (and long) reply. You're right, $30 is definitely a lot to be asking for an app. I'll try to explain where I'm coming from, and why I've landed on this price & monetization model. If anyone have any suggestions on how I can improve things while considering my points as well I'm definitely open to discuss.

But this app is paywalling basic stuff like a comment jump button (everyone else has this for free), content filtering, video scrubbing

When I was working on this update I spent a lot of time considering which features were "essential" and which features were more convenience/nice-to-have features. Two of the bigger features I've decided should be free are multiple accounts & post creation, both of which have been paid features in other apps. I thought everyone having access to these was way more important than app themes or a smart jump button.

Everything that was free in the last version is still free, and of course there's a bunch of new non-pro stuff too. My intent with this update was not to paywall "basic" features, but to offer more hardcore users some extra niceties that in turn support development. I don't expect the majority of people to upgrade, which is totally fine. I'll still keep improving the app for everyone regardless.

make it a reasonable one time purchase for things that don’t cost you money (under $10 imo, $5 would’ve been an easy sell). If you want to justify a subscription model you are gonna need to build features that justify it

I get that the lifetime price is high, I really do. The #1 reason I'm going for this type of subscription model is that Lemmy is so small. Apps like Apollo easily had tens of thousands of users and could therefore charge way way less. For some context - if every single active Avelon user paid for a $5 upgrade, which I'm sure you'd agree is unreasonable, that'd still be barely enough to finance one month of development. That's it. I'm not saying this justifies the price, but Lemmy is still very niche, and with such a niche market the development cost will naturally be spread among much fewer users. With the slow growth of the Lemmy userbase a one-time purchase is very risky from my perspective, and I want Avelon to make sense over a long period of time. I think the devs of both sync (which is $99) and Bean (which is $50) realized this too.

I do believe Avelon can continue to play a part in lowering the barrier of entry to Lemmy and improving the platform as a whole by pushing for more high quality apps. I hope to see Lemmy continue to become the best link-aggregator platform ever, and as that happens prices will naturally decrease.