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Honestly that’s fair. There’s way less of a subscriber base here, development time is expensive, and you need to foresee circumstances for the future (look how many people Apollo dev had to refund). Sync is also such a great app, I’m personally just using the ad version at the moment on my android phone (and this is from Memmy on iOS). Sync is still one of the best apps I’ve ever used and keep an android phone just for it.
How does less of a subscriber base lead to way more expensive price? Unless the dev is greedy and wanting to suck the souls of all the early adopters.
Well, let's just do the math: the original pro version has over 100,000 downloads over it's 10 years of life. At $3, that means the dev earn at least $300,000 over 10 years, minus 30% play store fee. Let's say they earn at least $27,000 per year, which is almost twice the minimum wage at the very least.
Now lets do the math for Lemmy version: some metrics say we have 1 million users. Let's assume 10% of them are active users (100,000), and among those active users, lets assume 10% of them (10,000) buy Sync for Lemmy at $3 (the original price) one time purchase (a very generous estimate). This means the dev will get $27,000 (after 30% cut from play store) from those users, ever. Even more likely is only less than 1% of active users buy it, which means the dev would earn something like $3000. Even if they sell it for $20 it's likely they still won't earn the same amount as the old Reddit version.
So yeah, I don't think the dev is greedy. In fact, I'm concerned that they won't get enough money to earn their living and we'll all have to go back to Jerboa (it's good though, but not as good as sync).
$3? I paid $40 cdn for Sync lifetime in May 2022. Toss an extra zero on some of your numbers there, it might have been $3 initially but it definitely went up.
3x the price for the lemmy edition is a steep hike.
I think some lines got confused between the calculations being originally done. The person you replied to was referring to the price of Sync Pro (Removed ads) whereas I'm pretty sure you and the original commenter are referring to Sync Ultra (extra features).
Sync Pro was certainly never that high, but Ultra was for the lifetime purchase option.
It was 1$ at the beginning for the pro version.
Can't estimate how much sales the dev actually got on ultra lifetime because the sales data is not public. This is just an estimate for sync pro.
Explained way better than I hahah. Comparatively, developers of his caliber should be making $200k a year salary (though the market has cooled recently).
I guess best way to put it is imagine Sync Reddit had 10,000 subscribers with each paying $10 lifetime. You’re netting $100,000 for those signups.
Now the dev time hasn’t changed (in fact I’d say it actually increased as he has to research and test with a brand new API), and now his potential subscribers have decreased dramatically. To accommodate for that you need to charge a lot more as the developer is expecting only ~1000 subscribers.