Why we’re switching Ulysses to Subscription

Today, we are switching Ulysses to a subscription model. The short story is this (tl;dr): Our users expect a continuously evolving high quality product — and subscription is the only way we can truly deliver on that expectation.

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Let’s map this onto Ulysses for a moment: If you bought Ulysses at its launch in April 2013, you will now have received nine major feature releases. For free, at no additional cost. At least 80% of that originally purchased app have since been scraped and replaced. Its functionality has quadrupled during the same time.

Each of these nine updates required a considerable amount of time on our part, which of course translates into a considerable amount of development cost. But with customers ever only paying for the development of the current version — how did we manage to finance new versions then?

I disagree with this. Wholeheartedly. With Ulysses giving major releases away for free, I guess I don’t know how they expected to make any money. When I was developing software, building new releases, patching them, and so on I charged for major releases and gave the patches/updates away for free.

Panic and Pixelmator both sell new versions (1.0, 2.0) and typically give updates (1.2, 2.5) away from what I recall. Seems to be working for them.

I’ve bought both Ulysses for macOS and for iOS and they’re decent apps. But I don’t use them regularly^[1] and so their new subscription model makes me cringe. I don’t wanna pay for app subscriptions unless I have them open often enough AND they’re so awesome they make it worth the monthly fee. Every time apps license with a subscription I’m like “no thanks.” I don’t care if that’s where the industry’s headed.

Case in point: Adobe’s got some great products but I won’t move to Creative Cloud, even more so when reading the criticisms. I’m in Photoshop and InDesign almost daily^[2] but I’m not paying $40 to use both those guys. $40 a month. I got enough bills.

Subscriptions are good for a service, not for a product.

#software #ulysses

1. Markdown seems more for nerds than writers. I have a novella in Ulysses and it won’t render as an eBook without screwing up the formatting. And also the linking in Markdown has never looked right to me. ↑

2. I would use Pixelmator full time over Photoshop but I just can’t. If I have a JPEG that I want to quickly crop, Pixelmator will do that but then when I go to save it wants to save it to its own PXM file format. Then I gotta go through the whole razze dazzle of saving as JPEG. And then after that I close the image and Pixelmator again wants me to save as a PXM. The horror. ↑