Ulysses Switches to Subscription
As of today, we’re changing Ulysses’ payment model. It’s still the same Ulysses, same features, same distribution, we’re just switching to subscription. For $4.99 per month or just $39.99 per year, you can now use Ulysses on all your Macs, iPads and iPhones, including sync. You no longer need to buy two separate versions for either platform – from now on, it’s just Ulysses, and you can use it wherever you want.
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We can finally offer a free, cross-platform trial. Ulysses can now be downloaded and fully tested for 14 days, on all devices, including sync, no price or strings attached.
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We are offering all our current customers a lifetime discount on Ulysses’ yearly plan (it’s 50% off the regular monthly subscription).
As with other recent switches to subscriptions, the Ulysses change seems to be accompanied by a price increase. The subscription is $40/year, while previously the Mac version was $45 and the iOS version was $25.
Both the monthly and the yearly subscriptions are auto-renewing.
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With the change to subscription, we changed the versioning scheme to better match the new model. We’re now increasing the version number for each new feature release. Ulysses has had 10 feature releases (1.0, 1.1, …) so far, so this is the 11ᵗʰ feature release. The next feature release will be version 12.
I am not exaggerating in saying that this was the hardest decision in our whole time as professional software developers. After all, we have a system which currently works — after 14 years we are still around, Ulysses is still “a thing”, it’s even going better than ever before, and there are no immediate signs which hint at a change coming soon.
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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.
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In-between such big point-releases, sales will often drop to a non-sustainable level. So it’s not that we’re getting rich during the development period, and even richer after each update. No. We’re actually loosing money during development. And so the longer it takes to ship an update, the riskier it becomes financially. We are, in fact, highly dependent on these sale spikes, in order to make money.
He doesn’t think upgrade pricing is the answer, in part because the way people update their devices has changed:
It’s perfectly obvious that the overall situation is the same for paid updates as for one-time purchases. The situation is less severe than with the paid-once system — the sales spikes after bigger releases will be much higher –, but after each release, sales will fall back to a similar level.
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And let’s just say you don’t update. You simply stay on the previous version, because you don’t think you need the new features, or because you find the update price not worth it. How long will this very version continue to work? On the same device and the same operating system… probably “forever”, sure. But does that really hold nowadays, when people get new phones every two years and OS updates are free?
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Ulysses, for example, had critical bugs on every new version of macOS and iOS that came out since we launched in 2013. Yes, we fixed them immediately, but the next device, the next OS, will break some stuff again. The old app will break eventually, there’s just no way around it. As soon as the user’s environment changes, old stuff breaks.
And with the iOS version only available via the App Store, there’s no practical way to stay with an old version—and a newer iOS version may not be able to sync with an older Mac version.
See also: MacRumors (forum), 9to5Mac, John Gruber, Shawn Blanc, Michael Rockwell, Adam C. Engst, Ben Sandofsky, Dan Counsell, Dr. Drang, Wojtek Pietrusiewicz, Joe Cieplinski, Charlie Sorrel, Alex Cranz, Matt Gemmell, Dan Counsell, Eddie Smith, Matt Gemmell, Core Intuition, Gopal Sharma.
Update (2017-08-14): Max Seelemann:
Adding subscription to Ulysses took us 7 months, with 1 man-year engineering, 1.5 man-years total effort. It’s 22k lines of production code.
It feels like most of that should have been handled by the App Store. So. Many. Pitfalls. Everywhere.
Update (2018-04-20): See also: ChartMogul.
Update (2018-08-31): Max Seelemann:
The amount of pain we’re going through by trying to run a cross-platform subscription business without accounts is mind-boggling.
I hate accounts, but for us that’d certainly have been faster and more reliable.
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No detail yet (ask Macoun 😉) but essentially we’re syncing receipts through iCloud.
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We also didn’t want to have them, as that’d leave the impression we’d also have user’s data. Which we never wanted to have. And it would still feel weird today. Data and license syncing through two different system...
