Ulysses Moves to the Subscription Model

This week Ulysses moved to a subscription model. As Dr. Drang has already observed, this will lead to much gnashing of teeth and navel gazing concerning subscription pricing.

At this point I feel as if I'm over it. I use Ulysses every day. I’ve already signed up for the discounted pre-owner subscription and I'm back to work. If you don’t want Ulysses in your life, you should take a pass.

What you shouldn’t do is trash the app in review because you’re not happy with the business model. Here’s Ulysses’s rating as of a few minutes ago. This App deserves so much more than 2.5 stars.

While I'm on the subject of Ulysses, I should mention why I subscribed. I use the heck out of this app. It syncs great between iOS and Mac. I like the opinionated design. Of increasing importance to me, it works great with automation on iOS. For example, one of my tricks is that when I set up a new podcast project, Workflow (among other things) creates the skeleton text and links for me in Ulysses so when the show publishes, the post is already half written … by robots!

I’ve also moved all of my text-bank style text into Ulysses and out of Apple Notes. I like the organization in Ulysses better and in Ulysses I can even assemble different text snippets into a starting place for documents without too much effort.

In addition to Ulysses, Disney also announced this week that they are pulling their content out of Netflix to start their own service that will … of course … be a separate subscription. This subscription model is only getting bigger in the years to come.