It’s great that they were able to see higher revenues and take the company forward, but I’m wondering if there were additional features that were only on the paid version and not on trial version which helped with retention and growth.
There aren’t many other applications I have used for so long and with as much satisfaction as Audio Hijack.
(I don't use Audio Hijack, nor am I in the market for anything like it. But it's obvious from the product page[1] that it's a nice piece of software. I also know that several podcasters I listen to rave about it.)
That's not to say free options don't exist. BlackHole[2] is FOSS.
[1] https://rogueamoeba.com/audiohijack/ [2] https://existential.audio/blackhole/
Or in the late 90s when there was a commercial program that allowed OS 9 to show real-time window previews while dragging rather than merely showing the window border outline.
All of that could increase discoverability of the version with only 15 minutes free trial, so it would be essentially trading sales for advertising.
That said, 2 weeks evaluation on a tool you might use only once effectively means it's just free. Those who might have a need say once a month might just uninstall and reinstall it, and feel completely justified because they didn't get their 15 days, only one day.
So customers were satisfied anyway, but because of the bug their satisfaction did not last enough:-)
Its built-in recorder is a small part of what the overall app does.
It drives me nuts how quickly people jump on the criticism bandwagon without bothering to look up what the thing they're criticising actually does first.
A two-week long trial ends and you're not even on the computer? Oh well.
You're recording something longer than 15 minutes that you want completed _right now_ and the only way is to upgrade? Instant purchase.
That doesn't mean that urgency has to come from a place of in-authenticity. In this case, I think the trial time limit is fair. People still get real value (actually for even longer than just two weeks), but if you want the full-offering you have to pay for it. It's a decent balance.
I guess you can do some of it using a Windows port of JACK Audio or something, but this isn't trivial to get working - and would still pale in comparison. Why it still is so difficult to route audio in Windows is beyond me.
To give a bit of context; I can sit in a Teams meeting using compressors and saturators and whatnot to make the audio better and put any amount of VST plugins in the chain on my own microphone. At the same time I can mix the output from an ambient track from Spotify with audio from liveatc.net and stream the whole thing to an Icecast server while ripping everything to a file.
Trying to do the same thing on Windows will just drive you insane.
But it wasn't "essentially free". For myself, whenever I encounter a tool I might want to use and it has a limited time trial, I typically skip it unless I'm already fairly certain that I'll keep paying for it after the trial period. I think loss aversion comes in here as well: I'm worried about "wasting" the trial. It's like consumables in a video game: yeah maybe this tool would be useful now, but what if I encounter something later where it would be more useful?
These days, OBS is probably a decent alternative, but it's very video focused and very streaming focused, so it's not exactly great for that purpose.
- redirect my music (eg Youtube music) to my Apple Homepod
- still play all other audio (eg some podcast or video) on my laptop
but it doesn't work / is buggy / either puts everything in one location or the other
Has anyone here found a good setup to redirect the audio from exactly one app to the Homepod, and keep all the rest on the laptop audio?
You've just described enshittification 101.
0) worse when it comes to developer bottom line (if you are being generous, try to provide enough trial time and usable software during trial period, a large chunk of your users will just never pay);
1) worse when it comes to user experience (you are interrupted, you encounter blocked-off functionality, which basically means that upsell is part of core GUI);
2) worse when it comes to developer experience (now you don’t just program one great product, you also have to program into your core GUI the upsell—the various ways in which it becomes restricted while remaining usable);
3) worse when it comes to product improvement (the unhappy user will simply delete the software and you’ll never know what they didn’t like);
4) exactly identical when it comes to honest paying user’s expenses.
No doubt, there are worse options. (One that takes the cake: advertise it as free software, but constantly upsell the “full version” offered on subscription basis.)
What’s that better alternative I’m comparing free trials against, then? Simply offer returns. Buy it, get a license, make your trial period however long you like; don’t like it—request a refund, get money back, get license revoked. What it means is that “tried and not bought” is no longer one of the “happy paths”. As a result, you have a better chance of really understanding what was wrong (if I must ask you for refund, you are in touch with me), and you also exhibit more confidence in your product up front.
