What users want is the same thing consumers of products have wanted forever: to pay the least and get the most they can.

The whole "free with in-app purchases" model was driven by users' unwillingness to pay for apps. So in some sense this nickel-and-dime thing is a self-inflicted wound. On the other hand, (we) developers ought to be smart enough to figure out how to handle that.

Evernote does well, because it offers ongoing value for that subscription fee. That's the key - are you offering a lot of value? If so, then subscription fees are fine. If not, then you feel like you are being nickle and dimed. Other obvious candidates (some of which don't charge) for valuable subscription are Economist, NYT, WSJ, gmail, whatsapp.

And then there is that third class of App, the ones where subscriptions don't offer much value, but honestly, we use the apps so often, we're happy to pay to support them (Overcast, Tweetbot, MyFitnessPal are ones I would put in this class)

I'm not sure Evernote is actually doing that well. I find their product useful but they did lay off about 20% of their workforce and closed 3 of their offices.

They're also facing stiffer competition from Microsoft with OneNote and this year's Evernote importers for both Windows and Mac they released which seems to be quite popular, which they might've made worse themselves by clamping down so much on their free users and the relatively limited data quota's on any of their subscriptions. 6$ a month is a lot of money, for barely 3$ more I can get a full Office 365 subscription including a truck ton of Skype credits and a TB of storage with OneNote providing a fair amount of the functionality Evernote provides. I wonder how long people will continue to be willing to pay for it, especially considering it doesn't seem to be evolving much as a product.

The people that I know who use Evernote, basically use it for everything - Taxes, Accounting, Receipts, Note Taking, Journaling. For those people, $72 a year is nothing. It would be nice to see a bit more development in the product, but in the core of the product -things like searching.

Agreed that Office 365 is a serious competitor to Evernote, but the existing dedicated customer base of Evernote is unlikely to go anywhere. Kind of like those people who paid AOL dialup fee's for 10 years after the Internet came online.

Exit might be to just sell off the business/customer base to Microsoft, and have them all folded into Office 365 - until then, I'm happy with what they offer.

OneNote is just awesome. I use it for everything... I own and mac and use android.

> And then there is that third class of App, the ones where subscriptions don't offer much value, but honestly, we use the apps so often, we're happy to pay to support them (Overcast, Tweetbot, MyFitnessPal are ones I would put in this class)

The problem is most indie apps fall into this category. Useful, but not necessarily useful enough to pay a subscription.

If you think that you will attract enough new customers that you will make more money under a subscription model than a traditional paid model, there is no reason to keep the existing users happy -- if they leave, they have already paid you all they were ever willing to pay, so you aren't missing out on any money from them. (If they aren't willing to pay for a subscription, they probably wouldn't have paid a one-time fee for the next version of the product either. These are the kind of people who buy once and don't upgrade.) Even if they switch to a competitor's product, it's not like you lost any money you would have gotten from them.

I disagree with your statement about paying users who will not pay for a subscription. I am one of them. I hate Utility Apps as a Service for a litany of reasons. I am, however, eager and willing to pay as much as or more than a subscription price to own software that I use. I don't want to open my notes app, text editor, TextExpander, or password manager one day and find out it is not working. I want to know that if my system never changes, I can continue to use the current version of software without worrying about it not working because I didn't pay my rent.

This is the analogy I use: if I am drilling holes every weekend for three months, I am going to buy a drill, not rent one evey Saturday and pay as much in rent as I would to own it. And when I own that drill, I expect it to work for at minimum 12-18 months (warranty/devleopment) and at that point, if something goes wrong (massive OS changes) or there is a fancier drill, I will buy it if that is worth it to me.

The peace of mind of owning software is more important to me than a reduced cost / continual upgrade of renting it. I will always look for software that sells me a license over one that doesn't.

You make a good point, although I don't think I would necessarily agree that just because a user isn't willing to pay a subscription, they also wouldn't be willing to pay for an upgrade. Presumably, a new version of a product has new features that act as an incentive to pay the upgrade cost. A subscription, which is recurring and indefinite, does not, and is therefore a much harder pill to swallow.

It wouldn't be an issue if existing customers were grandfathered into staying in the original free plan, and only new customers had to pay.

The issue here is that a user that paid for your app many years ago continues to use up sync resources without providing any additional revenue. Maybe you'll be able to convert enough new users to subsidize the cost of the existing ones, but maybe not.

I think the alternative of issuing regular paid upgrades makes more sense for productivity apps. You get recurring revenue, but it's tied to an incentive (new features) to pay the upgrade cost.

The only problem is that the App Store doesn't really have a great method for issuing paid upgrades. You basically have to release a whole new app.