Dear Devs,
I have used Agenda for close to 2 years now, bought the premium features once (33£). I generally liked the app, especially the design, though I never really used the calendar feature (I suppose other users get a lot of value out of this feature alone). But I just ported all my notes back to apple notes, when I realised I have to pay another 33£ to get color - such a basic feature. That is just a slap in the face. If I extrapolate that to other ‘major features’ I will reach approx 100£ for 3 premium updates. That’s insanity for note-taking app. I think the Devs should rethink their pricing policy, or introduce minor unpaid updates for such basic features. Too late for me, but just my 2cents.
Cheers,
A
Sorry to hear you’re leaving but I don’t think it’s a fair picture you’re painting, in the past two years we have shipped much more than just “colors”, we added many more options to how your note appear (checklists, tags, fonts), added the options to add tables to your notes, added the open quickly feature, added the more tag features and the tag editor, a powerful autocompletion feature, the recent projects filtering, the color options and are about to add collaboration options in a release before the end of the month. And that is not taking into account the literally hundreds of smaller features and improvements, I’d say that if you scroll down through that list that you got pretty good value for paying once £33.
Most important however, while of course you can argue that you’re purely paying for features, we would say that if you like Agenda and if it forms a critical piece of your workflow, you’re paying for making sure we can keep working on the app and keep the lights on so you can continue to use it and rely on it.
It sounds however like Agenda wasn’t perhaps a good fit for you, and that’s fine. Best of luck and thank you for the feedback!
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Fair points, tough I would call checklists, tags, and fonts essential basic features of a note taking app. I am definitely not a power user, so obviously I have a bias towards my use case.
But regardless, charging the initial payment each year is overkill imo. I wonder how often people do it on average. Just a spontaneous thought: Imagine existing premium users would pay e.g. 10% less with each premium upgrade. The longer you use it the less you pay, good incentive. Same time incentive for devs to keep the app attractive to new users. Anyway, to be clear, I harbour no ill will towards Agenda. Just not for me anymore. Best of luck.
Even better, if you opt-in to auto-renewing your premium subscription you currently receive a 15% discount 
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Yeah, I meant, 10% on each previous 10%. So pay 33 then 33x0.9, then 33x0.9^2 …, over the years. What you have now is just a discount but still constant payments in perpetuity, and later users pay much less than early adopters. Yes, they had the benefit of using the software, granted, but it’s not proportional. I would be on board with Agenda as it is now, but not if I have to pay 33£ each year, to get (other amazing features I make little use of aside) colours, bold text and line spacing. I still think that should be standard. Anyway, I was happy with Agenda while I used it. May it prosper despite my misgivings about pricing. Good luck to all.
Don’t think I’ve seen anyone do such a pricing model, and to be honest it doesn’t really make sense IMHO. It’s not that both cost of living or cost of maintenance of Agenda becomes less if you stay on board longer.
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I think it is also worth pointing out that Agenda is a free app. You can use it free forever. If you don’t think the premium features are appealing, you don’t have to buy them, and keep getting bug fixes and free features added over time.
So you really only have to pay again if what you see in the premium features is something you really want to have. Hopefully, if that is the case, you can think “I’m paying, but at least I’m paying for something I want to have”.
We think it is a pretty fair sales model. Maybe the fairest in software-land.
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I’m new here and I haven’t yet sprung for the premium features (although I expect I will). I love this pricing model and I wish more developers would adopt it or something like it. I like that I don’t have to buy into a monthly or yearly subscription or forego getting critical bug fixes and compatibility with future OS versions. I can buy new features or not – my choice, as appropriate to my circumstances at the time. But, I recognize that this is not going to work for everyone. When you code for everyone, you code for no one. There is no product that is going to please everybody in every way.
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I would say that the licensing of Agenda is pretty unique among freemium apps. Keeping the premium features you already paid is in fact equivalent to paying for a perpetual license of a specific version/feature set, and only paying for the next version when you want to “upgrade” the features, with the extra advantage that you keep getting security updates.
I have seen this licensing model only on much bigger software, from companies like Xilinx and Mentor.
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Oh yes, it indeed is, and you really invested quite some time to fine-tune the initial idea and then went to great lengths explaining it to us users. I was shocked to see that @resteschaf still found a reason to complain about it. Well, that’s how it is: You can’t please everyone, but please keep it up and continue to please the rest of us!
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