Just wanted to confirm if the lock screen widgets will work for us legacy customers or will that be behind a paywall? I always assumed that lock screen widgets were part of the widget feature built in.
I can completely understand the Apple Watch and Sync functions demanding more resources continually and definitely agree that subscription for those features make sense. Just not sure why lock screen widgets would fall into that bracket.
I would love to have the option of a lifetime subscription, especially for people who have been loyal supporters of Clear from way back.
I read through every single comment on this thread, and yours is the first one that accurately captures my feelings on this pivot. I don’t need themes or collectibles in a list-making or to-do app. My phone is permanently muted, so sounds are useless to me. The single biggest reason I don’t use Clear 2.0 as often as I used to back in the old days is the inability to sync lists across my (Apple) devices. As much as I loathe subscriptions, I’d be willing to pay a small amount for that functionality and only that functionality alone. Is that worth $25/year to me, though? Probably not? I’d love to use the app more, but the reality is that I simply cannot justify yet another subscription. Yes, $25/year is not that much (as someone pointed out above), but $25/year + $95/year + $20/month (etc., etc.) just simply adds up, and one simply must draw a line somewhere. I’m sad to say it because I really do appreciate the team’s transparency here and can somewhat understand the arguments for this pivot. For me personally, I’ve already adjusted my workflow and routines over the last decade to not rely on Clear as much, and unfortunately with this announcement, it seems likely I’ll just continue to limit my Clear use to iPhone-only for simple use cases like trip packing lists or tracking my favorite karaoke songs. Perhaps I’m not the target audience for Clear Pro then, in which case, that’s fine. Too bad about not getting the ability to sync, though.
@ColorYourList the monthly collectibles would cycle out, well probably won’t like de-activate a theme that ‘expired’ until you change it yourself. You will still be able to permanently unlock them in the shop, and there’s the rewards that you can continue to unlock for free as a legacy user so that should help you bank up some collection. Not yanking out quotes, randomization could be a fun smaller feature in the future.
There’s been a couple questions/concerns/references to AI in this thread. For Clear my gut feeling is to engage with this mostly by integrating more tightly with things like Siri and Apple Intelligence. Not that it’s particularly useful today, but because I do believe in some not-too-far future where you can basically ask Siri to do anything on your phone and apps that you can do yourself, and this future makes sense to me.
@Jamesfawcett unfortunately I really do think sync above all else requires a business model with some reliable recurring revenue from its users.
There has been some asks for a single lifetime unlock option from @Mer @yomiel and others in this thread / in my emails.
I’m not completely shutting down this as a possible option, but I would really want to make sure that it helps improve our chances to achieve longterm sustainability instead of potentially making this more difficult, and I would not expect this on Clear Pro’s launch. Some worries:
• ‘Lifetime’ freaks me out, it would be different if we have successfully established a sustaining business, but when we are still trying to fix this, I don’t feel like I could stand by that kind of expectation/promise.
• The lifetime option would have to be priced eye-wateringly high, I was asking my indie dev friend group and they were saying it needs to be at minimum 5x yearly rate which is over $100. This in itself would now make another group of people upset too lol.
• It’s basically pulling revenue from the future to today, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but with our longterm sustainability goal in mind, I think we would have to have a strong plan to use this early revenue to help strengthen that longterm goal. And I don’t have an obvious plan or idea there. Overall longterm steadiness is a lot more important to us than an early spike in sales.
So yeah it’s interesting, but also still murky to me if it would be a healthy decision for us.
@yardie I know most of us are at this stage where we are starting to prune subscriptions as we go and it’s kind of zero sum. Clear Pro is going to need to compete in that space and win its share fairly, by offering enough added value to the people who are already getting the most ongoing value from Clear. (In productivity boost etc.)
If you’re a more casual lister, like weekly groceries list or quite occasionally like that, it definitely doesn’t make much sense. If you miss sync but in a more occasional case like this, I would actually recommend checking out the new iPhone Mirroring feature on the latest Mac OS. We support some keyboard functionality there, so you can just type to start listing, and even command + 1-9 to switch between lists.
@skrimaging the delineation overall is like power user / pro / added functionality features and I was feeling like widgets fit under this – useful and fun, but not exactly required.
@dagwood777 yep we have been pretty focused on the syncing since the summer (it will start iOS syncing + simple web client)
@Rocket 
I hope your sentiment is shared among most of our hardcore!
