Hey team. Thanks for a great app!

I was just wondering, and not sure if you have already mentioned it, but what is your plan for a funding model for the app in the long term?

Some kind of one-off payment maybe, or a subsrciption model?

After all the crap at Reddit with Christian being essentially priced out of making an affordable app by spez, it’l be interesting to see how you plan to go forwards financially here. I ask this knowing that there will be ongoing costs your side and I would willing to help fund that.

On a side note, I guess Memmy users are signing up through many different instances. Apart from whatever your funding model is for the app, would it be possible to also add a payment option for those who want to donate to whichever instance they use? IMO that’d be a pretty useful extra feature.

Would love to know what y’all think.

  • marsara9@lemmy.worldEnglish
    103·
    1 year ago

    First I can’t speak for the Memmy devs but here’s my personal experience:

    In theory something like a mobile app doesn’t really have any reoccurring costs, at least not with Lemmy, etc… Not natively, anyway. Sure there’s the $100 cost for an iOS dev account but that’s nothing in the end. Should Lemmy start to introduce API access fees, again that could change, but that’s a long way off if ever.

    The question really comes down to, long term, how much time are the devs spending on development and if they want to make money with this or not.

    As some of us find this sort of development, well “fun”, and just do this as a hobby rather than as an income stream. And any small costs we’ll just eat because quite frankly we were going to build these apps anyway, if not just for ourselves why not share them with the rest of the community?

    Long story short, Memmy (and the other mobile apps) may not need to charge anything as it’s not costing the devs anything more than time. Now Lemmy itself, is a completely different story.

    • a887dcd7a@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      I am more than willing to also invest in „just their time fun projects“ if that keeps the motivation high.

      Besides: they might need to include other APIs $$$ have future or hidden costs for hosting or want to pay for media (logos) or licenses and whatnot. Or simply afford actual testing devices instead of simulators…

      Long story short I would embrace paying for the App, be it one-time or recurring.

      • marsara9@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Totally agree.

        Just wanted to point out that app development has different costs, sometimes none, associated with it vs hosting something like a Lemmy instance.

        But p.s. logos and artwork can be bundled with the app itself. I assume, but I could be wrong, that many mobile devs have at least a handful of test devices available. Although the simulators have come a long way. But agreed test devices, especially newer ones can be expensive.

        • Sean@lemmy.mlMEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          I think he meant paying designers to have logos made, not hosting, which is actually a cost for us at the moment as we are planning on doing that 😁