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Post launch day chat (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by ljdawson@lemmy.world to c/syncforlemmy@lemmy.world

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Afternoon everyone,

I wanted to go over a few points related to pricing, stats and the roadmap

Pricing

Sync for Lemmy is completely free with ads (the same as Sync for Reddit)
You can remove ads in the account picker or drawer for a one time fee of ~$20
Sync Ultra also removes ads but it's not required
I'll be working on regional prices over the coming weeks

There are now 24k installed users up from 100 the previous day!

I'm going to be spending the next few days going through all of the comments / messages and fixing any crashes.

As always thanks for the support and hope you're liking Sync!

Edit: testing edit

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[-] marsara9@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago

First I want to preface that I actually never used Sync for Reddit, I always used RIF but I wanted to give Sync for Lemmy a shot and see what it was all about.

A few things from my perspective:

So I'm using the combined BottomNavigation style, but finding settings or other options doesn't seem all that intuitive. Some of the things, like how to switch from Everything to Subscribed for my feed, I found by accident. Where to buy the Ad removal was also rather hidden, etc...
The elephant in the room... Pricing... as a developer myself I get needing to make enough money to sustain your projects, and I get that there's a lot less users on Lemmy than Reddit, but the prices for the subscriptions just seem outrageous. The problem as I see it, is that there's already a healthy competition for Lemmy Apps out there today and most are completely free and have no ads as-is. Some may even be operating in the red, but still $2/mo, $17/yr, $100/lifetime still seems a bit much for essentially:

No Ads (I've got a PiHole, so honestly I don't see any ads at the moment anyway)
Cloud Backup -- backup of what? My login? My app settings? The former seems concerning, the later I don't see much value as I only have a single Phone. If I get a new phone, sure it might save me a few minutes re setting it back up. There's not that many settings at the moment that needed customizing. And adding too many makes the app too confusing.
Highlight / Tag users -- Ok this seems interesting but not quite worth $2/mo IMO.
Translate text -- I can do this in the web app already just by highlighting a comment. But to be critical here, /most/ of the content is already in English, and I don't subscribe to any foreign language communities at the moment, so this at least doesn't have any value to me.
Select text from image -- Ok, another interesting feature but still not quite at $2/mo
Push notifications (coming soon) -- I'm really wondering how this is going to work personally, but this is a much needed feature, at least just for private messages. Probably the feature I'm most excited about.
Import / export subscriptions -- This honestly needs to be built into Lemmy itself, but there's also a handful of user scripts and other tools other developers have already written that can do this.

Keep in mind I don't have a frame of reference for what the prices were in Sync for Reddit, but cut the prices to about a 1/3rd or 1/4th of what they are now and they seem to be more inline with the value that the app provides over the other apps.

The privacy policy. It's a lot longer than I'd hope for a Lemmy app. I'm assuming most of the data being collected is for advertising, but it's still concerning to me.

I don't mean to sounds critical in all of this. The app is probably one of the smoothest and best looking out there so far, but the value to money ratio just isn't there.

[-] ljdawson@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago

Re pricing.

Ultra disables ads but also you can just pay a one time $20 few to disable ads forever. Ultra is the above and beyond extras.

[-] marsara9@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

Totally understand that. And personally, $20 to remove ads forever, seems reasonable. But the other features under Ultra currently don't add up to the price tag for those features at the moment.

None of the current Ultra features really stand out to me except tagging/highlighting users. Push Notifications will be a game changer but they aren't in the app yet.

[-] stephenc@waveform.social 4 points 1 year ago

Well technically it is still in beta so missing features are to be expected at the moment.

[-] marsara9@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

Missing features are fine. Even then, and maybe it's just me, but Push Notifications + User Highlight/Tagging doesn't seem like $2 worth of value to me. Just trying to call out that the current value-to-cost ratio seems off. And sure there are other features and maybe other users will get $2 worth of value out of those, but in my opinion that's why I won't be buying a subscription, even if I want to support the developer.

[-] vhostym@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

Right now, subscribing for Ultra is like Patreon. The amount of work to get the app forked from the reddit version and integrated into Lemmy in the span of weeks from a technical perspective is amazing. Support if you love Sync and want it to continue. The features in the Coming Soon will come with time.

[-] reddit_fugitive@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

I've been with sync from nearly the beginning. Ultra for me, no question. I really appreciate Lj's hard work.

[-] sabreW4K3@lemmy.tf 5 points 1 year ago

Can I ask what apps you develop?

[-] marsara9@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

https://www.search-lemmy.com

I also tried building a pet feeder during the pandemic because the one I was using, the company decided to go belly-up. Never got a fully working though.

(At least that's what I've done open-source wise). I do Android development for my day job.

[-] sabreW4K3@lemmy.tf 2 points 1 year ago

Whaaaa, I can't find me or any of my posts 🙃

[-] marsara9@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Thanks! I think I found the bug and I'll see what I can do to get that fixed here soon. But to keep this comment thread on-topic message me personally if you have any other issues.