Announcing the implementation of ads in our apps

This blog post was originally posted on Monday, March 25, 2013 by Christopher Jr. Riley.

I hate ads.

I don’t mind them when they are on YouTube or other websites and I’m fully aware of why they exist (thank you Google). I DO mind them being in my apps. The reason? It comes down to design. Every ad, no matter how nice they look, impairs the design of apps. They just don’t look great, they stick out like a sore thumb, and it’s not in our vision to implement them.

So why is the title implying that we are going to have ads in our apps? Simply put, it’s because of profit.

Triple J Studios is a for-profit company, not a non-profit. This means that we make money doing the things that we do. Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Disney, Dropbox, Microsoft. These are all companies that need to make money in order to survive. Now, we are making money with CloudSend and we are receiving a good reaction to it. However, we need more money in order to improve our chances of making it better, as well as making any of our future apps as elegant and bug-free as possible.

So with that said, here is what we are going to do. Starting with CloudSend, we are going to have two versions: a free, ad-supported version and a full, ad-free, paid version. We know that there are people who just want things to be free and that don’t mind ads, so we are making this version just for you. But we also know that there are people who would like to support us and hope that we can make our apps look as best as we can, so the fully paid versions will be here too.

There will be cases where our projects may only have an ad-supported version. In this case, we will have the option to allow you to remove the ads for a certain amount. There will also be cases where a project can only be downloaded by paying for it. This is because we want everyone to have a premium experience and that would mean that users will need to pay in order to use it.

Now will we be doing this forever? No we won’t. In fact, we will stop doing this once we can assure that most people will want to pay for our projects. And we do want to encourage you to pay for them because we work so hard to give you an experience that we think you will enjoy. Which is why we will be doing two more things that we will need to do in order to entice you to purchase:

1. When we send updates, the full version will be updated first, followed by the free version a week later (this doesn’t apply for any ad-supported apps)
2. When you open a lite app, you will, once in a while, see a message pop up giving you an option to buy the full version.

So this is why we are going to start adding ads. I know that this contradicts our values for how we create and view our apps, but I assure you that with this option, we can guarantee more profit so we can serve you better with our projects.

P.S.: In addition to CloudSend lite that we have just submitted, we have also submitted an update to CloudSend. CloudSend 1.0.1 will have some nice enhancements and bug fixes, so be sure to check back on this blog, Facebook, Twitter, and G+ for updates.