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Comment by EduardMe | Hacker News Reader

I thought about it, but one-time payments always have this problem that you need to come up with upgrades to keep the bills paid. And upgrades are in many aspects bad for users and for creators. For upgrades you need to 'save up' features and you need to come up with flashy ones, because bug fixes and improvements are not an incentive to upgrade for many...

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Panic has a really nice approach with their Nova app. They keep updating it all the time; you pay once and get free updates for a year. You can choose at checkout time to stay updated for 50% of new-purchase price each year, or you can choose to pay for a new year of updates later on, when/if you need/want it. https://library.panic.com/nova/purchase-faq/

Do they sell it through the AppStore? Probably not.

I think Agenda App and Working Copy do sell through the App Store with the 1 year of features. They don’t do the discount of course like Panic with Nova is doing which indeed isn’t possible in the App Store.

Doesn’t work with any current App Store unfortunately.

I would be willing to pay the $60, for the app, no subscription. If the app works well, it is mostly bug free, and it runs on the current OS, there is no need to come up with any flashy features. As long as it is kept up to date to continue to run.

If a new version comes each year, I shall buy it as well. I have done that with VMWare Workstation, and Arqbackup, to mention a couple.

Others have face the same problem and solved it by "feature unlocks", i.e. Working Copy (https://workingcopyapp.com/), which sells 1 year "pro" unlocks, and all features released during that year remains active even if you don't renew your pro unlock.

It's not a subscription, as the software will continue to work just fine when the pro unlock expires, but you don't get new features.

This of course puts pressure on the developer to keep coming up with new features, but then again that's the developers job.

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