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Comment by j-pb | Hacker News Reader

Looks like it's a single guy, that has been a mac dev for quite some time, developing Letter Opener (https://winmail.help/)

I love the quote at the end of the page: "Made with a special for winmail.dat files."

I'm a bit worried that he doesn't have the manpower to push kaleidoscope forward, but tbh I wouldn't mind paying a small subscription fee for having it maintained, working on folders, e.t.c.

I really want the high quality mac software back that we had 10-15 years ago. And I wouldn't mind paying for it, even if it's more than the ridiculous 1$ one time handout that we've somehow accepted as normal.

So good luck to Christopher!

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Thx j-pb! I read about the problem with working on folders in a couple of reviews, but never ran into it myself. Could you contact me at support@kaleidoscope.app so we can go into more details? Cheers, Christopher

As someone who has made indie Mac apps for a living, it's a tough market.

I've done well and made good money on my own, but launching a new Mac only desktop product these days without a subscription component is hard. Launching one without subscription is even harder, because your revenue is one off.

Apps that are not extremely mainstream are bound to make just a few thousand or a few tens of thousands a year. That is likely not enough to build out a proper app dev team.

What about starting With one off and switching to subscription? That appears to be the trend right now in the Apple ecosystem at least. I’ve abandoned some apps and subscribed to some as more keep doing that shift.

I wonder if starting off and growing a bit by being one off the switching wouldn’t be better business. Of course that strategy is considered repugnant by many. But I’m putting that aside.

One weird thing that usually turns me off too much is when the one off payments are less than the subscription per year price. Like Noteplan 3 per year is more than Noteplan 2 Mac and iOS separate purchases.

You'll get destroyed in reviews. It's horrible. It's a shitstorm you know will come when you make the change.

I actually agree that plenty of apps don't warrant a subscription. Do you want to end up paying a monthly fee for everything? It's a hard one to balance.

What about launching on Setapp?[1] Do you have any experience or have you talked to another indie Mac dev with experience? I’m a user and kind of a fan, curious to hear the dev side of things.

[1] https://setapp.com/

All the developers I have talked to tell me it's a waste of time and money, for the most part. It's more of "sure, why not" channel. But if someone has different experiences I would be happy to hear them.

It's really sad how apple killed their whole app ecosystem with their 99¢ pricing policy. A lot of the apps on there were once mac apps that you'd see on every std installation.

Would you be open to some questions from someone wanting to launch their first mac app?

Sure, e-mail is in my profile!

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