I believe App Store in fact works this way. If someone’s thinking about distributing there and feels like the only way to offer a trial is IAP, maybe reconsider: you don’t need that overhead, one fully featured version is enough if your users can already get their money back if they don’t like it. I believe refund process happens automatically for you as a developer, though I’m not sure whether or not the feedback they provided will be forwarded to you. Willing to be corrected.
So basically with Audio Hijack I can do a "hack" which is: - set my laptop to play on Airplay - play some music there - then if I want to listen to something else on my laptop, I have to create an Audio Hijack pipeline to play some other app on my laptop
Obviously I would prefer the reverse: by default play everything on the laptop, and be able to play a specific app on Airplay... but this doesn't seem to be possible because the "Airplay" device "disappears" from the interface as soon as I stop setting it as the default laptop output
In my case the interface was AirPods. It was incredibly annoying when various audio software would reset its output device whenever they disconnect or auto-switch to the phone. So, I set up a multi-output device that outputs signal to the pods along with the wired headphone port, and configured audio software to output to that virtual device. After that, there is no flakiness: when the pods are connected then they get the audio, if they aren’t then they don’t get the audio, nothing else needs to be changed.
Want a program, give the middleman some money, get the product.
Within whatever trial period, tell middleman you don't like it, they refund you, program stops working.
Post trial period, money goes to developer.
Provided middleman looks more trustworthy than developer or end user, both win. Roughly what lawyers do in the real world.
If that's not a product already, someone is going to make a killing out of creating it.
If anything, a downside of the approach I advocated for would be if too many dissatisfied users just issue a chargeback and not even request a refund. For a developer, high rate of chargebacks can presumably cause issues for billing.
Chargebacks aren’t so scary. It’s never a default recourse for any customer, especially not the type financially able to buy your product outright (remember patio11’s advice: the higher you charge, the better educated and less problematic are your customers; and any amount is higher than zero). You don’t just issue a chargeback if you didn’t like your new iPhone; same with anything. Whoever issues chargebacks all the time, rather than going through a refund process, is in no time dropped by their bank for chargeback fraud.
As a developer, you only run the danger of accumulating chargebacks if you promise a refund and then simply ignore refund requests, in which case it’s squarely on you. Frankly, there’s no excuse not to have a fully automated refund processing pipeline.
It's much more about aligning the freemium window with the urgency horizon.
A two-week trial won't convert a user that's solved their issue within that window.
Plus, never underestimate the ability of funnel customers to just flat out not understand something that seems simple to you. Deviating from norms IME leads to a big drop off. So the value of deviating has to be enough to overcome that.
But I guess the real bug and its outcome was more in line with the (often disappointing) reality that we all share.
Since getting a mac and paying for tools like this, the immediacy of being productive has caused me to actually make music.
it's the same with OBS - wow, what a piece of software. I spent a week going through and configuring it. They really thought of everything. Audio Hijack solved my problem in 30 seconds and made sense for my use case while doing it.
I’ve never used Airfoil though. To be honest, I feel like routing audio through a multi-output virtual audio device might defeat the point of the app if it’s meant to play to wireless devices directly.
Subscription model is not the norm either (and if you ask me, it’s among the worst models ever when it comes to small focused software of the kind Rogue Amoeba makes).
A major benefit (which, frankly, is a surprise to me that it’s even worth mentioning) is that refunds is the most intuitive process to handle it. Us weathered tech geeks have an intuitive grasp of the shareware business model; however, we are a minority.
As far as I know, App Store doesn’t have an option for an actual free trial followed by a one-time purchase (the kind old geeks like me know back from shareware times). If you try to emulate it and make your app stop working after some time unless a payment is made, it will be rejected by the App Store. Instead, it has 1) IAP, which many developers abuse by promoting a “free version” with crippled functionality and possibly full of ads, non-stop upselling you the next subscription tier; and 2) refunds.
I think lack of trials isn’t an issue: there’s no reason an average customer should be even required to understand this concept if refunds (familiar to anyone since forever) exist. Meanwhile, abusing IAPs this way leaves a bad taste, and I don’t think in 15+ years I have purchased a single app using this model.
As a developer, you also don’t want to burden yourself by having to provide support to customers who have not paid yet and, probabilistically, in all likelihood never will pay.
Option 2: they chech every 15 minutes if the trial time is over, so an inmediate expiration is notuced 15 days later. And 15 days - 15 minutes is a coincidence.
