This post lead to me to send 20 USD to the Jerboa/Lemmy devs.
Based
I hope the dev donates a fair share…
“Adding” ads to a FOSS service is pretty sinister especially if it only cost $3.99/year to remove them from the Sync for Reddit app.
Lemmy could use some white hat bug hunters to find security vulnerabilities before malicious actors do, like Mozilla helping patch Mastodon’s TootRoot.
Reddit had considerably more users when Sync was created- so smaller amount per person over larger user base would pay for the bill.
With Lemmy, user base isn’t there yet to create that same economies of scale - so to pay for the dev’s time - each person would need to pay a larger amount.
You can’t compare Reddit and Lemmy. They are different with a different model. Lemmy rely on donation. Reddit has ads and investors.
The dev of Sync did money with Reddit but Reddit had a source of revenue.
Lemmy relying on donation doesn’t have this source of revenue. This is why splitting the revenue of Sync between Lemmy’s devs, instances and Sync’s dev is fair.
If someone donate to the Lemmy’s devs and/or instances, this person allows the sync’s dev to make money on this donation. This isn’t fair.
The sync model with Lemmy is predatory at best and parasitic at least.
80% of the app is the same. It’s not like he spent years creating a new app from scratch. I’m not saying he doesn’t deserve compensation but I feel like he’s being a bit gougey in this situation.
I mean that’s literally how business works - amount needed to be profitable / number of customers = base price.
Reddit had millions of users, lower price per person.
Not to mention the literally free version!
@1ird @chargingtriceratops Regional pricing hasn’t been set up yet, but he plans to make a single time purchase option in the future, and set up Regional pricing
Here’s hoping it all shakes out in the end.
I’m pretty sure he had to rewrite all of the code related to network and the API, and that’s not little work. Thats weeks worth of work including testing
As much fun as Sync is (and while I appreciate creators want to get paid)…
We’re talking like $15-30(!). That’s steep for a phone app. All this money stuff is pushing me back to Connect and Jerboa.
I wish Sync well. But I think I’m done with it already.
They are okay and did the job until Sync came out. But are no way near as polished as Sync, which has years of updates and development.
Yeah I’ve been using a lot of the available apps and while I had my favorites (Summit and Liftoff) there has always been little quirks that I’ve just been dealing with. The moment Sync hit my device it’s like I’m back to my reddit experience for the last decade. I’ll still keep an eye on the other apps, because I very much prefer and try to support open source developers. But I just can’t force a subpar experience on myself.
The Summit dev has been extremely responsive and has added in a few features I requested on a quick turnaround. They also happen to be out of town on a work trip this week so the timing probably sucks for them. And as I’m typing this I’m remembering that ones not even open source 🤦♂️.
It’s not open source, but it’s also not spyware or adware.
Summit.
I’ll just wait, they are usable enough. If you want the Lemmy experience to improve, donate $5 or $20 for Lemmy (in-browser) UI development, which is still default for most devices and it very much sucks. (Part of it is lack of support for anything like cross-domain cookies in browser technology that would store what your home instance is so that you would be always redirected to browse from home but even without it there are problems.)
I like Sync so no thank you
Okay, I won’t push you from Sync. But if you have the money to remove its ads, please also consider supporting Lemmy directly or indirectly (Mozilla, among other things, funded the effort to find and patch TootRoot before it became a problem). If you don’t want to just donate, switching to Mozilla VPN will also help.
While liftoff was the only third party I liked, I still think it was pretty unimpressive. It ran ok and that’s about it. Features were lacking, aesthetics are bad, some glitches. For me the $20 or whatever it is for sync is worth it. I’ve used reddit since 2012 and browsed exclusively on my phone, swapping between relay and sync. If you average that cost out, even considering the $5 or whatever it was to get rid of ads on Reddit, it’s basically nothing. The usage tracking is pretty shitty though.
