Clear Pro (And Syncing)

New Clear
63

Lol I appreciate it, I only have an orange cat dependent on me though!! But several of my teammates do have kids and that definitely raises the stakes on decisions like this one.

(That said, don’t sign up just for my cat or the kids… worst case scenario my teammates are all quite talented and could find jobs if needed. We would just prefer to work on Clear.)

My indie app friends gave me a heads up – no matter how we handle subscription, there will be some very upset people. So what we’re shooting for is more like, a reasonable base that supports and approves this plan. I think we’re hitting that threshold. Will note that email replies to the pro announcement have tended to be more supportive.

P.S. I think it’s worth remembering, most people have no real idea how expensive quality app development can be, and probably have internal models more based on apps from larger startups and companies that often subsidize things or have other ways of making money.

And I never forget that for someone to be very angry, there has to be some real foundation of love beneath it all for the app, to provoke such an emotional response.

But yeah I am pretty sure if they understood the full situation even the angriest in this thread would be a lot more supportive or at least understanding. It’s hard to communicate it all! Will keep trying in this thread.

Oh and final thought – it is very true that upset people tend to be more vocal. For example like 90% of our 1 star ratings in the App Store come paired with a written review. Meanwhile there are more than 10x 5 star ratings, however the vast majority of those are just ratings, without a review.

So while every upset person in this thread represents other Clear users, the supportive ones represent even more I think. With that in mind the community discussion has actually been more positive than I had expected :sweat_smile:

4 Likes
64

I’m a longtime supporter, and love Clear so much. However, I’d hope that if I (gladly) pay for a subscription to ensure that the future of the app is successful…I’d really want a Mac app.

There are times when I work offline (not daily, not weekly, but occasionally), and Clear for Mac was the best because I could do that in the past, changes syncing later when online.

For a subscription, I really don’t love web apps as the core experience on a Mac. Any thought to eventually bringing that back upon the successful re-launch, introducing Clear Pro and sync?

3 Likes
65

Yeah I am sure Clear Mac will become a popular request following sync/Clear Web.

Out of all the platforms I do think Mac is the most expensive for us to do right. Original Clear Mac 1.0 turned into an almost year-long project! Spent a lot of time trying to make it work well with keyboard, mouse, gestures, and combinations of them.

So we will have to be careful about making sure we’re ready to dive in when we commit to it. Hopefully Clear Pro helps set up for that with sturdier ground under our feet :muscle:

Today I found another 40+ replies to our Pro announcement email stuck in the spam filter… I think all the business talk made gmail suspicious :grimacing: Replying to these today but I have to say it’s really encouraging they are almost universally supportive so far!

2 Likes
66

We want you to get it right and be here for the long-term!
Clear is a great little app. Take your time.

3 Likes
67

thats fine thats all im asking for, clear web. basically I want to be able to use clear to have reusable checklists that I can access on my work pc. I try to use them on my iPhone but it’s a bit fiddly when im doing other work on the pc.

2 Likes
68

FWIW, I’ve spent about $60-$70 on cosmetics and I would gladly pay $100 for a lifetime option, if possible. I understand not everyone has the same financial situation, but I just greatly dislike subscriptions.

Another software I use is WaniKani, and they do a 33% discount on a lifetime option once a year around Christmas - never any other time. A suggestion could be to offer a lifetime discount temporarily upon launch and maybe once a year or something. Just a thought. :slightly_smiling_face:

2 Likes
69

I posted some thoughts about the lifetime request here, midway through it: Clear Pro (And Syncing) - #46 by phillryu

I’m not ruling it out entirely as a possibility in the future, but we will not be launching Pro with one. Ultimately I just feel like it’s potentially dangerous to our longterm sustainability plans, and while we could introduce it later (in theory, it could even adjust pricing based on past subscription), we couldn’t really rewind it if it we launch it.

Oh and noting that our plan with shop customers who bought 5 or more things is some scaling amount of free membership time. But still trying to figure out exactly how to implement this, it’s a little confusing!

