Mellel Mobile Premium Subscription

[_NM_]

Has Mellel Mobile Premium adopted a subscription model without offering dynamic content? This is not good, and I will not support any such model.

Some applications can justify a subscription model. All other subscription-based applications would rent-ware. I consider an application to be appropriate for subscription only when it offers services such as:

1. Dynamic content, such as music, movies, news, etc.
2. Online storage.
3. Remote computational services that the local client would not be able to perform or perform efficiently, for example, due to the intensity of computations involved or the amount of analytic data needed.

However, any application would not be appropriate for a subscription model if:
1. its premium (subscription-based) functionality would be static and performed on the user's device, and ...
2. ... the user's license to use such static premium features expires with the subscription. In other words, the application, although no longer updated by the vendor under the expired subscription model, no longer allows the former subscriber to use the static functionality unlocked during the user's subscription term.

It is for the same reason that I do not support Bookends Mobile.

[Eyal Redler]

I understand and share your dislike of the subscription model. However, unfortunately, Apple doesn't provide any other mechanism, like paid upgrades, to get existing users of an app to pay for their ongoing use.

Perhaps this doesn't seem like a big deal to you as a user but we actually need this revenue to continue to maintain and advance Mellel and if we can't do that, you, as a user, will not be able to enjoy the app.

At the moment, existing users are the main source of income and subscriptions are essentially the only way to do it in the app store.

I'm sure there are other apps that can rely on sales to new users to provide the income required to continue, but the reality is that Mellel is not (yet) growing that fast.

We thought about this long and hard and tried to come up with a model which is more like paid upgrades but the solutions we could come up with were technically very complicated and would require a lot of work just to maintain the mechanism and IMO that is time better spent on adding useful features.

In monetary terms, the cost of the subscription is the same as the could you would have if we were able to charge for upgrades.

[_NM_]

Thank you for your thoughtful response.

I understand the rationale and desired business model. However, this subscription model has flaws when it comes to applications such as Mellel and Bookends. These applications are developed in one-person shops. Therefore, adopting their subscription model is risky for users, and there have been examples. Sente, a once highly regarded reference manager for macOS, suddenly went silent and ceased to exist. Had its users not had perpetual licenses, they would have indeed been in a dire situation.

Mellel uses a proprietary file format. I caution anyone who would become subject to proprietary dependencies with small applications.

The only way you could make the subscription acceptable to people like me would be to create a subscription model that incorporates new features and updates for the duration of the subscription while allowing users to retain the unlocked features after the subscription expires.

Another option would be an annual release cycle. You could distribute Mellel Standard and Mellel Pro 2024, stating that after a year, the new features would be added to Mellel 2025. This can slow sales toward the end of the cycle but boost them when a new version is released. The main difference is the retention of functionality in the previous year's release.

[jda]

Mellel Mobile does not use a "subscription model". It uses a "hybrid model" (like Bookends for iOS). There are two in-app purchases, Standard and Premium. The Standard purchase is your basic one-time payment (forever) license. If Mellel were to cease developing today, you can continue to use Mellel Mobile indefinitely (this was true of Sente's core features as well). And I would point out that Eyal has already written that he will continue to add and improve Standard over time, and these features will persist indefinitely even if development stopped.

The Premium license adds functionality that is nice to have but not essential. At this time, it means citation management in conjunction with Bookends, but other "pro" features are in the pipeline. I don't know what Mellel would do if they stopped developing, but at the very worst you'd lose these Premium features when the subscription expired. Which means at the very worst, you'd still have a great word processor on your iPad that syncs with a great word processor on your Mac, which you can use forever.

Since Bookends for iOS offers something similar, if you are a Bookends user and want to address our purchase options separately, please post your thoughts on the Bookends forum, too. It will engage another community, and I'd rather address them there than intrude on the Mellel forum.

Jon
Sonny Software

[Amontillado]

Mellel uses a proprietary file format. I caution anyone who would become subject to proprietary dependencies with small applications.

I share your reluctance to trust proprietary storage. For my use, Mellel gets a free pass on this one.

If you peek, Mellel's file format is not very proprietary. It is very feasible to more or less glance at the internals of a Mellel document and start creating new Mellel docs without using Mellel, or extract the contents of a Mellel document to another format without using Mellel itself.

I hope Mellel spans generations so my great-great-grandkids can use it. If not, the contents of Mellel documents will not be unobtainable as long as we can do a few very baseline things like interpret ASCII text.

[Eyal Redler]

Regarding Mellel's format. It is indeed proprietary in the sense that it is used only by Mellel and is very tightly combined with how Mellel works but it is based on industry standards like xml and zip and you should be able, with not a lot of effort to extract the text and even formatting from a document without Mellel.

[Eyal Redler]

Regarding Mellel's business model and the use of subscriptions.

To be sure, had Apple provided a mechanism to provide real paid upgrades, we would have gladly gone this way but Apple did not, and not only that, it is unlikely that Apple would ever offer that on the app store, they push for subscriptions and they consider subscriptions as a "good enough" substitute for paid upgrades. I understand that you don't agree it's good enough, and I share that opinion, but this the reality we're living in.

It is conceivable and was actually done to provide a semblance of paid upgrades using subscriptions by letting user "keep" the features they gained during the subscription period after the subscription expires but implementing this is very hard and is an ongoing burden on development. I'd rather spend the time and effort on brining useful features to Mellel Mobile rather than maintain this rather convoluted business model.

Perhaps in the future Mellel Mobile will adopt this model, if we can afford it, but at the moment, the current model is the only realistic way to make Mellel Mobile possible and this is the important point to understand: It is not a question of having Mellel Mobile with this model or another, it is a question of having Mellel Mobile or not having it.

If you don't need Mellel on iOS then by all means, use the mac version and enjoy that, but if you do want to use Mellel on iOS and you want this option to grow stronger and more independent than you should understand that the result of refraining from purchasing it to make a point agains subscriptions is more likely to lead to not having an iOS Mellel at all than to adopt a non-subscription business model.