Also I just want to note and thank you all for keeping the heat level of this discussion at reasonable levels, I feel like it’s rare to be able to hold a contentious discussion like this in good faith with internet strangers these days, and we seem to be pulling it off so far 
@phillryu Great to hear that sync across iphone/macbook is coming again soon! I’m waiting with cash in hand! BTW, as someone with decades of experience in marketing and tech industry, I would agree whole-heartedly with your hesitation on “lifetime” subscriptions. I have seen this go bad in so many different ways for companies large and small. It is an absolutely terrible business model, as it robs you of the recurring revenue stream that is critical for continued support and improvements. If your goal is a long-term, viable business, you should avoid the lifetime pricing model like the plague IMO. Ask American Airlines how they feel about the “lifetime” flight passes they sold back in the 90’s. Ask Tivo if they regret the “lifetime” subscriptions on their DVRs that are still to this day selling used on eBay for hundreds of dollars to new users who will never pay Tivo a dime. The list goes on…
My suggestion was to offer a Lifetime subscription to those loyal early adopters for a limited time period and then remove the lifetime option for future subscribers.
Ok fair enough Phil. Thank you for your reply. I don’t like subscriptions, but if sync works, count me in to support the team.
This is slightly tangential but for those curious about the Lock Screen widgets, we’re testing a checklist option (where you can tap to check off), but also perhaps a reference list option that will just fit more lines on screen.
Will synching only work on Mac ? Been thinking recently the main reason I don’t use clear for a lot of things is being able to access it on my work pc. Would happily pay the suggested sub if it did but might have to think about looking for another app
We’re preparing a simple web client, hoping to roll it out at least in early alpha testing when we begin TestFlight for iOS syncing.
Oh sorry @Madeirabhoy I actually misread. It will be iOS syncing + Clear Web. We’ve been testing iPhone and iPad here.
I bet the traffic to that website just skyrocketed 
Haha, please don’t get your hopes up hunting around the website, it does require a special TestFlight build of Clear that supports it as well.
I cant wait, I am so excited for it
I’m definitely waiting for it too.
I’m a small business owner, so I completely understand your perspective. I use your app extensively and am willing to pay for additional features. If and when a subscription model is introduced, I’ll gladly subscribe.
Would it be possible to just use the web client (without iOS syncing) when the product is ready to launch?
this is very fair. I am in.
Saying the shop model wasn’t working comes across as incredibly disingenuous when the shop was abandoned from almost the moment Clear left public beta. New themes were added less and less frequently, and for like half a year or more there have been no new themes at all—despite quite a few themes never having been moved from the beta stage to the public access stage. That’s not even counting specific themes like Private Beach which people have BEGGED for, even willing to pay more money than usual if you’d simply grant access to it.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t know how the casual user is interacting with the shop. But maybe even casual users could tell the shop has been little more than abandonware for the better part of a year? So saying that model didn’t work just sounds like an excuse, when you had people constantly asking for themes, designing themes for you for free, offering to buy more themes at a premium… like did the shop model actually fail, or did you deliberately torch it?
I promise it wasn’t torched. Some more details here: Clear Pro (And Syncing) - #16 by phillryu
For some time we were really pumping out good fresh collectibles for the shop and that probably makes it seem like we simply turned off the tap. But us coming up with another whole set of that caliber (and even more as we go) really was not possible. Not saying that we don’t have some more creativity left, just that this pace was absolutely unsustainable and we were running low on ideas.
We covered a lot of ground!
I would cite the graphic themes as the point where we realized we can’t keep it up with the normal color themes (without them starting to feel less exciting/different and pop from the existing ones). This was March or April, some months after 2.0 launch, and they weren’t able to sustain shop momentum… so we hit pause, started prioritizing sync work, and began to think about what to do with the business side.
I’m hopeful with just less intense pressure on it (like the entire business on its shoulders), we will be able to start putting out some content again in a more creatively sustainable way, though at the moment we really have our hands full until we get Pro and Sync rolled out.
If it felt possible to turn it around we would’ve kept going but it was turning into an uphill climb that keeps getting steeper as we go and too much pressure on it that felt like inevitable burnout/no clear path to success by itself… hope that makes sense.
If you have any other questions you can also hit me up on iMessage, phill@impending.com
@iOS I suppose it would, though especially to begin with, we will be focused on it as a syncing client for our iOS base first.
A little late but am so disheartened by the cry babies complaining about an OPTIONAL subscription. You guys jumped over backwards to try to prevent this. What more do they want. What they want is a world-class app that we all love for free. That sounds nice. How is Phil supposed to feed his kids then? Honestly, I don’t know why you even listen to them. You know what you have to do. The users who get how important this app will gladly pay the annual subscription and maybe we’ll hear less whining on these message boards. I’m so proud of what you’ve built and enjoy using it every day. Keep up the great work
