{"id":39081,"date":"2023-04-19T15:58:26","date_gmt":"2023-04-19T19:58:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=39081"},"modified":"2023-04-22T11:44:04","modified_gmt":"2023-04-22T15:44:04","slug":"price-increases-for-developer-tools","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2023\/04\/19\/price-increases-for-developer-tools\/","title":{"rendered":"Price Increases for Developer Tools"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sketch<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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We’re writing to let you know that we’re introducing a modest increase to the cost of license renewals from $99 to $120. The new price will come into effect the next time you renew your license, on or after 19 May 2023.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

We don’t take decisions like these lightly but, like everyone else, our running costs are increasing. Doing this helps us remain sustainable and deliver more new features and improvements. Even with these increases, you’ll find our pricing is still favorable compared to our competitors.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Florian Albrecht<\/a> (tweet<\/a>):<\/p>\n

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Very soon, we will be announcing Kaleidoscope 4 with many exciting new features. But before we share details about the new version, we want to outline our subscription pricing and upgrade options for existing customers.<\/p>\n

The new subscription price will be $14.99\/month or $99\/year ($8.25\/month). All existing customers will get the first year for half the price.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

We grew the company in order to work on features requests that require more engineering resources. And we have a roadmap that will make Kaleidoscope even more powerful.<\/p>\n

Transitioning from paid upgrades to subscription will allow us to follow through on this roadmap.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Sören<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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Kaleidoscope 1.0, 2010: ~$36 ($49.67 in 2023 dollars)<\/p>\n

Kaleidoscope 2.0, 2013: $69.99 ($90.38)<\/p>\n

Kaleidoscope 3.0, 2021: $149.99 ($166.52)<\/p>\n

Kaleidoscope 4.0, 2023: $99\/yr<\/p>\n

Feels like a big ask. OTOH, how do<\/em> you sustain a business around such a niche tool?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

It feels<\/em> weird because, say, BBEdit is only $49.99 for a perpetual license and about 2 years of feature updates. It does way<\/em> more than Kaleidoscope, and I spend more than 100x as much time in it. Or, put another way, Kaleidoscope is an expanded version of one of BBEdit’s features, for roughly 4x the price. Plus, there are free alternatives such as FileMerge. Yet that’s not a very useful way of looking at the situation. Kaleidoscope is<\/em> really good at what it does. For some people the alternatives would suffice, but for others this may be a niche, but it’s a very important one. If a niche product can’t get a lot more customers, the only option seems to be to charge more than the more mass-market products. That can work for a product that when you need it you really need it. As a fan of Kaleidoscope but a light user of it—I do most of my diffing in Tower, BBEdit, and Word—I’m not yet sure which group I’m in.<\/p>\n\n

The main choice, as I see it, is how much development to do. Perhaps one could charge less with fewer new features, built by fewer developers, who are maybe dividing their time among multiple apps. How many new features does the app need, anyway? It already does what I (think I) want; I mainly want it to keep working. But they have lots of ideas and are going in the opposite direction: charging more to support more development. They presumably have reason to expect that they can win over customers who already have perpetual licenses for Kaleidoscope 3.<\/p>\n\n

Another developer tool is Hopper<\/a>, which has gone from $19 to $45 per major update, to $45 and then $99 per year of updates. To me, it’s similar to Sketch and Kaleidoscope in that I don’t really need a lot of new features, and sometimes I go weeks between uses, but I wouldn’t want to be without it. Hopper is a bit different, though, in that it seems to require regular updates to keep working with Apple’s OS and compiler changes. Those are probably best thought of as new features. Whereas, with Sketch I would expect less breakage due to Apple. The main reason I keep upgrading it is that my designer saves files using the latest version, and then the app scares me into thinking that they won’t work properly if I’m using an older one.<\/p>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n