Frugly vs. Freemium

&gt; Anyway, here’s the moral of my story: there needn’t be so much conflict between ethics and profits. Carefully consider your constraints, and use design thinking to make the world a better (and possibly uglier) place.<p>I really hope the author the best, they seem to be working on trying to figure out some way to monetize their project without doing anything evil. Which is a rare and admirable attempt. But the moral of the story here seems very contingent on whether or not their plan works out, right? And I think it is not a very sure thing.

&gt; Not to toot my own horn, but I am very good at making things uglier.<p>&gt; To work with my natural skillset, I focused on aesthetic downgrades over aesthetic upgrades. I call this “frugly pricing”, AKA “cosmetic crippleware“.<p>&gt; It’s simple: I plaster the word “free” everywhere until consumers pay for a license. I’m not the first to do this, and I certainly won’t be the last.<p>From the title and other comments I was imagining that the UI itself was made uglier in the frugly version.<p>But it sounds like the only difference is that it has these messages.<p>Which reminds me more of being nagware than being cosmetically crippled.

One thing I noticed about having different tiers and free options: government institutions will be required to acquire whatever the cheapest version, even if they have tons of money and your product directly supports their mission&#x2F;goals. So if you want to have government customers, realize that their duty to taxpayers may prevent them from purchasing if you have a free version.

When paying is optional, the question is how do you get people to <i>want</i> to pay you?<p>If they dislike you or they&#x27;re cheap, they&#x27;ll use a workaround.<p>If they want to show their support, then they might pay you even though there&#x27;s a workaround.<p>So the question is, how good are you at selling your website as something that people might have warm feelings about? Seems like a high bar.

The problem with this approach is that you will sour your customers on your app with your intentionally bad UX - they won&#x27;t want to upgrade from the &#x27;bad&#x27; version to the good one.

Interesting idea but I think one huge factor for cosmetics in games is status. Other people see, what cosmetics you have and this encourages people to show off expensive stuff. This does not apply to a personal UI.<p>And what about people judging the app on the first look? Good design can interest people in checking out what the site is actually about in the first place.

I really like the author&#x27;s philosophy. I too am allergic to maintenance and do everything I can to avoid it.

Another option is affiliate marketing. If you already lead your customers to a reasonable and justified purchase, you can get a cut of the sale.<p>This is how I can afford to spend so much time on free and useful things. A few pages on my website fund everything else.

I think the growth before profits mentality of SV startups has been cargo culted way too far. Free to play games demonstrate an alternative model (pushing customers to spend via service rate limits, cosmetics and limited time deals) that is more honest in my opinion, since the value proposition is right there for the user to see, and it lets you monetize without degrading the experience for the average user (as long as you know how to manage your whales).

Showing online ads is the quintessential frugly because you don&#x27;t control what the ads look like, and thus you lose control over the overall design.

I respect the effort either way, but is anyone actually paying to remove the frugliness?

discord is good example of this. nitro got good themes.

Is there some dynamic equivalent of document.querySelectorAll(&quot;section&quot;) JS-based DOM filtering, that listens to websites building new UI elements through dynamic loading and applies the filter on newly added (or modified?) DOM elements (much like how CSS rules automatically cascade when HTML elements are added and removed)?

What is wrong with just making the product paid? How can there be any kind of ethical dilemma for the author? Charge a fair price for the app and that&#x27;s it. Freeloaders do not have to be considered. Paying people for their work is a matter of respect.

If you make your free version ugly, then doesn&#x27;t that drive potential customers away?

Reader view solves the ugly ..

We have fortnited the apps. May god have mercy on us.

so it&#x27;s a variation of the overall idea of <i>nagware</i><p>I believe the real problem is larger than computers and technology. capitalism just doesn&#x27;t play well with digital assets which have effectively 0 distribution costs

The term Crippleware is ablest and we should probably stop using it.<p>That said, I like the frugly approach. The cosmetic upgrade approach in Fortnite the author mentioned is also implemented in a new game I&#x27;ve been playing called The Finals. It is nice not to have winning behind a paywall.