The subscription is $100 per month, which covers all maintenance and ongoing support.
You just eliminated 98% of the people who might have bought this at a reasonable price.
This is the classic mistake.
Overprice and never get any traction.
You want a tier that is much cheaper than that and you want a few higher tiers that offer more features.
what maintenance and support do you think people will need ?
First, I love when devs create dedicated apps, or attempt to. I think it's something missing from XF.
That said, $100/mo is, with the utmost respect, insane.
I get that this app isn't just a simple one-time install and that ongoing development and maintenance are involved—but charging $100 per month is pretty outrageous, especially for forum admins who are already covering hosting, licenses, and other operational costs.
While it would be too expensive for me it seems once more that a lot of people here do not have any understanding of the effort and cost of developing an app like that. It is basically a while-label-solution for a per forum app with unlimited users, native for iOS and Android and including onboading/setup, support and updates and - at it seems - even customizations, at least to a degree. You may like it or not: I consider this rather cheap than expensive, sadly, given the time, effort, cost and headache tied to it.
If you run a small, non-commercial forum as a hobby this is probably out of reach. If you run a huge forum with 10.000s or even 100.000s of active users and you are running it commercially this is rather the bargain of the century (or at least it could be, if it works as promised and as people hope and assume): Wit 50+% of mobile use of forums today a native app is clearly something that can boost active participation in your forums massively. Plus it could even generate an income stream: You could offer the native app as part of a premium account on your forum and with hypothetically 1$/month you covered the app cost involved with just 100 premium users already. Anything above that mark will be additional revenue. In the end it is pretty simple maths to calculate if it may or even safely will work for your forum or not.
For me it would probably not work, but even on my small noncommercial forum with currently ~2.400 users I could imagine there could be enough people willing to pay to cover the cost.
The big questions are:
• will it really work?
• will it work on the vast majority of iOS and Android versions and devices out there?
• which limitations will it have?
• which addons will work and which not? The support of the very complex add on landscape may become a deal-braker for for some potential customers and at the same time a neck-braker for
@Mbx ...
Plus the elephant in the room:
• will it be available, supported and developed further in a timely manner "forever"?
We have seen so many attempts in regards of a native app promised but failing and we have seen so many developers step out from their add ons sooner or later.
So there is a trust issue - reasonably. In the beginning and for quite some time. I would not want to offer my users a native app and then have to pull back only after short time. Even less so if I charged them for the app.
Regarding the price: @Mpx could do a pricing depending from the number of installs or the size of the forum. Could help with getting a bigger installation base, if it makes sense for him economically is a different question.
Personally, with a support intensive app like that, I'd rather have 20 customers paying 500$/month than 100 customers paying 100$/month let alone 10.000 customers, paying 1$/month. The more as you probably can assume those with a 1$-bill have often enough completely unrealistic expectations and create nothing but trouble, pain and effort.
