Airmail 26.037

The reaction around here was really different when Apple raised prices a fraction of this.

So exciting to ask a chatbot to search for invoices instead of just typing "invoices" in the search field. Very much worth the higher price.

Sadly, too many apps start out as $5-10/year and end up at $5-10/month.

At least with email you're going to use it multiple times a day. But that's a big price to ask when all of the competition — Apple Mail, Outlook, Gmail — is free.

Ouch. But "legal" (not that there was any implication here that it wasn't):

Developers who offer subscriptions can increase the price of a subscription without interrupting service only under certain specific conditions. If the increase does not exceed approximately USD $5 and 50% of the subscription price, or USD $50 and 50% for annual subscriptions, and where permitted by law, developers may change the price without interrupting service. Developers may do this no more than once per year.

MLB.tv screwed up a couple of years ago (afaict) marking an "until the end of the season" subscription as an extremely low price year-long subscription. I unintentionally signed up for the whole year. Great deal!

As the next mid-season rolled around, someone clued in and jacked the renewal up by a ton of money to more closely match the standard price rather than let us get another year for $19 or $29 or whatever it was, so the Apple email said something to the effect of, "Sign in to approve this price increase," because the increase was so large.

But as we got closer to the actual renewal date, MLB.tv clued in even more and marked it down to something that didn't require an action to renew, so maybe $29 + $50, but still a good deal.

This year the renewal finally hit full price. I tried playing chicken again, but it never dropped to a "renew without approving" price.

Here endth the only tangentially related story about the other end of Apple allowing sub prices to go up insanely quickly.

Also most free email clients ultimately stink. How are we still so far in the dark ages with the one app everyone still uses? But then I guess I answered my own question.

> This is a big increase in percentage terms.

This feels like a weird way to phrase this? I can accept that a $10/year subscription might not be profitable, but this comes off like “because we can” and “everyone else is doing it”. Just like how stores in the US used to the tariffs to justify across the board price increases regardless of whether or not they were actually affected by the tariffs significantly.

Heh, my first reaction was: What? Were they acquired by Bending Spoons?

Out of curiosity, I visited the Airmail website to see what was new… and was immediately greeted by a chatbot, before I'd even started to scroll down the page. WTF?

I did scroll down, and towards the bottom of the homepage they describe Airmail for Business. There's no subscription, no synching stuff to the cloud, no tracking. That stuff is just for the little people. (/sarcasm)

I just did the math, and Airmail Pro annually is just slightly less that what Fastmail charge annually to PROVIDE my email, even less because I'm paying them three years at a time. (£49/year vs £50.4/year.) Um, yikes!

"The reaction around here was really different when Apple raised prices a fraction of this."

You wrote this before anyone even had a chance to say something. But also, different situations. I'm pretty sure Bloop isn't a multinational corporation with immense power, billions and billions in the bank, and 50% gross margins.

You can't complain about the lack of good email clients and then also complain about paying 50 bucks for one for a year.

@Total The Apple hardware and services hikes don’t seem very analogous to me. Apple didn’t start out at lower prices than competitors and didn’t add a new free tier. Bloop isn’t (directly) affected by memory pricing. And I’m not sure which “reaction” you’re referring to.

@Kina Yeah, I’m kind of unhappy with how the phrasing came out, but I’m not sure how to say it better. I don’t know how profitable they are, but to me the main point is that (for whatever reason) this is the new normal for paid e-mail clients. They’re all expensive by historical terms but not, I think, in the big picture of things if you look at them as professional tools that you use every day. Yet it is quite a jump if you’d been on the old pricing for a decade.

@Plume Is there an economic term for this situation where there’s lots of free competition from companies that are selling something else, so there’s a smaller niche, so the product has to be more expensive?