Airfoil will maintain a connection with your Airplay device even after resetting your system audio device.
Though not perfect, but you can use applescript to force Airfoil's discovery of your airplay device by way of control center:
tell application "System Events" to tell process "Control Center"
repeat with menuBarItem in every menu bar item of menu bar 1
if description of menuBarItem as text is "Sound" then
set soundMenuBarItem to menuBarItem
exit repeat
end if
end repeat
click soundMenuBarItem
repeat with currentCheckbox in every checkbox of scroll area 1 of group 1 of window "Control Center"
set deviceId to value of attribute "AXIdentifier" of currentCheckbox
set deviceName to text 14 thru -1 of deviceId
if deviceName as string is equal to "DEVICE NAME" then -- DEVICE_NAME is the name of your airplay audio device in control center.
click currentCheckbox
click soundMenuBarItem
exit repeat
end if
end repeat
end tell
tell application "Airfoil"
set safariSource to make new application source
set application file of safariSource to "/Applications/Safari.app"
set current audio source to safariSource
set aSpeaker to (first speaker whose name is "INSTANCE_NAME") -- Paste the Airplay speaker's instance name here
if not (connected of aSpeaker) then
connect to aSpeaker
else
disconnect from aSpeaker
end if
end tell
dns-sd -B _airplay._tcp
[0] https://rogueamoeba.com/support/knowledgebase/?showArticle=A...
Yes, you are the only one, because you've misunderstood.
> Most bugs don't come with their own updated alert text. It sounds a bit more like they had planned to switch to a different trial method and enabled it earlier than they expected?
No, the bug was simply that the trial period ended after 15 minutes instead of the intended 15 days.
> Or maybe a "rogue" employee added the feature as an experiment and didn't tell anybody?
There were no employees. At the time this happened, the company consisted entirely of the 3 cofounders. In fact the bug, that is, the shortened trial period, is what allowed the company to grow and hire employees, although the company is still relatively small.
> After 15 days, Audio Hijack will nag you to register at launch and will quit after 15 minutes.
Before the bug: after 15 days, the 15 minutes alert would start to appear.
---
From the article:
> In version 1.6, we accidentally broke the intended 15 days of unrestricted usage. Instead, from day one, the app was limited to 15 minutes of recording.
After the bug: the 15 minutes alert started to appear on day 1
(1) For the first 15 days, you could make recordings of any length.
(2) After 15 days, you could use the app for only 15 minutes.
(3) If you paid, then you could once again make recordings of any length.
The bug was that "15 days" in (2) accidentally became 15 minutes, so that after only 15 minutes of trying the app, you were limited to using the app for only 15 minutes, which of course would happen the first time you used the app.
Perhaps you're confused because there were two factors both with a value of 15.
"After 15 days, Audio Hijack will nag you to register at launch and will quit after 15 minutes. Additionally, the recording feature will be disabled."
"Instead, from day one, the app was limited to 15 minutes of recording."
My brain didn't make the jump from "the app quits after 15 minutes" to "the app is limited to 15 minutes of recording."
But it's very clunky, that's true.
When I was offering a paid app for 2€ on the AppStore I got less than a hundred customers. A free app with a 2€ IAP resulted in a couple of thousand of purchases.
Note also that the free version of the app didn’t have ads or anything, just slightly less functionality. The IAP arguably unlocked only minor features.
My point is: users put zero value on most programs. They will almost always choose a free alternative if it provides them the bare minimum of functionality
Now, with highly professional software like Rogue Amoeba’s things might be different.
> The bug was that "15 days" in (2) accidentally became 15 minutes
My understanding was that the 15 days became zero. If 15 days became 15 minutes, then depending on implementation it could run 30 minutes of first run? Or could be identical. Hard to know.
But, my reading is that the 15 day timer broke, allowing the other timer to take over, not that days became minutes.
Whereas if you have a full function trial period, it solves your immediate need for free and then you already have this mentality "this functionality should be free". Maybe even uninstall the app, erase all its data, and then register for a new trial period next time you need it etc.
trivial and free with https://equalizerapo.com
This would actually be easier than just paying.
A free trial gives them a chance to waffle, and usually by the end of the trial they have haven't put in the effort to decide they want to buy the product, so they don't. Paying earlier also creates a commitment bias.