Currently prepping an app update to make sure everyone is aware of Clear Pro incoming:

simulator_screenshot_-iphone_16_pro-_2025-02-04_at_10.38.17
simulator_screenshot_-iphone_16_pro-_2025-02-04_at_10.38.171206×2622 242 KB

And some interesting poll results on naming, Clear Pro vs. Clear+

I’ve also replied to around 50 people who wrote in about this from our mailing list. In total I would roughly peg it as 70% support, and 30% concerns/dissent across the spectrum of, can you lower the price a couple dollars, to I will delete this app because I cannot stand the concept of subscriptions.

I feel this represents a reasonable threshold to continue with the overall plan. The remaining wildcard I guess is if the feedback coming from the in-app link significantly changes this distribution.

Should be sending out this update later in the week!

Thank you everyone who posted here so far, you all represent other Clear users out there. If you feel I hadn’t directly addressed your question/concern/idea tag me in this thread and I’ll try to reply.

5 Likes
70

To be honest, personally, id rather pay €25 a year every year, than a larger lifetime sub. it might be illogical in that when i buy an app, or game or whatever, i dont even think about it, and if an app is free, great, but when an ongoing service offers lifetime subs (like when VPNs do it) it scares me. i pay the equivalent of a few years money and then maybe the app closes down, or work on improvements drops off.

2 Likes
71

Hi, Phil. As always, your transparency regarding Clear and its features and development is appreciated.

Like you said above, “no matter how [you] handle subscription, there will be some very upset people”. But I think there was–and might still be–a way to mitigate that user anger, and that’s to charge for a subscription in a way that makes sense, and to be clear (heh) about it with users.

I’m one of those who is generally against subscriptions for apps when they don’t make sense. Providing sync for Clear across different devices incurs an ongoing servers cost to your company, so it makes sense to make that a subscription service for customers. But there is no ongoing cost to your company to access Clear on an Apple watch or via widgets, so why should users have to pay an ongoing fee to use those features?

These are the attitudes I see in the comments in this thread. People seem to generally be okay with paying a subscription fee for sync because covering an ongoing cost makes sense. People are angry about paying a subscription fee for things like widgets and text styles because there is no ongoing cost for that. Charging an ongoing fee for those features makes no sense and just looks like a money grab.

And in fact, I’m very glad to be grandfathered in as a legacy user, because I don’t care about themes, rewards, or widgets, and I don’t have a Watch. The only thing on the Pro list that matters to me is Text Styles and, frankly, that would not be enough to get me to subscribe.

I obviously don’t have access to your books so I don’t know what your numbers look like, but as a consumer here’s a Clear lineup that makes sense to me:

Clear – A basic list app with basic (i.e., Clear 1 more-or-less) static features for some low one-time fee similar to other apps, good for minor updates until the next major release
Clear Plus – A more advanced Clear that includes most of the stuff on the Pro subscription list for a higher one-time fee, good for minor updates until the next major release
Clear Sync – Syncing service that can be added to Clear Plus at appropriate subscription rates

I think this would result in customers who can pay for what they basically want, don’t feel like they’re having to pay too much for things they don’t want or need, and you having your server costs covered (with some extra profit on top because that’s how business works).

Anyhoo, please give this some consideration.

PS: Early last year you said adding recurring tasks was “the #1 [you] would love to finally solve for Clear”. Any progress on that?

7 Likes
72

For what it’s worth, of alternate proposals, I think the idea of splitting sync from other Pro features and having a one-time unlock for those (but recurring for sync) is a relatively reasonable one, and it did prompt some team discussion here. That said, I need to push back a little bit on the idea that they would simply be fixed costs.

Something like Apple Watch will definitely require ongoing work to keep up to date – the 1.x Watch app had to be dropped, and then entirely rewritten after things changed so much, it would no longer function on latest WatchOS / be allowed on the App Store. This happened once again lately with widgets, I think the ‘old style’ still function for now, but heavily demoted in the iOS UI.

Another example might be shortcuts support, which we have started some work on, and plan on releasing later for Pro. We will be trying to ship with some useful base set, but expect a lot of requests moving forward and more possibilities in the future as Apple expands on it.

So it’s not quite clean to try to draw a dividing line here… and there is some benefit to starting with one simple membership. E.g. perhaps in the future we may be interested in adding a family plan tier, and the options would start to multiply.

