It would be nice to have a free tier, even if it limited the amount of time that I could use it per day. 1h/day seems enough for a hobbyist to incorporate this tool into their workflow.
Founder here. I launched Ultorg a few days ago, so I still haven't quite figured out if there ought to be a free or reduced-functionality tier yet.
There was a big "The fallacy of freemium in SaaS" post from another founder a few weeks ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37832809), which inspired me to try with "free trial then paid-tier-only" for the initial launch. But I might change it later.
For now, I've set a rather long free trial period (21 days).
Looking at IntelliJ Ultimate, they do $599 for the first year, $479 for the second, $359 for the third and onwards. But then they have a "perpetual fallback license"... so I assume many people will buy just the first year and then keep that version forever.
For people who prefer perpetual licenses, is this because of a perceived lower total cost? Or for some other reason? Does the sentiment change depending on whether the buyer is purchasing for themselves or for their employer?
One downside of perpetual licenses is that at any given time, a large number of different versions will be in use across different users. Though maybe the users don't mind--perhaps they only want to upgrade their software whenever they change laptops.
Question: Do you plan to implement valuable enhancements over the coming years or do you believe this is feature complete?
> who prefer perpetual licenses, is this because of a perceived lower total cost? Or for some other reason?
For me, it's knowing that I'll have access to the software forever, but if I want to continue to get valuable enhancements, I keep paying. This is for me, the individual. When it's for a company, I truthfully care about that a lot less, next to nill, but care more about support, invoicing, SLAs, etc...
I have IntelliJ Ultimate at home and pay for it every year, but it gives me piece of mind knowing that if something happens, it's still "mine", but just doesn't get any new bells and whistles.
Every place I go to, guess what I develop with? IntelliJ. If they don't have it for me already, they will within the week.
> Question: Do you plan to implement valuable enhancements over the coming years
Yes, absolutely. The current release marks the productization of a long backlog of features that were previously developed only to the prototype stage--due to the project's origin as an academic research project.
With that now done, I'm hoping to (1) establish a sustainable business model, based on the current product, to fund future development, and then (2) start a big engineering effort to really develop Ultorg as an alternative to Excel and custom-made CRUD apps.
(You'll see a lot of VC-funded startups with similar goals. Inventing the "killer app" that lies in the space between Excel and a relational database is one of the software industry's holy grails. But there are some technological breakthroughs required that existing products didn't manage to crack, despite a lot of money poured into the problem.)
I'm very curious what a hobbyist could use this for!
I've noticed that SQLite itself seems to already have all the functionality needed for an AirTable clone besides the UI, everything needed to generate a pretty decent end user forms interface is basically already in a database schema. sqlite-web is really close, just missing foreign key browsing.
It would be nice to have a free tier, even if it limited the amount of time that I could use it per day. 1h/day seems enough for a hobbyist to incorporate this tool into their workflow.