My perception (although I never tried it) is that it reduces the number of people actually trying it and avoids that you have to still pay for the payment platform fee when there is a refund, plus I presume there is also some dedication needed for handling the refund itself.
I speculate that there might be a sweet spot between the impulse purchase and the price level where you do not bother to ask for a refund, even if the tool does not work for you, but still it is counterintuitive for me why not to reach as many potential users as possible at a nearly zero marginal cost and sort of pray for conversion with a much higher user base.
In other words, at this price range with no recurring income, what is the percentage of users who actually to ask for a refund? Is it very low?
When someone pays for the app, they try it most of the time immediately. He explores the app, finds issues, and, because he paid for it, will be much more involved, which will provide me with much more accurate feedback.
Also, if something is not working well for him, he writes me, and I benefit from these interactions with the users. A lot of my improvements for my apps are based on "Refund talks" Overall, the upsides outweigh the downsides.
I don't have many refunds, but when I do, it really helps me improve the app. I already had users who asked for a refund, and a few versions later, the app improved based on their feedback, and they repurchased it.
I am sure that some users don't buy without trying, And this is why I am super responsive to refund requests and handle them faster and without "playing games" with this topic.
Hope this makes sense in some way
The amount of people who do not want to pay upfront, but would buy after a trial, is not just substantial, but game changing.
You can also add the same pressure to test the app after installing by offering a 14 or even a 7 day trial.
Perhaps on Macs it's different, or maybe it's due to your price point, but still your approach automatically drives away a large swath of potential, but cautious buyers, or those who don't want to be bothered by the refund process. Your pitch is "here is some good stuff, and here are the hurdles if you want to test it".
I'm not affiliated with them, but I am a customer. They put a lot of effort into finding the right balance of what to unlock upfront in the trial. And their license/unlock process is pretty seamless.
I don't dispute the power of a free trial, but it can be a fair bit of work to get the details right.
It's only 10€, so it's pretty well in the impulse-buy category.
To the author: I'd suggest localising the currency, if possible. At least for English speaking locales (US, UK, CA, AU, NZ). The EUR pricing made it look to me like you might not be able to buy it if you're not in Europe. (Edit: I'm in Canada and it shows EUR, not CAD.)
I work with Raycase + ExtraBar together.
ExtraBar is really good for managing different tasks in the same app, since there's no direct way to set this up in Raycast/Alfred, and it's also a good place to "bookmark" your favorite Raycast/Alfred actions without having to open the full app.
Raycast provides a deeplink for every action in the app. So I just take the actions that I use the most and put them in my ExtraBar.
I am working to build full macro creation inside ExtraBar, which will allow you to quickly run complex scripts that use different applications and actions in an easy, accessible way.
Let me know if you have any more question or wants to try it out
I'm also curious how this compares to other similar solutions -- QuickCMD, Raycast, Keyboard Maestro, Command Keeper, etc. It seems clear that its featureset is different, but it's hard to figure out which ones do which things. If you included a comparison features chart it might be helpful so potential customers can see what makes this one unique -- i.e. it's the only one that does X and Y and Z, because every other app only does 2 but not all 3.
Regarding the similar solution, we don't replace them, instead, we make them much more accessible and integrate with them amazingly well. A lot of our users are saying that this app is the missing part for Keyboard Maestery and also a huge improvement for Raycast.
Because everything works with Deeplinks, it's super easy to integrate, and with the keyboard-only navigation options, everything is much faster.
If you have any more questions feel free to ask
The app looks cool but I think the big challenge is in demonstrating what makes it unique/better. You spend time comparing with icon managers, but that is not the competition. It would be much more helpful to me in understanding how it differs from the actual competition. And saying that it is the "missing part" or a "huge improvement" doesn't tell me anything factual.
Don't some of the competitors use keyboard triggers? Do they not also allow you to create deep links? Don't some of them also sit in the menu bar? This is why it's not immediately clear to me what specifically makes your product better. I'm assuming you have an answer, but that's where a feature comparison chart would really help.
I assumed ExtraBar was intended to be its own all-in-one solution for executing commands. Now that you say it also works together with other utilities, that changes my perception completely.
Offtop: but is this the right question to ask?
Coming from Linux (involuntarily), the menu/tray implementation was one of the loudest UX issues I immediately discovered. Some functions can only be invoked from a system tray icon, and those actions can also be app/workspace-sensitive (like taking a screenshot with some special config using a screenshot tool). MacOS renders those functions inaccessible if the currently focused app has more than ~6 items in the menu.
Gosh, some apps even have menus so big, they don't fit on a single screen (btw, MacOS's solution is to compress the font, yeah, ask me how I know), leaving only the control center in the tray (which is completely useless in this scenario).
This is the first time I encounter a MacOS user who at least acknowledges the problem, albeit from a different angle: "you are displaying it wrong/your screen is too small".
Seeing as I'm not involved with developing macOS, I think it is?
> This is the first time I encounter a MacOS user who at least acknowledges the problem
Complaints about the menu bar icons are practically as old as the Mac itself. I don't know who doesn't acknowledge the problem. People have been complaining for decades now about having to buy Bartender to get around the problem.
I have a custom menu bar I wrote that integrates with Yabai and requires disabling SIP for full functionality, it works similarly to yours, but I love how simple and polished this one is.
How are you able to do that without OS permissions?
That phrasing is so GPT coded. Same for other portions of the text.
Just feeling curious that the tone is there, not judging your usage of tools.