As I mentioned in my last issue and in this week's YouTube video, I am moving away from helping developers get a job and instead focusing on how to help developers earn an income away from a traditional 9 to 5.
With the developer job market as it is at the moment, I think every developer could do with some additional income on the side as a safety net should they get laid off.
I am not an expert at this, so naturally I need to “practise what I preach”.
Rather than start a brand-new project, I figured I would look to improve one of the projects I already started. Back in March I shared the iOS app I built for my wife with the help of Cursor. I have been adding small improvements, but I have kept it in beta for now.
The main reason for making the app was because we didn't like any of the apps that were on the market, and they were all quite expensive.
I understand that everyone wants recurring income but charging £4.99/month for a habit tracking app seems a bit steep to me.
As a consumer I am sick of everything being a subscription and I am sure that is the case for others too.
For some applications it makes sense. If by a customer using your product it will mean a recurring cost for you then it makes perfect sense to pass this on to the customer. For apps that run completely locally I don't think a recurring subscription is fair.
For a perfect example of what not to do, look no further than Adobe.
I did originally buy Adobe Photoshop CS5 when I was at university. It was a one time fee and I only needed to pay again if I wanted the newer version. Now the only option is to pay £22/month for Photoshop and as I found out when I cancelled my plan, they also charge you a £20 cancellation fee!
My plan was to move to Affinity which charged a one-off fee to use the current version. If you wanted to upgrade to a newer version then you pay a discounted upgrade fee.
Affinity seems to be going through a transition at the moment after being acquired by Canva. They have completely stopped sales of their product until 30th October. The r/Affinity Subreddit is full of customers praying they don't change to a subscription model.
It is the same for other applications as well. Take Microsoft 365 for example. I would quite happily use Office from 10 years ago, after all it hasn't changed much, but instead you are forced to pay a monthly subscription to use it.
Fair pricing models #
For all my applications I want the pricing to be fair for consumers. Here are the pricing models I am considering for my apps:
- Offline mobile apps: One time app fee
- Mobile apps with an API backend: Yearly fee or monthly depending on the cost.
- Offline desktop software: One time fee for the current version and all minor updates. Upgrade discount for all major versions.
- Desktop software with an API backend: Monthly fee
- SaaS application: Monthly fee
There isn't much difference between desktop software that does everything in the cloud and a SaaS application. If I am having to pay monthly for infrastructure it makes sense that this cost is included in the price.
For large corporations with hundreds or thousands of employees, one time payments aren't really viable but for solo devs I am sure it would be profitable enough to earn a living.
Let me know what you think about these pricing structures and whether you are fed up with everything being a subscription like I am.
❤️ Picks of the Week #
👾 Game — A WebGL game where you deliver messages on a tiny planet — I am always amazed at what can be done in the browser when it comes to games. This looks like a fun game to play.
📝 Article — Understanding, not slop, is what’s interesting about LLMs — Being able to write out what you want and have the computer understand it feels like science fiction to me.
📝 Article — Indefinite Backpack Travel — Seeing posts like this makes me realise how much stuff I have accumulated. My family loves books and so naturally we have hundreds of them filling up our house. I also have various tech items and other knick-knacks that I enjoy. What it must be like to live with just a backpack I can't imagine. It would certainly be cheaper.
📝 Article — Blog Feeds — I am a big fan of RSS feeds, I read mine everyday. It seems a much healthier way to consume content.
📝 Article — The UK is still trying to backdoor encryption for Apple users — I hope the Linux phone becomes mainstream. We desperately need an option that isn't Apple or Google.
📝 Article — Ambigr.am — I first heard about ambigrams after reading Angels and Demons by Dan Brown. I think they are really cool.
📝 Article — attitudes around quitting your job — I have certainly considered quitting in the last few months even though from all angles I have quite a cushy job at the moment. You shouldn't feel guilty aspiring for something better even if you have the job others would dream of.
📝 Article — Why is everything so scalable? — When you start building things by yourself you do need to get out of the large scale mindset. You don't need highly scalable microservices until you have scaling problems. Focus on getting some customers first.
📝 Article — Vibing a non-trivial Ghostty feature — I rarely use AI to build out whole features. I mostly get it to work on one file at a time to recommend refactoring or write tests. It is interesting to see how others are using it through and how much they are spending.
📝 Article — Anthropic's Prompt Engineering Tutorial — AI is only as good as it's inputs. Obviously part of this is the data it is trained on which you can't control, but you can at least learn how to write prompts properly. There are some good examples here on how to get AI to respond in the way you want.
📝 Article — Leaving serverless led to performance improvement and a simplified architecture — I have found this at other companies I have worked for as well. There is a certain threshold you get to with serverless where it would be cheaper and more performant just to run it on VM.
🛠️ Tool — Halloy – Modern IRC client — It has been a very long time since I last used IRC, but it is still going strong. I might have to try it out again as this IRC client looks really nice.
📝 Article — I almost got hacked by a 'job interview' — I know a lot of you might be looking for jobs at the moment. Beware of the scammers!
🛠️ Tool — Zed is now available on Windows — I really like Zed and I use it for all my personal projects. I don't think it is quite ready for mainstream yet as there are a few languages and file types that aren't supported, but it is getting better all the time.
📝 Article — Migrating from AWS to Hetzner — I use Hetzner for hosting some applications for my paid members such as video hosting and my git server. It is only costing me around £20 a month, and I am nowhere near any CPU or memory limits.
👨💻 Latest from me #
🎬 YouTube — Time for a change... — It feels good to get back into making videos again. I am already planning the next video which should come out early next month.
Top comments (0)