Hacker News Reader

Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

Hundreds of thousands of dollars to create in app subscriptions? There are many indy developers that have done that as a one man operation.

View on HN

I said dollars, not hours. I stand by that estimate.

Right now there's no mobile-first onboarding flow. That's a completely new thing they'll have to build. They'll also need to update all of their code that checks subscriptions, handles dunning, etc., to now work with multiple billing providers. So yeah, it's going to take a lot of time, which is a lot of dollars.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars to do in app purchases. As an example, do you really think Marco Arment - sole creator of Instapaper before he sold it, The Magazine, and now Overcast spent “hundreds of thousands of dollars” just to create in app purchases?

evan_ is thinking in terms of "What would it cost to get a bunch of depressed FAANG engineers to code this as part of their day job?", and you're thinking in terms of "How many packages of instant ramen will a motivated entrepreneur have to eat while he codes this in his parents' basement?"

Both valid perspectives IMO.

Well, Marco made a few million from the sell of Tumblr to Yahoo and he is one of three hosts on either the most popular Apple related podcast or the second most popular podcast. I don’t think he’s a struggling entrepreneur.

If you're gonna use him for your argument you can listen to Marco's actual thoughts about this on the episode of Accidental Tech Podcast that dropped today, I won't spoil it but he's not on board.

I didn’t say he was onboard with the decision. I am not onboard with the decision. I said it’s a gross exaggeration to think a competent iOS developer couldn’t get in app purchasing working in an evening.

Turning on the Wallet entitlement will take like 10 seconds, I don't know how long it'll take to build the rest of the subscription stuff but probably not a long time. You're ignoring that they are going to have to update all of their backend billing code to support two different billing providers, and design and build a mobile onboarding flow in the app. Then they have to support those things going forward.

They obviously knew that Apple Pay subscriptions were an option when they were whiteboarding the product, and they decided to not do them. That says to me that they weighed the options, did some math, and decided that the numbers worked better if they didn't spend time on that, and kept 100% of the money.

They weighed the option of not having to pay 30% and (understandably) didn’t want to do it. If a company run by the creator of Ruby on Rails can’t do that without spending “hundreds of thousands” of dollars they are grossly incompetent. I doubt that they are.

wasting a month to implement it and maintaining two different billing systems so I can pay the apple tax? really?????

A month? What type of piss poor developers do you think BaseCamp have that it takes a month to implement a billing system? This is like “My First Program” level of complexity.

it sucks pretty bad though

Reply on news.ycombinator.com