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It's live for me. It appears that the paid version, "Sync Ultra", requires a $2/month subscription, or $17/year. Seeing as lemmy APIs are free, I am confused why this is so expensive? o_0
I mean it takes the developer time and effort to make the app, and he doesn't benefit from any ad-revenue. It's just paying for some nice features to support the work and effort of an awesome dev.
Why come so many other excellent free apps but this one ads and money tho
Also why need data?
A lot of the are Bibby enthusiast projects while sync continues the lineage of a well established app.
To show some support!
I mean, we're already browsing ad free on here and many developers are making their apps in their free time. I get that this are expensive times, but if no-one would subscribe to such apps. There would be much less developers.
So how would you feel about Lemmy instance hosters adding ads, harvesting user data to sell to third partiess, making paid subscription models to remove said ads they added and then charging for API access?
We spoke about it with Ruud on Discord actually. He's fine with it. Most people understand that nothing comes for free.
Actually, it is even a nice gesture from the developer. The ones who cannot afford it can still use the app, without paying for it.
I'm not suggesting that they should or even can be forced to change or that lemmy.world admins actually do anything differently.
It's also not about the cost or not being able to afford it. It is about principles and and the ad driven business model being antithetical to the goals of Lemmy. Being federated is one thing, but it is also about moving away from ads. I am fully in support of nearly any monetization of software other than ads and selling user data.
Personally I just can't understand the person who would agree that Reddit was being egregiously corporate minded and greedy to the point that they move to Lemmy and then be ok with adding ads were there previously were none. I'm definitely not going to be using it and I don't even care that much despite my comments here if other people do. I just want to make this point known. I don't want Lemmy to become Reddit all over again and I felt there was a bit of an honor system in place to not do things like that and it has already been broken.
Another point of contention with ads is that everyone is generating the content for free that Sync is injecting ads next to. I don't want to help them make money off of something I do as a hobby even if it is only pennies. This is one of the main reasons I won't use Reddit and have been favor of the federated internet.
I'm confused how $17 is considered expensive. If that was a monthly price it would be expensive. $17 for a year? Cheapest subscription I've ever paid for, and I'm happy to do it as a subscription to continually support the developer.
While I hate subscription models, I actually paid the yearly subscription for this (fyi $27.99 in Australia.
One of the main reasons I paid is because I used Sync for Reddit multiple times a day for years and wanted to support the developer. If the fedeverse fails to take off at scale I won't renew for additional years.
$28 is a small price to pay on my behalf to thank the developer for all his previous work, but also support further development. It's high quality apps like this that help drive traffic to the excellent communities that are reestablishing themselves in the fedeverse.
Well it is cheap for people living in developed countries but in developing countries where the exchange rate vs the dollar is high and the average income is lower, the cost of the subscription is substantial. Yes we should support the developer but unfortunately this subscription model is unfeasible for some people.
Bruh, you can't spare two whole dollars for something you're going to be using every day? Like, I use Jerboa, which is free, but I still signed up for dessalines patreon to support their work.
The future is either free to use, but put up with ads, or pay a meager amount to support the developers so ads arent required to sustain the product.
Or, we can just like ...buy it once...like most other software that isn't tied to a first-party hosted service?
I'd like to unsubscribe from your vision of the future
There will be an In-App Purchase later on. Keep in mind this is a beta and not the full release. For the beta the option is ads or ultra. For the full release it will be ads, pro (one time purchase) or ultra (subscription).
IMO that's a good way to go
In this scenario you'd pay for updates though right?
Well games receive patch fixes and even content updates after release and most of them are pushed through to the people who purchased the game at no extra costs. Yes dlc's do require you to purchase them but updates that fix bugs and improve performance resulting in an improved experience are usually free of cost
FYI there will be a one time payment option once the app is out of beta.
It got pushed out on the today actually.
These prices are for Ultra. Ultra is voluntary and only for super fans to support the developer. There will be a pro version that is a one time payment and it removes all the ads and is very affordable. But the developer didn't want to start charging for the Pro version while bugs still exist and is waiting for the Beta to be over.
The option to remove ads has been added - it costs $20 USD. The lifetime Ultra costs $100 USD.
I'm somewhat with you on this, but most software that's updating its pricing or is new, is using a subscription model. 2$ really is fine I think, even less with the yearly thing. I'd still like to see a OTP
The developer has confirmed on Discord that the one-time lifetime payment is planned for the full release.
That's nice to hear!
It's already live apparently, just update to the latest version and it's "remove ads" under the account switcher section.
These prices are for Ultra. Ultra is voluntary and only for super fans to support the developer. There will be a pro version that is a one time payment and it removes all the ads and is very affordable. But the developer didn't want to start charging for the Pro version while bugs still exist and is waiting for the Beta to be over.
Idk what the plan is for Lemmy, but at least in the original Reddit version, ultra cost more because it also includes things like translation services that required third party server space
There's a simple ad-free version pending approval I think that I assume will probably just cost the usual dollar or five
It costs 22 euro to remove ads for me, I find that too steep.
It's moderately expensive actually at more like $20 (depending on location) but I'm happy to pay it - it's a great app.
It appears IAP are coming later and I assume they will just disable ads for 5€ or something. Just like the original app.
The option to remove ads has been added - it costs $20 USD. The lifetime Ultra costs $100 USD.
$17/year to subscribe to Ultra, or $100/once. That means you'd have to subscribe yearly for almost 6 years to break even.
For me it's 7x the price, bought Sync Pro for reddit fur 2,99€ in 2018.
everything works great without ultra- not sure why you'd need that
I completely agree with someone trying to make some money off of their app, but when it comes to Lemmy I can't agree with injecting ads just so people have to pay to remove them. If it were just about the added bonus features then it would be a lot more acceptable.
Lemmy doesn't have ads and the instance hosters rely entirely on donations.
I must say, this is pretty uncool of Sync for Lemmy developers.
Moreover, it looks like it's gathering user info to third parties like messages, device or other IDs? Hmm 🤔
If true that is a real deal breaker for me. The whole idea of Lemmy is to break away from exploitative data gathering from corporations. If they are data gathering to sell to third parties then what makes them any different than Reddit? 🫤
If I had to guess most of that info is just to feed you ads, but that is already bad enough for me.
I think we can all make our own conclusions. I mean, don't get me wrong, the app looks great. But I think the subscription model and the data gathering maybe isn't the right approach in this instance, since we're talking about a different culture in Lemmy. This is not Reddit. I'd be happy with a simple, straight app purchase with no bs data mining, thank you very much.
Any paid tier (ultra or eventually pro when it comes out) will have all the data gathering disabled. It's purely just for whatever framework sync is using to serve ads.
Those are the ads SDK, which is disabled if you subscribe to ultra or pay a one time purchase to remove ads (available later when the app is out of beta).
What makes you think it's gathering that data?
LOL this is not how you gather data in a mobile app. There isn't a
GATHER_USER_DATApermission 🤣🤣🤣Ok then, how do you think it's getting the user's location data without access to the location permission, wifi, or Bluetooth?
That's only one of the many data points an app could get. Simply tracking user's network behaviour would be far more valuable than getting their location data.
Proof?
It is indeed beautifully designed. By far the best looking client I've seen yet.