

RubyMotion is 20% off until Sunday - enriquez
http://sites.fastspring.com/hipbyte/product/rubymotion

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prezjordan
Also, less advertised - if you're a student you can contact them for an 80%
discount (bringing the price down to $40). All you need is a valid ID.

You get 1-year of support, and you cannot sign your apps to sell them. In
order to do so - you'll need to cough up the remaining cost for a "full"
license.

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pbiggar
I would recommend that they move from a one-time-payment model to a monthly-
recurring-revenue model. Its a small market, $169 isn't that much money but is
a barrier to entry, and $9 a month is more likely to get people using it.

~~~
relix
No, you don't want to wake up one day, find out the company went bankrupt, and
after the month is up your source code is useless because the license isn't
renewed.

~~~
pbiggar
Did you read what happened to Sparrow? Basically the same complaints - without
recurring revenue they went bankrupt, and sure people had the software, but
they weren't going to get any updates so they were angry and felt it was now
useless.

~~~
relix
Three points:

\- Selling SaaS is very new, and almost still a "niche" especially for
consumer software like Sparrow. Software without subscriptions is still 99% of
what the consumers buy. It's definitely a viable market. You can't just take
one example (Sparrow) and then claim the whole traditional ecosystem of
software doesn't work. _Of course it does_.

\- This is professional stuff used to build businesses on. Already it's quite
risky to use this new tech made by a third party startup and invest hundres of
hours of developer time to build an app. If something goes wrong in the
future, for example Apple forbids RubyMotion apps, your investment (not in
cost of RubyMotion but in the cost of developers which is obviously orders of
magnitude higher) goes up in thin air. If you add the limitation that you need
to pay a monthly fee to keep using it to that, it increases the risk that
something might go wrong, decreasing the attractiveness of RubyMotion.

\- They already have recurring revenue, based on the fact that after one year
you need to pay half of the license fee again to get support and updates.

~~~
pbiggar
> "Already it's quite risky to use this new tech ..."

Which a price tag of $169 does not help. $9 a month is easy to sign up to.

> "They already have recurring revenue..."

Good, I missed that. There's a difference in how it's presented. The renewal
after a year isn't as good paying every month.

> "Software without subscriptions is still 99%"

I would love to hear where this figure came from - it seems intuitively wrong.
Reference?

~~~
relix
For a real business, $169 is peanuts. If it's $9 a month or $169 a year, that
won't make _any_ difference for a professional app developer. I'm sure you've
heard of the Adobe products with price tags of around $1000. That's the price
tag that software regularly goes for in this world. We're talking about
developers who earn upwards of $200 an hour. I'm sure you can appreciate how a
pro developer wouldn't blink an eyelash at $169.

The "added risk" of paying $169 is exactly zero. Anyone who buys this is
either a hobbyist or a business. The business is about to invest hundreds of
thousands of dollars into making apps using RubyMotion. The upfront cost of
$169 is peanuts.

Sure, hobbyists or amateurs might find it more attractive to try out that way,
but the extra cost in support and the decreased perceived value are probably
too big of a cost, and not worth it.

Ask your mom, dad, brother, sister, what software they pay for every month.
They'll probably answer "there is software you need to pay for every month?".
Mac OS X or Windows, both "regular" software without monthly payments. Office,
same thing. Almost _every_ app in the app store, software without monthly
payments. 99% of the games, software without monthly payments.

~~~
pbiggar
I think you might underestimate the realities of the developer-tools business.
I know how little $169 is compared to how much a fully loaded developer costs
(I make developer-tools-as-a-service: <https://circleci.com>), but its pretty
hard to convince people to see things how you want to see them.

If anyone understands SaaS though, its developers, so I disagree with your
last point.

