First, on the question of subscription-based software, I am personally no fan of the model. I have the utmost respect for other software developers who have chosen to go the subscription route - they have to do what is best for their business and we all have to make money to survive - but as a customer, I tend to shy away from subscription software. (I use Affinity these days instead of Adobe purely because the latter went subscription-only, for instance.) It’s mainly a psychological barrier: although I’m fortunate enough to be financially secure these days, I still have a residual fear that I might not have the money this time next year, so what if I get locked out of a tool I rely on? We at L&L have always wanted to appeal to struggling writers, and going the subscription route would, it seems to me, do them no favours - especially when there are so many subscriptions for so many services nowadays, from Netflix to Spotify. It just keeps adding up.
That said, the way the market is heading, I wouldn’t be surprised if one day we were forced to go subscription-only. Apple encourages the subscription model on the App Store, with subscription software “only” having to pay 15% of the profits to Apple after the first year, as opposed to the blanket 30% for one-time-purchase apps. And many third-party store providers are trying to move in that direction, too - Paddle, who we use these days for our online store (after eSellerate disappeared), often urge us to consider the SaaS model; it’s the direction they are most interested in. It may, alas, just be a matter of time before online store providers remove other options.
That’s all by-the-by, though. The op’s main point seems to be that we can’t financially survive - let alone compete - without going the subscription route, with “so many people eagerly throwing money at competing products”. On that score you can rest easy: none of the problems we face right now are financial, and from what information is publicly available, we seem to do very well in terms of market share and income.
The Ulysses guys - and they might technically be competitors but I like them a lot - wrote a fascinating article about why they switched to the subscription model. They described the problems with a one-time-purchase model: needing to push out paid updates to get attention, then having sales drop off to a non-sustainable level as that attention attenuates. What’s interesting is that we didn’t recognise those problems because we have been fortunate enough not to have faced them. Although of course sales increase after big releases, we have been very lucky in that - touch wood! - our sales have always been steady and solid and much more than sustainable. I don’t take it for granted, but we are healthy and profitable.
I do understand why you might think otherwise: v3 for Windows is years late and there haven’t been any Mac or iOS updates for several months now. It’s not a good impression to those users who gauge the health of a software company by the frequency of its updates, I know, but the situation will not, I hope, continue for too much longer.
The point is that the problems we face right now are structural and philosophical rather than financial, and that therefore the subscription-vs-one-time-purchase debate is immaterial to them. Which is not to downplay those problems:
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The Windows version is hugely overdue and this is hurting the faith our users have in us. And yet it’s an impossible situation. I don’t want to go into internal matters, but there is no way of throwing money at it that will fix this. The Windows update will be released, I hasten to add, but we need seriously to evaluate how to avoid this situation in the future.
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Scrivener has grown over the years into something rather large, with a code base to match, and yet I’m the sole developer of the macOS and iOS versions, as well as the developer of Scapple. Really, I desperately need another coder to come on board, and that needs to be a priority over the coming months. We have the money to pay for another good coder or two, but finding them is the problem - my experience of working with coders has not been great. The iOS version spent several years languishing in development hell as we went through a succession of coders, even hiring a London-based app developer company at one point in desperation, until eventually, as it became clear that it was never going to get done, I rewrote the thing from scratch myself over a six-month period. And as we’re spread around the world with no office, monitoring and training another coder has its own difficulties.
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Software expectations have changed. Users are less willing than ever to read a tutorial or spend time learning software, and Apple has made everyone expect software to “just work” with iCloud. But Scrivener is built around a paradigm - being able to throw anything and everything into a project, file size be damned - that doesn’t gel with modern syncing expectations (we’ll need terabytes-per-second connections in every home!), and it has grown so much over the years that it is often difficult for me to keep track of its features and options, let alone our users. Start tearing things out, though, and we risk losing existing users (and the good profits we now make!). This is what I think of as the Word 5.1 effect: Microsoft’s Rick Schaut lamented in a blog post about how he was always being told that Word 5.1 was in its simplicity the apex of word processors, so why not just go back to that? But of course everyone who accosted him thus did so with the caveat that they would want to add one feature from a later version of Word, and everyone picked a different feature to add.
So, I feel we are coming to a crossroads, but I don’t think it has anything to do with subscription models. I think the questions we have to ask ourselves are less about the sustainability of our finances than about the sustainability of Scrivener itself in its current form. These are difficult questions, and there is no way that the answers, whatever they might turn out to be, will please everybody.
Thank you for this honest but polite perspective. I should stress that Mac development has not been delayed for the Windows version. It’s just that my work over the past few months hasn’t seen the light of day yet for other reasons, and won’t for some time. There will be updates for Big Sur, though. It seems to me, however, that if you find Bear more than enough for your writing needs, then you require very few of Scrivener’s tools anyway. That said, I do have two serious questions:
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What would tempt you back to Scrivener?
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Suppose there were a simpler version of Scrivener - without so many options and perhaps with not many more features than the iOS version. But suppose this simpler version had iCloud support and could sync as seamlessly as other iCloud apps do (but also that this meant that it could not store research files inside a project because of the potential file size). Would that appeal?
I should stress that these questions are purely hypothetical - I’m just genuinely curious about the payoffs users are willing to accept for the changes they want.
All the best,
Keith