#EDITED TO ADD CONTEXT:
The developer has responded quite a bit in the comments here, and has made adjustments to the free tier feature set based on my and others’ feedback. See more info in this update thread: https://lemm.ee/post/12353243
If you’re reading this post after update 1.0.7 I suggest you skim these comments and that update thread before forming an opinion.
#ORIGINAL POST:
I like this app a lot, I can tell there’s been a ton of love and hard work put into it.
The strategy for monetization leaves a bit of a sour taste though.
For one, nobody wants another subscription - and $30 lifetime for a brand new app is a huge asking price compared to, say, Apollo, which was $5 or so (with a subscription tier for things that actually made sense to buy due to recurring cost).
But this app is paywalling basic stuff like a comment jump button (everyone else has this for free), content filtering, video scrubbing, and various other things that have no recurring cost to the developer.
My recommendation, take it or leave it, if you want my money make it a reasonable one time purchase for things that don’t cost you money (under $10 imo, $5 would’ve been an easy sell).
If you want to justify a subscription model you are gonna need to build features that justify it - push notifications, stuff like that.
And included features that clearly cost the developer money to support on an ongoing basis. And came several years into the project after the dev had established a huge userbase and healthy relationship of users that trusted him to deliver on quality and value, and wanted to support him financially.
No one is forcing you to pay the lifetime fee.
Of course not! Nobody is forcing me to use this app at all - I can just go back to Voyager or Thunder if I want. I made this post because I disagree with the pricing setup but really would like to see the dev succeed because they’ve done a great job. If my opinion isn’t shared you’re free to ignore it.