Sorry, chief. I've been a macOS dev for 10 years now. I think charging a subscription for a menubar app with a singular use-case is just the absolute worst.
"not one time payment because I don't know what would the right price be for supporting an app for years to come and still have people willing to pay for it"
The right price would be about $5-10. If you want to be kind, $0.
I hear the feedback but no way I'm doing get payed once support forever or give away for free support forever. I've done these mistakes it the past, I might re-consider if I get rich or something and start donating my time to passion projects.
Even the simplest apps end up having problems, even the perfect one can break when something in the environment changes. Working on even the simplest app is always a full time job, not because you write code 40hr/week but because you need to have you attention on it, retain the information about the architecture and more importantly the "gotchas". If you don't, you will end up spending hours and days for the simplest things to study your code and re-discover everything again so you can work on it.
Or maybe that's just me, maybe other people can work on 10 projects making simultaneously and fix a code they wrote months ago in seconds. If that's the case, those people should make all the apps so we can use em for cheap or free and we can go do better things with our lives.
I can experiment with the subscription pricing though.
If someone I employed said that something “is a full-time job because I need to keep myself familiar”, I’d really have to hold in my laugh of disbelief, to say the least.
You’ve taken the “people should pay ongoing for ongoing work” discourse and applied it beyond the degree to which most intend.
Even if I wasn’t already using a perfectly adequate and free menu bar application to do exactly this, there’s no chance in hell that I’d ever see an apparent lack of documentation ability as justification for an ongoing subscription for this.
This is all ignoring the fact that you’d very likely need to maintain this application in its entirety to continue scratching your own itch.
I pay for a lot of software, including subscriptions. I am almost always happy to do so. This is a rare occurrence where it comes across as a piss-take.
I'm sorry, I can't switch from project to project at whim and keeping up with a project is something continuous for me.
Those who believe that it's a better practice to do it some other way should just do it. I've done my fair share of free apps, browser extensions etc back in the day. Not doing it again. I'm of course open to different business models where the app can be free and recoup the cost in some other way but so far haven't heard any suggestions.
It is alright if a project "fails" if I can't do free work or go through the agony of working on code I moved on long ago.
And this one? If that's right why I'm working on bugfix now? Is it because of the subscription model? If it was one time fee, am I going to just ignore the bugfix requests?
Me, I guess. I've released MacOS apps for free and never felt any expectation to provide indefinite support. They do what they are supposed to do and people still use them.
"not one time payment because I don't know what would the right price be for supporting an app for years to come and still have people willing to pay for it"
The right price would be about $5-10. If you want to be kind, $0.