>> 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.