EDIT: Ok I just saw the lifetime price for ultra, damn wtf lol. Again, averaging that cost over the ten years I’ve used the app means it’s still a good deal but fuck upfront that’s a lot lmao
Ditto. I used to be a big Sync fan and used it for years as my primary mobile client for Reddit until 8-10 months or so ago when the dev did a ‘fuck off and be unable to be contacted while something in the app breaks’ break, which led to a bunch of ads appearing despite paying for no ads (and according to people on the subreddit at the time it was not a one time occurrence lol). I switched that day to Boost and didn’t go back, but I was looking forward to trying out Sync for Lemmy when it released.
All the privacy and pricing concerns the last 24 hours have brought forth does not make me wanna even touch the app lol. I’m not paying that much money to fucking browse a glorified forum on my phone (specially when there’s many other options).
Given how much time I spent on Sync with Reddit, I imagine the ultra one-time price ($99) will end up being a dollar per hour in a few months and just go down from there.
A dollar per hour for entertainment is generally a good deal to me.
I agree. While $20 could still be seen as reasonable - even though making it one of the more expensive apps, thigh I’m willing to go for it if Sync continues development -, the asking price of $100 for the lifetime ultra is insane. I’m not aware of any other app that is this expensive. Of course, you could argue there’s subscription apps out there that don’t even have a lifetime model - e.g. Adobe, Microsoft Office -, But these provide considerably more value as well and are huge corporations.
My feeling is - and I don’t have facts to prove it - that the developers of the large reddit apps (esp. Apollo) simply became used to the money making machine and want to squeeze as much as possible out of it.
While in the end it is entirely up to them, as there’s open source and free alternatives out there, I’m not too fond of this behavior.
Yes.
There are a lot of other apps for Lemmy. Some are not as polished as Sync – but some are. And none (that I know of, on Android) are ad supported. Most are open source and 100% free.
This is a money grab. People were so excited for Sync that they don’t want to call it a money grab. But that’s what it is.
I think that asking to be paid for your work is totally fine (albeit I myself made my lemmy app completely free and opensource, simply because its just my hobby project), but its a rather different story when you provide app for open source, nonprofit venture-free platform and start to inject ads and trackers into it. Its goes against the entire idea of free decentralised platform and makes it closer to profit-focused app like reddit/threads/etc imo
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Honestly I think we all need to relax. Lemmy is a niche app that’s rising, and it’s one guy. I paid for ultra since it was cheaper than the pay for no ads option.
$29AUD or whatever it was per year for ultra is literally paying a dev once a year for their work, and to keep it updated and build features.
The outrage is really ridiculous considering how quickly the app was built, how decent the experience is and the realities of the real world right now.
Pay the cash, you’re not going to remember it by the time you’re paid next. For the job you did, producing something. Like this guy did.
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And this is exactly why I bought the app without thinking. I paid $1.99 for Reddit Sync in 2012 and have been using it since then. I consider buying the new app payment for all the value I’ve gotten out of the app and the developers work over the past 11 years.
There’s no ads in Lemmy.
There’s no ads, yet.
I feel like ads in lemmy would be a hard to implement thing, it would need to be done on the instance level… and people would just jump ship to another instance that didn’t have ads. it’s possible that it could post ads as posts that get federated but it sounds like an amazing way to potentially get your instance defederated in concern that it’s going to devolve to constant spam.
I mean, right now, yeah. But these instances use resources, which means they’re not free. Someone needs to cover the bill. I remember when YouTubers were put on blast when they started running ads and now it’s normal.
Or there might be instances that are specific paid and that’s known. Like an OnlyLemmy or something.
Greed.
I signed up for a year of Ultra yesterday, more as a show of support. I’m already regretting it after seeing how many tiers of pricing are now being shoved out.
I get the dev has to eat, but this is completely going against everything Lemmy is supposed to be about, while costing significantly more than its Reddit counterpart.
While not necessary, it would have been nice if there was a small discount for Ultra subscribers of Sync for Reddit. I got just over 1 year of usage out of my ‘lifetime’ purchase. A gesture, even a small one, would have been nice.
I’ve just been soured over this whole thing, tbh.
I added the new price tiers based on user feedback on here after launching.
