I have mixed feelings here. I legitimately paid ($1, once, a decade ago) for a calculator app and feel it was a great value (I still prefer it to this day). But then again the free version was fine too and the one-time payment was essentially a donation to the developer for a great app that unlocked... Themes...

Oof. Yes!

The proprietary cloud crap usually has worse or non-existent documentation, fewer features, and a terrible or non-existent API.

But it comes with a salesperson. So there's that.

But people with cloud server orchestration skills are terrifyingly expensive right now, so self-hosting a better product can be a very hard sell.

They always want to charge per user too instead of just charging a monthly fee. They'd rather have no money than not charge per user it's actual crazy. Imagine any other industry turning away paying customers when it doesn't cost them anything to have the customer. Software companies are insane. Can't wait until their funding runs out.

Sometimes the value add is security, sometimes scaling or uptime. Enterprise considerations aren't necessarily the same as for individual consumers.

Sometimes it's just a dogshit product though, and the sales team pulled the wool over some execs eyes.

Oh fuck yeah! So much of my research into new tools is just checking to see if they have a demo, documentation, and price.

When I'm looking for a new tool, I don't have the time to schedule a "quick" 20 minute call to do introductions and schedule a follow-up hour long meeting followed by a quote sent over in an email days later only to find out the price is so far outside the range there is no way it's ever going to happen!

I'm not some useless middle manager looking for any excuse to look busy; I don't have that kind of time to waste!

Sounds like a front for either blatant adware or malware with botted reviews/downloads to bring it to the top in search results. I can't image there isn't a free app that does this.

The thing that I find insane is having to pay for Nitro to have an animated .gif as your profile pic.

...The animation is played client-side, so literally costs Discord nothing to do this, and as a matter of fact it's actually more effort for them to intentionally block animations from playing until you pony up than just letting the browser container the app runs in natively do its thing. Given that the Discord app itself is basically just a glorified webview container with some stuff bolted onto it.

On a similar note, skins and other cosmetics in video games that do nothing to help with camouflage—or worse—make you stand out more. Never understood why people waste money on that.

Didn’t MKBHD launch some wallpaper app for $12 a month? I heard about it and just figured he was another tech YouTuber who lost touch

Those "I'm rich" apps basically tested the app store price limit which was set to $9,999 (don't know if it's different now). Brilliant idea really.

I put this in the same category as the "Million dollar homepage" where some guy asked for $1 a pixel and hosted a page with the results. Something smart that if it gets enough attention could make someone good money for not a lot of work. And generally something that will only work once as copycats won't be seen to have the same value.

Novelty apps were practically the majority of what was out there in the early days of Android and iOS. I remember a lighter app, and an electric shaver app.

My favorite novelty app was that marble maze game on iOS that* used the accelerometer. I got really good at finishing those mazes in seconds, which upset my cousin because it was his phone and I demolished all his best times, lol. Only video game I was ever good at.

I've never really understood the imitation app developers. Like your first little run of the novelty, sure, makes sense, minimal effort that might pay itself off or even go viral, but why do the imitations think they have the same shot?

I was legit baffled by how such a shit peace of software could become so ubiquitous – until I got to know SAP and realized that Teams isn't even in the bottom half of enterprise software quality.

Over 9000!!!! 😱🤯

I don't know, not the worst in this thread at least.