The pendulum always swings back

Ten years ago, I paid ￡14 for a MacOS app. The average price on the App Store back then was about ￡6 (my own perception). A few sophisticated products like Pixelmator were charging around ￡20, but I paid ￡14 for a plain text editor FoldingText.

I never regretted that purchase because the app gave me the best personal productivity system I’ve ever had. I enjoyed it for about nine years—a phenomenal value for money! Then, one day I got a new Macbook and realised the app had been taken off the App Store because the original owner stopped developing it.

Disappointed (and pissed off, quite frankly) I broke the system and found a way to independently install the app and carried on for another couple of years. I loved it that much and, having paid the full price, I also owned it, for god sake!

(The product has since changed hands, and the new owner even made the last stable version available at no charge until the next release comes out.)

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At some point, Noteplan came about and offered a nice integration with calendars, which made me switch. Such is the nature of software products: platforms change, integration landscape changes and suddenly you need help with compatibility issues.

The Software-as-a-Service model has become an answer to this. It came with the rise of web software and took commitment out of the buying decision. The model appealed in a few powerful ways:

• Maintenance completely taken care of (compatibility, security, version upgrades)
• Continuous improvement (new features, optimisations, polished experience)
• Cheap to try and easy to stop (low monthly rent vs. full price upfront)

It’s easy to fall into thinking that nothing else is better. Except SaaS was a certain no-brainer a decade ago but for ten years the landscape has been shifting.

• Full price for software products used to be high but development has been becoming easier and quicker.
• Distribution used to be a tedious exercise but today even for native apps it is simple and often even automatic.
• Marketing used to be local but now it’s global by default and upon initial CAC streamlined direct marketing costs peanuts.

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If you look at broader timescales in any market, the cyclic nature of changes comes forth. The pendulum goes one way but after time always swings back.

One model can’t be the best for everything all the time, and SaaS is being really tested now for some use cases. 37signals are an early voice with their Once teaser. I suspect there will be more voices like this moving forward. In the meantime, I am left wondering whether FoldingText 3.0 will charge me a subscription fee or offer a free lifetime upgrade for some free publicity :-)

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Truly yours, Sergey Soloviov