Recurring Lists

We have been considering recurring lists but I don’t have an elegant design solution to it quite yet… often with Clear it’s a matter of how we could tuck something away :grin: So it’s not bugging you until you need it.

Looked briefly into the idea of allowing a right swipe while creating/editing an item, to make it ‘sticky’ and reappear on checking off + clearing away. But it conflicts with text cursor adjustment.

Recently we were briefly considering another angle, something like shake for an extra option to ‘reset’ a list, which would simply uncheck all checked off items. I’m not sure if this would really cover the cases, and need to digest on it some more. Plan on revisiting this with some more bandwidth after initial Pro rollout and sync testing going.

2 Likes
73

I get what you mean about having to maintain some features when Apple makes changes. That’s why my app tier suggestions refer to being good until next major release. If Apple changes the way a device behaves enough with an update/upgrade that Clear breaks and also requires a major update to work with it, then the Clear user pays for the new version. If they don’t upgrade their Apple systems and everything still works, then it’s all good. The potential source of angry users here is them not knowing beforehand that updating the Apple stuff will break things. I don’t have an immediate solution for that.

As for an elegant way to implement recurring lists, I still think my idea in that other thread is a good one, or at least a decent place to start:

I would add to this that, when entered, “@permaitems” could self sort to the top of the main list, the first Heading: -styled item they encounter, or the bottom of already existing recurring items, whichever they meet first on the way up. Maybe that would be a setting.

1 Like
74

Ah ok, so not quite a one-time fee. I would have to think on that one more, but a couple concerns are that it would result over time in splitting up the base into more and more different buckets/experiences to support over time, and sounds more complicated to fully communicate. (And a little bit like a more complicated subscription but, I get where you’re coming from.)

Busy day but let me try to catch up on that thread tomorrow and properly take in your idea/reply there.

2 Likes
75

Yeah, I can see how that would be a lot more challenging for an indy operation to manage than for an Apple or a Microsoft.

76

I think the worst option. Well the worst option is not to do recurring lists. But I think doing a different action to repopulate swiped lists rather than the swipe down to remove them will just lead to lots of us swearing as we accidentally delete our long lists.

And ideally I wouldn’t want the action to be on individual items as that’s a bit of fafffing for a long list. Ideally for me would be putting an obscure symbol in the list name meaning all items in that were indestructible and then you swipe down to put them all back. That also improves the idea I was thinking of automatic teplenishment but maybe you don’t want it just yet and maybe you sometimes don’t swipe every ite.

2 Likes
77

That’s a clever idea, putting the special symbol in the list name to make the whole list recurring. An ideal solution would be both: the symbol in the list name for the whole list and the symbol on individual items to mix it up in a list.

2 Likes
78

Just a quick note that 2.3.1 should be going out on the App Store. It’s mainly an announcement for pro / link to more details but includes some fixes too:

• Clear Pro announcement, coming soon! More info linked in-app
• Better handling of multiple recognized time/date phrasing for reminders
• List deletion confirmation options have been swapped for consistent UX
• Fixed bug when starting an item with an emoji
• Fixed some subtle keyboard animation bugs
• In-app notifications moved to top of the screen to clear the ‘back button’
• Trailing spaces removed automatically on items

3 Likes
79

Great, the update is already available in the App Store. :ok_hand:t3:

2 Likes
80

I’ve been using Clear for a long time and I understand the need to fund development, but I think a more flexible model could work a lot better. What about a ‘Feature Store’ where each premium feature (except sync/coop, which does require ongoing support) could be purchased individually instead of being locked behind a subscription? This way, users can pay only for what they actually want without compromising the app’s simplicity, and those who need sync can opt for a more accessible subscription just for that. Best for all, and it even keeps the fancy shop format.

4 Likes
81

I do like this idea, but at this point I have some PTSD on trying another fairly experimental/novel business model, for the fear that it doesn’t work yet again.

If I could sum it up, I’d say the level of risk with this direction makes me hold back from seriously considering rehauling our Pro plans/timeline. But it’s interesting enough to keep in mind for the further out future, because in theory, we could pivot to this fairly gracefully. (E.g. with proper grandfathering.)

I hope that doesn’t sound like a total copout, it is a legitimately cool idea.