Thank you to all of our customers who have offered feedback on the new TextExpander, and thank you again for your long-term support. In our enthusiasm to release, we missed some details we’d like to address here.
Tough day for the folks at Smile. I do love the people at this company.
It’s easy to jump on Smile over this, and I will.
But there is a larger problem here. Utilities like this, or big software like Adobe Creative Suite have matured. And, as such, they try to seek new revenue streams. Unfortunately, these are both powerful bits of software that cannot add features to justify price increases among users. What’s the value proposition from each of these companies?
Photoshop et al keep inventing use cases that stretch farther and farther from the core feature set in the hopes of attracting new users. Adobe, active for many years in the content creation sphere has seen its overall customer base decrease as print becomes less valuable, new installs dwindle, and new features don’t excite.
What could Smile add to an already capable piece of software to justify either upgrades or new installs?
We are at a crossroads here. Jobs didn’t help when he marginalized to price of software. Remember the days before the App Stores? Overnight, the retail price of software dropped considerably.
Smile is choosing to narrow their user base to those that depend on Group Sharing, which there are many. And I wish them luck. But at the same time, I can’t help but feel abandoned after being years of loyal customer.
To me, Smile violated one of the unspoken rules of subscription pricing. Subscription pricing should be cheaper than one-time app price in exchange for steady recurring revenue. Adobe Creative Cloud and Microsoft Office are good examples of that.
Going from $25 for Mac and iOS versions to $47.52/year for the cheapest subscription is a big increase anywhere you slice it, especially for those who have no need for group sharing.
I will find an alternative. This is stupid. I’m sick of such nonsense. I’ve been a faithful user of TextExpander for years. But this is the end.
The need for subscription pricing just highlights that Smile was unable to collect a suite of applications. They essentially have Textexpander and PDF Pen. We’ll see how they do but I think subscription pricing is only going to work for developers that have a suite of application where the subscription pricing is lower than outright buying the suite which dovetails with what nutmac stated. If they can’t sell this to the Enterprise they’re going to be in serious trouble. It’s not a given. 8 bucks a user is what businesses will pay for communication tools but snippet sharing is not on the level of say a Trello or Slack for many companies.
I guess I understand this; I’m still using 3.4.2. I wish them well.
Well, I’m already moving to TypeIt4Me. It’s actually really good, and had everything I need and a few things TextExpander doesn’t! (Like A $19 price).
I guess I better start looking for a replacement for PDFPen Pro now.
Looking at the release intervals and upgrading pricing, TE did cost me around $10 per year so far. We have been sharing snippet groups, simply by copying them to shares on our file server, forever. Not getting the incentive to pay almost five times as much. For what? The approx. 1 MB storage space on their server for a few snippets? I do pay $4.30 monthly for my private Exchange account, including 50 GB storage, full EAS/EWS support, free backups and archiving, guaranteed 99.98% availability and including Outlook licenses (which I do not use, but still) for my computers. Heck, a huge software package like Affinity Photo is $49 to own (and they do more substantial updates more often than TE).
Will do what I did with every company moving to subscriptions or mandatory own sync solutions so far (Adobe, Novamind, Day One)… Abandon them. MS is the only exception here, because they actually provide tons of updates, support for new devices and great cross-platform support for a price below the old model.
It’s unfortunate (the situation developers find themselves in such as this). But $5 per month is obscene.
aText is a $5 one time purchase and does almost everything TE does. It’s perfect for “the average user.”
And for the really light use type of person, just use Apple’s built-in implementation—it works surprisingly well for text-only expansion.
Exactly right. This reminds me of StuffIt. It reached a point where it did everything we needed (pretty early), but once Aladdin bought it they apparently wanted an annual revenue stream so they kept adding more and more crap no one wanted, which made it more complicated and buggy to boot. When was the last time you saw a .sit file?
No kidding. It just occurred to me this morning that the business cost of TextExpander is now the same as Photoshop and Lightroom together! Talk about being out of proportion.
wrong spot
Changed my mind, I’m going with Typinator. Vastly more capable than TextExpander. I’ve already created a workflow today that’s going to save me a bunch of time that could not be done in TextExpander.
And it uses regular expressions! Hoo boy!