“The Business Model Made Me Do It”

Good products become bad customer experiences with the wrong pricing scheme

This is the story of a failed product love affair.

In the beginning there was Adobe Illustrator. I think I was one of the earliest users of the sturdy drawing tool—having bootlegged my first copy back in, what was it, 1993? It is truly a mighty power tool for us creatives. Yet, as the nature of my work has become more focused on wireframes and user flows across multiple devices, Illustrator has seemed a Swiss Army Knife when what I really needed was a scalpel.

Enter Sketch. I’d noticed the app when it first sauntered onto the scene. This was a lovingly produced Mac app made with flair by fellow product designers who knew firsthand all about my pain. But it wasn’t until I read this persuasive Medium review that I broke down and downloaded it.

The app was rougher around the edges than I’d hoped; basic tasks that are effortless in Illustrator like selecting objects or manipulating text could be unwieldy or finicky. In other ways, though, it was clear they’d built a drawing tool that could be just right for people like me.

After a few weeks of playing with it I looked into purchasing it on the App Store. At $79 it wasn’t cheap, and the numerous reviews that mentioned its bugginess gave me pause. I’d be depending on this for day-to-day prototyping—if the app had bugs that affected my work it could could have serious consequences for my productivity.

Screw it, I decided. I’m in. While big companies can deploy massive resources to address stability in the products, small teams with simple products put their heart and soul into making their customers successful. I can suffer through rough edges on a new product. I’m an early adopter, dammit!

After purchasing, and then using the product for several weeks I started noticing how bad some of the bugs really were. I’d select a text box to edit the type and half the letters would vanish from view. I’d suddenly lose the ability to select items on the canvas, or all the tools would become unresponsive. These bugs would stop me in my tracks again and again costing me valuable time. They were causing me to be less productive than I was in Illustrator. No biggie, I thought. These’ll get fixed in the next update.

Well, I waited. And waited. The automatic update didn’t come. So I went to the App Store and attempted to manually download the upgrade. Errors.

Finally, I went to the web site and realized the problem. The app had been upgraded from 2.4.4 (the one I’d purchased eight weeks before) to 3.0. And there was an additional $40 fee to upgrade to this latest version. Not an unfair amount for a professional app upgrade, but if I’d purchased the app two weeks later the upgrade would have been free.

Now, I know what you may be thinking. “That’s how licensed software works! Developers charge for major new versions to pay for ongoing development. They have to have a hard cut-off date for free upgrades.” Perhaps.

But let’s be clear: this is a recipe for destroying customer trust.

Three reasons.

First, it’s hard not to feel slighted when you just plopped down $79 bucks for a professional product that doesn’t quite work, and then discover after the fact that it is no longer supported. It feels even more like a bait-and-switch when it happens on the last release of the current line. This whole scenario feels designed to make a customer feel like a sucker (though of course I know it’s unintentional).

Second, we’re all increasingly unaccustomed to dealing with the contingencies and costs of the “version license” software model. The majority of my professional software comes as services, not just the obvious web apps like Slack or Mixpanel, but now even desktop apps like Adobe Creative Cloud (where my trusty Illustrator is forever evergreen).

And I virtually never have to pay extra to receive updates on my iOS/Android apps. They simply update automagically. I don’t have to re-purchase them—certainly not to get critical bug fixes. The Mac App Store is designed to convey the same customer expectations as the iOS app store, making the paid upgrade feel wrong.

It’s also a terrible pricing dilemma for products in crowded, mature categories—the higher the costs to a user, and the greater the risks, the more prudent it is for them to stick with the safe, stable choice. (Note that even Apple and Microsoft seem to get this, as they’ve ended upgrade fees for operating system updates).

Finally, and perhaps most nefariously, this business model can pit software developers against some of their customers. When you charge for new versions, there are arbitrary cut-offs that are going to punish some people due to the accident of their purchase timing. The act of tolerating unhappy customers as “acceptable casualties” of the system is fundamentally corrupting.

By contrast, in software-as-a-service the interests of developers and those of users can be better aligned, especially if subscription fees start low and increase over time as the product improves. Developers have incentives to constantly improve the product (gain new customers AND reduce churn!), while early adopters have a minimal risk and greater reward for coming onboard early and staying.

The Sketch team, Bohemian Coding, is operating inside a business model with impeccable internal logic—pay for ongoing improvement by charging for major new releases. But it’s a logic with little room for customer empathy. This limited thinking dictates their customer engagement style. This isn’t inevitable in the version license model, but it’s a natural byproduct of it.

Consider: there was no pro-active communication about the impending end-of-the-line when I purchased the mothballed app, and when I first emailed with my frustration they sent me a dismissive one liner, simply restating their policy. After prodding them via Twitter for some kind of human touch, one of the developers, Pieter, did take more time to explain:

I think it is unfair to call 2.4.4 a bug-ridden product…We have made significant improvements to the app over the course of two years and at a certain point we have to release a new major version and cut off the free upgrades…Promo codes are limited…I hope you understand our position.

The thing is, I do understand the position. And it is this: Their business model comes before their customers. Nowhere in their communication to me (of which the above is just an excerpt) do they express any particular appreciation for my point of view. No thank you for being an early user and suffering through the growing pains. Nor did they attempt any followup on the specific bugs I reported. It’s like they wished I would just go away…or upgrade already.

So I’m cutting my losses. Not because I think their developers are bad people or that the product doesn’t have tons of potential. It’s just that if I’m going to be treated as just another transaction, I may as well stick with Adobe and their mountains of development resources. At least I’ll know my bugs will eventually get addressed.

I really wanted to love this product. And I almost did.