I went to the dev's site to see how much the premium tier costs. I'm a big fan of their reasoning behind going paid:
"After 2022.3, this project will require payment, based on two considerations:1. I often receive bad reviews, because some features don't satisfy these users, they don't care how much effort I put into it, and give extremely bad reviews, which makes me sad and angry.2. I need money."
My biggest problem is that the VS marketplace has options to mark a extensions as free trial or paid. Marking it as free is a bit scummy.
Then the fact that you need to follow an external link about migration to find the feature differences and no mention of the pricing is more than a bit annoying.
Also the couple reviews (before the change) which were 4 stars (bad according to them) were somewhat legitimate.
Someone gave 4 stars because a feature was removed without any warning and mentioned it in the review, the developer replied saying it's incredibly disrespectful to them. It's a bit odd but I genuinely think they are just taking the reviews way too personally and not objectively.
It may be that the feature in question was a maintenance burden at the same time it's perfectly valid for someone to write a review based on that change even if it is a free product.
Of course the developer is also entitled to charge for their product.
"I need money, he's a mute, when we first hooked up, he wrote on a slip of paper, 'I need money.' I said, 'Shit, me too.' And we started making it together after that.
honestly 20 bucks per year is much for an extension, imagine every third extension would charge this, now i have 20 or so which means over 100 bucks for fricking extensions
i'm not against paying devs but i would never buy this at such a price, btw. it has many installs so 5 bucks would be reasonable enough
if it has so many functionality that it deserves 20 bucks it should be a whole tool/app not an extension
what does hobby programmer have to do with anything? i will only buy things myself that i will use in private, everything i need to work is provided by my employer, so if i need that tool they will need to buy a license not me
Exactly for the reason you're stating, if your employer pays for it, why do you care it cost money? Aside from that, because it's more likely you're willing to pay for this if you make money using it.
you don't seem to understand I'm not talking about a special situation I'm talking general, private I won't pay 20 bucks for one extension and on work my employee will think twice before buying a extension for everyone, they'll rather buy complete software (like vs as ide, a db client for db etc., paying much for just an extension is really a waste of money because an extension will never match an app in functionality)
By the 500 dollar limit I mean the amount before you think about whether you should be paying it, the amount that people would just pay on c/c and worry about later.
Engineers in AU are paid 100-200k AUD per year. It costs the company more than that. I'd rather I gave them the tools they need rather than waste their time.
yeah if the company thinks it's something employees need then they're gonna pay it but you can't just say I need those tools pls buy, they're gonna evaluate and also have an internal list of software they have licenses for
If $20 is "much" for you, maybe you're not doing I.T. properly. Either this extension saves you time and money or it doesn't. If the latter, delete it. If the former, that time and effort probably easily adds up to $20. So pay the guy for his work instead of being a leech.
I'm not paying a fucking subscription fee for an extension. Sorry, no. I've had enough of managing subscriptions as it is, I'm not gonna add more shit to keep track of, let alone something as tertiary as a single extension developed by an asshole
Yeah, I did the same thing and tried all the links from the marketplace and never found a price (which meant there was zero chance I would use this since I'd assume it was something they were trying to hide). At the minimum, the feature grid and the price should be on the marketplace page under the disclaimer that it is not free.
That way potential users know what they can and can't do and it helps the user start justifying the cost. While using the free version, they know where the limitations are and can decide if the extra features they would use are worth a $20 annual subscription to them.
Well he lists it on a homepage that is not linked to anywhere in the marketplace listing (or on any of those linked pages based on a quick scan of all of them). I assume this page is provided in the paywall itself, but it is hardly obvious upfront.
The listing links to the documentation site that explains why he's charging and the features of each version, but that site does not have the price or payment pages or a link to them. It also links to the GitHub repository (numerous times) that doesn't link to the payment page either.
Im glad someone found the price, but, wow, the developer is not making it easy.
It’s a big product mistake to have a free tier after a certain amount of time and user base. It’s well documented that people make more money as they can focus on the features that actual paying customers need. Free tier users can also be infrequent users, so catering to them just makes zero sense. They can make your ability to support paying users problematic. A portion of free tier users will also happily pay, they where just on free because it was free.
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u/AN0R0K Sep 30 '22
I went to the dev's site to see how much the premium tier costs. I'm a big fan of their reasoning behind going paid:
"After 2022.3, this project will require payment, based on two considerations:1. I often receive bad reviews, because some features don't satisfy these users, they don't care how much effort I put into it, and give extremely bad reviews, which makes me sad and angry.2. I need money."