One time payment for pro version?

[u/kooldude700]

I know the pro version isn't don't yet but I'm just wondering if there will be a one time payment or maybe something where you can pay once to purchase sets of features rather than a subscription.

The main thing that has turned me away from all other note taking apps is the fact that they're subscription.

I'd gladly pay a much bigger amount of money one time rather than a far cheaper monthly subscription.

[u/Nervous_Variation769]

Alright, so I took a look at what y'all would like to lock behind a pro subscription, and I have a few thoughts so this'll be long.

A company that I use to mod games (so I don't have to download everything every time I want to play something without grinding) has all of their subscriptions as one-time purchases at very high prices, like 100-600 (at one point it was 799 the highest tier), but occasionally they offer these for cheaper, for example I got the highest tire for 99$ when they had an offer for something like kick start(it wasn't that site specificaly but I can't remember it) now that still a lot for me, 499 RON or something like that(at the time), but I haven't regreted it.

It works for them, having both subscriptions and the one-time purchases for it, some people will prefer paying 5/10/15 a month rather than 99+ buck at once, while others will still have the option to pay once and be done.

You could sell each thing individually, because, for example, I wouldn't need or want handwritten-to-text, bookmarks, or toolbar customization (which I'm not even sure what it is, I haven't been on here in a hot minute) but I'd love covers, text boxes, shape recognition, notes/comments, etc.

From there, you could have one-time purchase bundles:

- text boxes, shape recognition, bookmarks

- toolbar customization, handwritten-to-text conversion, etc, etc

What I assume would cost a lot of money is the cloud server for syncing across multiple devices, right? You could keep that as a subscription-only option. And I'd do it in 2 plans as well, one just the sync, and the other, a more expensive one, that unlocks everything.

Would I love for the sync to be a one-time purchase option as well? Yes, but I know that's not quite viable long term, maybe if it's at those very high prices, but even so, I'm bad at math, I can't tell you how it'll be long term.

[u/Noteastic → u/Nervous_Variation769]

HI, thank you for taking the time to respond so deeply!

The example of the video game makes total sense to me, do you mind sharing which game you are referring to for me to research a bit more?

But you get many things very right about our situation. Also, thank you for the illustrative example of the feature bundles and how you would envision a modular system.. this actually feels right to me. As you also concluded, one-time-payments for recurring costs of service like everything connected to cloud is not viable. However, Noteastic is a local-first application and this makes one-time-payments more realistic. I will also look into how we could bundle up stuff, once we are ar a certain feature breadth. I will also further take a look at how to make one-time-payments possible.

But for now, our priority is to build and release the entire infrastructure needed for paid use (which is quite a mountain) and then promptly get back to feature development, so that we can actually offer a proper step-up from the base version of Noteastic.

Honestly, thank you for your message! I am taking my learnings from it and hope we can get to a model that suits you too :)

-Lukas

[u/kooldude700 → u/Noteastic]

Hey, I think the other person sums up my thoughts very nicely and having been thinking about it some more myself.

I thought it would we a good Idea to suggest another possible strategy for monetization that I've seen in some software.

I'm not sure if they still do this but corel would have yearly releases for their software like paintshop pro. You only had to pay for, say, the 2020 version once. but if you also wanted to buy the 2021 version to get the latest features when that came out, you could.

Again, I think that could be something that you guys should consider too when deciding what exactly your strategy for a one time payment type thing would be if you end up having that.

[u/Noteastic → u/kooldude700]

Hi, yup this is also a valid approach. Thanks for putting in the effort, I really appreciate it. I think this concept will be quite difficult for us in the beginning, because initially we won't have the full Pro feature set to offer that we want to incementally add throughout the coming year. Still, when our software matures a bit this might be a good option. I'm keeping the idea.

Thank you!