Since this is the top comment as of now - hijacking this to introduce a change to pricing:
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OP here - based on the feedback, I’ve switched boringBar to a perpetual license for personal use: https://boringbar.app
It’s now $40 for 2 devices and includes 2 years of updates. After that, you can keep using the version you have, or choose to pay for updates again later.
For businesses, I’m keeping the existing annual pricing.
A lot of the comments on pricing were fair, and I appreciate people being direct about it. I still care a lot about long-term maintenance for an app like this, but I think this is a better balance.
Awesome that you were receptive to feedback. I hope most of the people who commented find out and don't just memory-hole the project.
What was your justification for the monthly fee in the first place?
There is a model that worked for decades: If you spent a _significant_ amount of work enhancing an existing tool you'd release a new major version. The would be a discount for license holders of the old version. Why reinvent the world over and over again?
Simple answer right? It makes more money.
Not saying that was OPs motivation but that's obviously why the shift happened.
To me it seems like small businesses like this get squeezed by these demands to make everything cheaper while the big corporations ignore it and stick to their pricing.
I’m not sure OP should have capitulated. Someone who loves this tool will probably gladly pay more.
The question is what is the proportion of people loving it vs liking it.
The proportion gets a lot easier to deal with as the price goes up.
Is it easier to convince one person to pay $100 or 100 people to pay $1?
I personally prefer the monthly payments of a nominal amount where $2-8/month is my usual small app tolerance. It feels like I’m supporting the development of useful tools while having the option to discontinue my patronage when the tool is no longer relevant or useful to my workflow. This gives products a natural lifespan and aligns the developer incentives to keep the product functional and continue developing new features.
Old guard will say what they will about software licensing but at the end of the day it’s all the same.
I get it now that folks absolutely loathe the idea of subscriptions - that too for a taskbar. In hindsight I too find it hideous but I wanted the pricing to reflect the effort that went into this - wrestling with the Window Server and Xcode for multiple weekends over the past months.
But hey, the masses have spoken - and a perpetual license it is. Vox populi, vox dei.
Given how many developers here use LLMs daily, how do you think about defensibility? Tools like this seem relatively easy to reverse-engineer and replicate with enough time and LLM assistance. Did that influence your decision to charge a subscription or the change to a personal license?
That's the reason why I added a subscription in the first place - you would pay a dirt-cheap price for a "boring" product with an added insurance that someone will be there to support it.
People will replicate it, sure, but supporting it regularly is another thing. I guess the majority wanted a perpetual license - so it's a win for the masses.
I cannot agree with you more.
Personally, I dare not replace the Dock with Windows-style task bar for fear that my OLED display might have burn-in on it. Yet, when I need an alternative, I would rather make an APP for my own.
>> how do you think about defensibility?
defensibility nowadays is app support and development. the more work you pour into it the more defensible it will be.
I personally would gladly pay to have app constantly polished and improved. What I would not use is some vibe-coded alternative that was slopped with AI in a day and pushed to github with a tweet "i made a free X alternative" and then abandoned.
how much is there to improve and polish for a taskbar? at most it will be keeping up with macOS throwing breaking changes at you and maybe one or the other weird bug.
but isn't that it?
I would not.
I'm not paying $40 for a taskbar replacement. And not for two years of updates and a two device limit on top.
Maybe if it was $10, I could consider it. Prices for macOS apps are insane in my opinion. Everyone wants to charge yearly or every two years now too.
They’re not insane.
It costs $99 a year just to be able to write Mac apps at all.
Any sort of buy-once app on macOS is unsustainable to the developer. They are paying Apple $99 a year forever.
If you want cheap/free apps get off of Apple’s ecosystem and switch to Linux.
I second this! As a lite Mac user, $40 is a bit steep. I'll manage without boringBar no matter how great it is.
Honestly, I have tried to really cut down on my usage of 3rd-party dependencies when possible. In a way, it's kind of freeing. Whatever I still need, I write myself. If I cannot write it, then I try to find something FOSS. If I find nothing, then I consider purchasing something.
For example, I am rolling my own window manager (that needs some much needed TLC). I ditched Alfred for Spotlight. Though Alfred is better, I will survive just fine. And the list goes on.
I am not trying to take a dig at the OP. I am sure he or she put effort into this application. But I am genuinely curious -- does anybody actually need this software? Cmd+Tab, a decent window manager, and Spotlight would solve the same problems for free.
Feedback from a potential customer: I despise 2-device limits. I used DEVONthink for a decade but dropped it because of that exact thing.
At home, I have a Mac Studio[0] set up in my office with my music stuff, and I'm writing this on my MacBoor Air[1] here on my lap in the living room. I also have a work laptop, although it's safely tucked away in my backback right now. My wife has an MBA, too, but that's hers and I don't mess with it. So I'm elbow-deep in Macs that are used solely by me, and I bounce between them regularly.
The 2-device limit is a dealbreaker for me. It's where I stop reading. I don't care if it cures cancer: I won't buy an app that makes me pick and choose which of the devices in my care I can use it on. I'm sympathetic to why vendors pick that limit. I get that you don't want me to buy a single license and spread it around my friends and work circles. That's completely reasonable and understandable. And yet, it completely breaks my use case. I bet I'm far from alone in this.
[0]A previous job let me keep it when I left.
[1]I bought to hack on personal projects instead of using [0], which was work-owned at the time.
You can purchase multiple licenses. If you can afford a dozen computers, you can afford a couple more licenses.
Very true! Completely irrelant here, because I only purchased one of those computers as you correctly noted, but true!
What's the alternative?
Trust and respect, which is a 2-way street. I've bought some relatively expensive apps (the pro version of nearly everything Omni Group makes, Things, etc. etc. etc.) and all of them let you install and use the apps on all of your computers. They're licensed per person, not per device. I despise technical controls on this for the same reason I despise DRM on physical media: it's an inconvenience to rightful owners and a temporary speed bump to pirates.
I'm not about to abuse my OmniFocus licenses, even though I could. They sold me a great product at a reasonable price, with permission to throw a copy on everything I own so I can use it no matter which chair I'm sitting at. They trust and respect me, and I trust and respect them.
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