$60 can buy you a lifetime license for the Affinity Designer 2, which is a fantastic alternative to Adobe’s Illustrator, which some people can’t live without. AFAIK, Serif isn’t backed by a venture capitalist as well. So, are you still happy paying $20 more for a social media app?
Like, look, I get that we should support devs for what they do, especially if they don’t take venture capitalist money to sell their products for cheap to gain market share. But this seems really overpriced. What are you getting with an $80 app for social media?
Software use to cost this much and much more in the 90s, and often did less (not working with a much of networked api calls, not integrating with a bunch of other platforms, etc) and wasn’t frequently updated.
It’s 25-30 years later.
People have lost touch with what paid software costs.
Developers didn't have access to mountains of open source code, online tutorials and stack overflow back then either. Compilers, like Turbo C, also used to be paid products.
I've been using Openvibe which is a similar app and haven't seen one add and doesn't have a subscription model. I understand development cost money but I agree with you.