Good morning, Brendan.
One of the reasons I chose to use your application—and support a small independent developer rather than a large tech company—was that, years ago, you mentioned that you were not a fan of subscription-based software. I appreciated that philosophy and it was one of the factors that led me to purchase Tap Forms.
So, to my disappointment, I now see that Tap Forms 5 appears to be reaching end-of-life and that the future direction is moving toward a subscription model. Needless to say, I am not particularly happy about this change.
What concerns me even more is that Tap Forms 5 currently relies on Rosetta. As Apple continues to phase out support for Rosetta, there will likely come a point where Tap Forms 5 will no longer run on future versions of macOS. This effectively leaves existing customers with little choice but to move to the new subscription-based version if they want to continue using the software.
Could you clarify the situation? Will Tap Forms 5 continue to be available and supported as a one-time purchase application, while the new version is offered separately as a subscription? Or is the subscription model intended to completely replace Tap Forms 5 once Rosetta is no longer available?
If the latter is the plan, then I will unfortunately need to start looking for alternative software. I understand that subscriptions provide ongoing revenue for development, but personally I am not willing to pay an annual subscription for a personal database application. At roughly $45–50 USD per year, the cost is difficult for me to justify, especially when I originally purchased the software with the expectation of a traditional one-time purchase model.
Thank you for any clarification you can provide.
Hi Eric,
It takes a lot of time to keep Tap Forms up-to-date with all the changes that Apple makes to the operating systems year after year. Plus to fix bugs, add new features, and so on. To expect a one-time payment to get the benefits of all of that forever is no longer financially viable for me. Yes, there’s the upgrade model, but as you know, Apple doesn’t support that model in the App Store. I did that once before with Tap Forms 5 by releasing it as a new application with a migration function. Tap Forms Pro is the last time that I have to do that as now I’ll be able to release fixes, new features, and updates to account for OS changes as I go. I won’t have to hold back updates or new features for some big feature upgrade once a year or two. Everyone will now get them as I finish them. Plus I’ve been providing support to all my customers, no matter which version they bought for 18 years now. That also takes time away from development. I love providing help to all my customers. Everyone has always been super nice and I’ve been very grateful for that.
The Rosetta issue is unfortunate. I had fully expected Apple to just keep it there forever. I put a note in the App Store for Tap Forms 5 that it does require Rosetta. It will continue to function forever on Intel Macs of course and anyone who stays at macOS 27 on Apple Silicon Macs. I know that’s not feasible for everyone though. But it is what it is and the decision to remove Rosetta was out of my hands. Tap Forms 5 relies on a database engine that is no longer supported and was compiled for Intel on Mac. In Tap Forms Pro I yanked that out and replaced it with Apple’s CoreData engine and raw SQLite. So that will never be an issue again. Just doing that took me about a year of development.
So I’m very sorry that you’re disappointed in my decision to move to a subscription model, but without having done that, I saw the end of the road for Tap Forms. Revenues were declining year after year and now I’ve finally managed to turn that around. Now Tap Forms Pro has a very bright future ahead of it.
Tap Forms Pro has been out for just over a year now and I’m now starting to see a rise in my income from last year rather than just barely scraping by with a declining income year after year.
I hope you better understand my decision now.
Brendan
Hi Brendan,
Your reasoning is well understood. The problem is that we all have different uses of Tap Forms (5 or Pro). Some will have a rather intense and/or professional use, and the $50 annual subscription is fully justified. Others like me use TP5 for a single database, rarely used but important. I use it to track a collection of old books. I use BookBuddy for modern books and it is very convenient and complete, but it does not work well for rare/old books, often in multivolume sets etc. For this I use a database I originally designed in Filemaker, then converted to Bento, and perfected in TP5. I do appreciate the relational features, the reporting, and custom displays. So this database is important to me, but it is the only one use, and I am not adding rare books often. So TP5 is perfect as is for me. $50 annually just to keep it going is hard to justify.
So, maybe a solution could similar to what a software company like Audirvana did. They also chose to move to subscription model when they introduced “Audirvana Studio” to replace the music software Audirvana 3.5, for reasons similar to yours. But after a while they introduced a second option: a single-purchase, “Audirvana Origin” that only works for local music libraries, without the access to streaming services included in the “Studio” version only available by subscription. They now have both kinds of customers.
Maybe for “light users” you could have a version that works with a limited number of records and/or a limited number of databases (2 or 3?). This could be single purchase, or a cheaper subscription price, allowing for upgrade by moving to the higher price. $50 is not far from the old price for a single purchase, and half of the Microsoft Office Suite. Again, I understand, and for heavy/Professional users, it makes perfect sense, but you may actually get more users and revenue by offering a “light” version for more occasional users. You would have to see what are the criteria that make sense.
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This reply was modified 3 weeks, 3 days ago by
guardajoias.
Hi Guardajoias,
Those are good points. Currently I still have Tap Forms 5 on the App Store for people that have older operating system versions. But that will stop working when Apple removes Rosetta from macOS 28. At that point I’ll probably have to remove it from the App Store if Apple doesn’t do it for me (they did for some of my older versions such as Tap Forms 3.5 and Tap Forms 4 (for iOS)).
It’s a difficult decision to make because I’m only just starting to see progress in my proceeds from the subscription to Tap Forms Pro. All last year it was basically the same as when I only had Tap Forms 5 for sale where revenues were declining year after year. But now in the 2nd year, Tap Forms Pro sales are picking up again and renewals are definitely contributing to that. So do I want to cannibalize that? if I build a lite version, do I still have to maintain that with new OS updates and features? Or do I just right to a one-time purchase at maybe 6x the annual cost? Tough decisions.
Thanks,
Brendan
Well we still have some time before MacOS 28 arrives :)
The “Lite” version would be the same but with limitations (max. number of records and/or databases for example). So it should not require much separate maintenance. You would make the update on the Pro, and add the limitations to the Lite versions. The objective would be to NOT cannibalize subscriptions of TP Pro, but to add users that would balk at an annual $50 cost (the problem is that it all adds up, and if all software is subscriptions, users will need other define priorities). it could be a one-time cost (Audirvana Origin includes updates for 2 years, then has paid update), or a lower subscription cost, one that could be justified for a lighter use, within the limitations of the “Lite” version…
If you find the right levels, you should be able to ideally get additional revenue. Because users of the Lite version could “upgrade” to the Pro version easily, you would also provide an easy path to further revenue increases.
Just food for thought at this point…
