God, I wanna tear my hair out and need help.
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It is insane that even after the app is published in play store and app store and actively used in real world outside, thunkable can decide to affect the end user experience if you forget to pay subscription…how is that fair? Or maybe time to say goodbye to Thunkable forever for their weird practices.
I was on Thunkable pro plan for years and finally launched an app. As a solo dev with no money, I had to pause thunkable pro sub to spend that money on marketing. So it is launched and everything right? I thought that (like before), if you pause or end subscription the experience end user will not be affected. BUT NOT THE CASE! Every user got this ‘APP UNAVAILABLE’ ERR-665275 error making the app unusable? What is this? Is it already out there man! I have already paid Thunkable for years now. Do I have to keep paying till forever 60 euros? It is just an app builder. I should have just made the effort to use ChatGPT to build the app than having paid Thunkable lot of money over last years.
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My question: If I get on the builder version, what happens to released app if I stop my subscription. Will every single user get this ERR-665275 screen and app is fully unusable? Do I have to keep paying builder version so Thunkable will let end users use the app?
God after 3 years when I just wanted to market and get users - thunkable decides to throw this screen for a released app after paying them for years.
The Thunkable team has confirmed that you have to be subscribed to thunkable for end users to use your product even after published. Anytime you stop subscribing, end users cannot use app anymore.
Now that they have locked in the users and no one wants to re-build their apps in a new platform, nothing stops Thunkable from raising the lowest tier to whatever price they want per month. People will have to pay. I suppose this is fine for big companies but for solo devs like me 60 euros a month for just maintenance is a lot after paying a long time for them already.
PS: I have already talked to the Thunkable support! My suggestion was to increase the cost during development and to have a one-time fee to publish the app thereby becoming de-coupled after (when finally uploading to the stores).
This ensures that user will not have to keep paying the maintenance fees forever when the app is out there with users.
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I replied to another post just a few minutes ago, with this same issue.
Unfortunately, that’s what it is. You cant really do much about that unless you bought the subscription again.
Here’s a plan that I just thought of:
- Keep paying the subscription while the app is on the App Store and Play Store
- If your app is successful, then you can use a percentage of that money from downloads and reviews to Thunkable’s subscription.
What can I say? I think on my feet.
While ChatGPT is smart at coding, it’s not reliable at building apps. I actually gave up on Thunkable last month and tried to switch my app to Python. Long story short, it did NOT go well.
I think with the various users on their platform they decided to bump up pricing and everything (because $99 CAD isn’t really affordable). I actually took a break from Thunkable about two years ago and decided to hop back on. I had seven projects and it said I have surpassed the limit, despite me not knowing about this. Then they put a limit on screens. That was my biggest issue.
I actually thought of rebuilding my app on Flutterflow, a low-code app builder, but it’s a lot more complex than I thought it was. So, basically Thunkable is your only choice.
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