General Long-Time User Feedback: Concerns About the New Free/VIP Model

papaya · September 25

Dear iOS Gods team,

I have been using your services for a very long time, and I first want to give you a big compliment. You are doing a great job. If I am not mistaken, many of you are investing a significant amount of your free time to keep this place running. You have my utmost respect for that.

For that reason, I also completely understand that you want to be compensated for your work. That is why I have always considered the VIP membership a great idea. Even though, unfortunately, quite a few hacks do not work with the latest iOS version, or sometimes only work after several attempts.

This brings me to the more unpleasant part.

For most of the time, I have been a Free User and occasionally purchased a VIP membership whenever there were enough games that interested me. That seemed fair to me, and I was happy to support you whenever I felt it was worthwhile.

However, I feel that the monetization model has now been pushed a little too far.

Games marked as “Free” used to mean that you could use all available hacks for those games without restrictions. Now, a limit of three activated hacks per Free game has been introduced. If you want to activate more than three, you have to pay for VIP membership.

In my opinion, a game should no longer be labeled “Free” if its available hacks are subject to such a restriction.

The problem for me is not that you offer a paid VIP membership. I actually think that is completely reasonable. The problem is that the boundaries between the Free and VIP offerings seem to be shifting more and more, and the Free option is becoming increasingly limited.

This leaves a rather bitter taste for me.

I also suspect that I am not the only person who feels this way. For many people, continuously paying for additional services simply becomes too expensive, especially when the cost of living is already high enough. One of the things I particularly liked about the previous model was that it also allowed people with lower incomes to enjoy your services and benefit from the work you put into them.

For now, I have therefore decided to remain a Free User and stick with one game that I play regularly. Fortunately, that particular game only has one hack, so I can continue using it for free. A big thank-you to Puddin for that!

I sincerely hope that this is not the final version of your monetization model. I will definitely be interested to see how things develop from here.

Thanks again for all the work you put into iOS Gods. I genuinely appreciate what you have built here. I just hope that the balance between supporting the community and monetizing the service can be found again.

Rook · September 25

Hello papaya!

Thank you for the kind words, your past support, and for explaining your concerns so respectfully.

You’re correct that free IPA Mod Menus have a limit of three features active at the same time. You can turn one off and enable another, so you aren’t permanently restricted to three particular features.

Since you’ve been around for a long time, you may remember that mods on non-jailbroken devices previously came with their features automatically enabled, without a menu to turn them on or off. Bringing configurable Mod Menus to non-jailbroken devices took a significant investment, and we chose to make unlimited active features a ViP benefit to help fund that work and continued development of our other projects. We see being able to choose which features you use as an improvement overall, though I understand that the limit can feel like a step back if you want more than three enabled together.

I'd also like to mention that we do not monetize the apps with ads, nor do we have ads on the iOSGods App itself anymore (this may be subject to change) so our free user monetizations are limited, and this is the only free user monetization we have currently. That leaves us with fewer ways to fund development, so offering unlimited active features through ViP helps support what we provide to both free and paying members.