My memory is fuzzy on this, but I'm pretty sure that MacPilot began life as a $15 app, and it wasn't long enough ago to hang your hat on inflation.
Certainly it didn't cost enough for me to remember what it cost and although a LOT of additional functionality has been added, $99 is steep — even for a lifetime license, and $2.50 a month seems the upper limit of what I would be willing to pay for a subscription.
The software
subscription pricing model is, for good or ill, the wave of the future as software developers struggle to maintain sufficient cash flow to keep their doors open and support their products in a slowly but steadily
shrinking market. I have to give Koingo credit for their effort to offer an alternative that resembles the old price model that served everyone so well when the computer market was expanding exponentially. More and more developers are being forced to a subscription pricing model. Just this week I found that Quicken is now subscription only 😠, and even my WiFi router (Plume) has moved to a subscription basis — but they have pledged to always honor and support the original lifetime licenses. 😃
I just looked at several of Koingo's apps and the $99 lifetime license or $2.50 per month subscription seems to be their standard pricing for a
SOLO license/subscription (they offer six different price ranges, seven if you include the Utility bundle). I used to use their AirRadar, MacClense, and MacPilot, but only MacPilot remains because the others were priced out of range of my perceived utility value. Koingo's
Senior/Student rate of $49 for a lifetime license ($1.50/mo subscription)
might fit my personal cost/benefit ratio for
some of their products and I am unquestionably a
senior. Whether Koingo has arrived at a viable price point for their market, only time will tell.