I appreciate that, but your pricing is still still disproportionately high, especially when compared to the number of fantastic free alternatives out there.
I love your app, and I’ve supported you as a Pro and Ultra member on Sync for Reddit as well, but I really think you should reconsider the current subscription pricing and lifetime purchases for Ultra options. As far as I’m aware, Sync is also one of the only major Lemmy apps that has introduced ads/pay to remove ads option. You’ve brought subscriptions and money into a platform that is now home to an exodus of users that hated how those things were slowly destroying Reddit. It just doesn’t sit right with me.
I’ve signed up for a year out of a show as support for you. The best thing you could do is show your long-term support for this platform by encouraging growth and fair options for users rather than creating multi-tiered pay walls with questionably high prices.
Why are you getting mad? The economy of scale is simply not there yet because there is only a handful of us lemmy users right now. With 100,000 active monthly users, even if 1% of them bought a subscription at $17/year, it’ll still going to net the dev ~$12,000 per year (after 30% google play fee) which is actually below US minimum wage. As lemmy got more and more users, I’m sure the dev would revise the pricing. If he were greedy he would just quit and work at some big corp instead of working full time on a lemmy client for peanuts.
The price is very reasonable if you realize the economy of scale is not there yet. There is only about 100,000 monthly active Lemmy users right now. Even if 1% of those users bought the app at $20, the dev only net ~$14,000 for working on his app full time. The calculus will surely different if Lemmy have 10x more active users which will allow the dev to lower the app pricing while still sustaining himself.
So you’re basically saying wait until the lemmy user base grows and see if the dev drops the price. That would lead to a lot of the OG buyers getting angry.
They shouldn’t get mad if what they say about gladly supporting the sync developer is true. I meant, isn’t it weird to get mad when something you bought actually got lower price a few years in the future? Like buying a game for $60 at launch and then some patient gamers bought them for $10 a few years later. Why angry at that?
Punishing us for asking for regional pricing.
Use Liftoff
…or Thunder, which is very similar to Liftoff. I use them pretty much interchangeably. Both are built with Flutter, have similar UX and performance and they work on both Android and iOS.
I’ve tried thunder, and the UI looks really good, but for some reason when I try to scroll up on a feed the whole list starts shaking, almost as if the posts on the top of the list are changing size.
This happens for me too. I expect it to get fixed rather sooner than later.
Meanwhile I just got Summit for Lemmy and it has the slickest UI in my opinion. It takes linger to find features, though.
bit late but, liftoff doesn’t feel the same like sync, sync looks and feels like a native android app
Between the ads, pricing and tracking I’m just going to stick to Liftoff, it works really well.
I think the developer should have just made the app ad-free, and charged for features people will want.
It’s not a feature to remove ads. It’s just normal. At least for many of us Linux users, we never see ads since we have so many ways to combat them.
But yes, if Lemmy starts to become very popular, it will pull in everyone who uses windows and has ads and shit in their face all day. They are used to it. Maybe they will pay.
So you would rather have micro transaction/dlc for various features… Instead of having a free path and a paid path…
Honestly all these hardcore, zealot Linux users all bent out of shape because god forbid they pay for someone’s work while acting like they’re on the high road, really makes Linux users look bad. I’ve come across way too many posts about yet another person triggered because OMG, it wasn’t just free and the dev can’t survive off good vibes and a ‘donate’ button no one would click.
For all the people mad sync isn’t free, how many of the Foss projects have you donated too. A fiver one time a decade ago to one project means nothing. Going to guess I’ll get more downvotes than people showing proof the donate, regularly.
I bought sync. Bought it here and bought it on Reddit many years ago. With the amount of time I used it, probably came out to less than a penny per hour of use.
It seems you are grouping me in with previous people you have talked to. And I hate micro transactions or dlc.
I would simply lower the prices. That’s it. I think people should pay for quality software, including search engines and email providers that are high quality. I do that of course myself. It’s the only way to get away from the ad/tracking model we have today.
But the price of Sync is just too high.
I can confirm the price with a bit of variation 21.99€ for me.
WTF is this in CAD!?
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Inflation
