I didn’t use Sync with reddit but since it’s the best one for Lemmy… Here I am! On Sync! Enjoying it!
I’m absolutely thrilled to have sync on the Fediverse, and will happily pay for a yearly subscription to help ensure LJD has sufficient compensation to keep the app up-to-date with whatever changes come to the Android/Lemmy APIs years down the road.
The problem with (even excellent) free apps for platforms like this, is they require consistent maintenance to keep up with both the platform they run on (Android), and the platform they serve content for (Lemmy). That is not a trivial amount of work, and is absolutely deserving of continued, recurring compensation IMO.
A one-time payment might make sense for a simple native game that gets produced once, has no web component, and never needs another update for its entire lifetime, but not for this. You aren’t paying for a singular product, you’re paying for a service. You wouldn’t go to the barber and winged about needing to pay every time I get my hair cut.
As a software engineer I find it miraculous the amount of people that whine about somebody wanting to get paid for putting weeks, months, and years of their life into a product 100s of thousands of people CHOOSE to use.