I've seen this over and over again in products. You want to give people enough usage that they can have confidence the product is worth paying for, but not enough time that they waffle.
I've been buying this sort of software since it was called "shareware" and was obtained on floppies or downloaded over XMODEM from a local BBS. I made a living from it for a long time. The fact that almost nobody has done it this way should indicate it's not as good as it sounds. (The App Store may work this way in practice, but the stated terms are that you request a refund and then it might be granted, at the discretion of Apple. They also explicitly state that requests might be refused for "abuse" which is not defined, and could very well include merely getting too many refunds. It can't really be treated as a trial.)
all coerced sales come from a sense of urgency. Not the same thing.
> That doesn't mean that urgency has to come from a place of in-authenticity
In-authenticity is a subjective term here, but are there competing incentives against offering a "use only once" price alongside the full product or a subscription model? You bet.
In v1.6, the 15 days was inadvertently removed. This meant that the 15 minute limit was in effect from day 0.
(That's as of now -- August 2025 -- so it's possible in the future this issue will be resolved. Don't take this as necessarily true if you're reading this in 2026 or beyond.)
It’s possible that our trial might have worked better if it were like modern iOS trials that start charging you after a certain period, but ours just let you use the paid features for 7 days and then lapsed, and it stifled sales. My theory was people urgently needed the paid features (mostly to download maps for a coming trip) so the trial got in the way of them paying right away.
It's really hard to do time limited trials in any durable fashion, where that encompasses more than a single runtime of the program. Something, somewhere, has to persist some kind of indication to the program as to when that period started, and you can always modify it, nuke it etc.
I worked on a (once) popular Saas app :) We were losing customers when I came in. But then started growing again (slowly) when we started shipping a bunch of great things.
But then the owner wanted to get rid of the "free trial" and was adamant we offer a free version. That would boost our growth to an incredible new level he promised. I could see the reasoning. Our free trial still required you give us a credit card up front. We just wouldn't charge you for 30 days. Asking for a credit card has to be bad for growth, right? People want to kick the tires before they become our customers, and there's a lot more of those folks.
So we ditched the collection of credit cards up front and went to a totally free plan. You could upgrade to a paid plan of course.
Growth started tanking again and we never got it back.
One theory was collecting the credit card just got the really eager shoppers and now our growth was from zombie, forgetful, monthly Saas payments. And that's valid of course. But I wonder too, if just asking for a credit card gets you to be more serious too about trying a product. If you have to put in a credit card, you'll probably focus in here for a bit and not sign up for 10 other things the same day to try. And successfully collecting a credit card while someone is in the process of choosing anything, is probably always going to be easier than trying to convince them in 30 days to come back and get into a buyers mindset again. Unless you really are selling something so deeply crippling not to have it again after 30 days.
Comparing the dialogs; did the 15-day expiration dialog have a "purchase" button at the time of the bug? (its screenshot in the write-up does not.) Making the purchase easy to initiate with the purchase button seems like something that would increase conversion rate, too.
DJ Screw has joined the meeting
It goes through similar scenarios. Example, "Offering a free version and not requiring a credit card can push the idea that your solution has no value so why should I use it?"
[0] https://bookbrief.io/books/alchemy-rory-sutherland/summary
I definitely prefer a world where being a small software company charging for your product is sustainable. Not everything needs to be ads/SaaS/Mag7 owned/slop...
The second dialog was always shown (and presumably always had the purchase button), but the difference was between whether users got 15 full free days first or not.
I use SoundSource because without it digital audio has audio levels locked, which is also asinine. We have to admit, audio control on Macs is straight up garbage, and having to buy third party tools to do something the other major OS does out of the box is not a good look.
It's become less so lately, but the Mac ecosystem historically was what computing SHOULD be.
[0] https://weblog.rogueamoeba.com/2023/03/24/the-riaa-v-steve-j...
OBS can replicate the audio routing (though not as smoothly) though I'm not too familiar with its audio processing capabilities. I mostly see OBS and Audio Hijack as complementary products.
That said, Audio Hijack is so good for routing and processing audio that it's not even a competition, AH all day.
I've done so much mischief and tinkering with AH just because it's so easy. You can reroute audio between applications, fiddle with L/R channels and filtering, and pipe it through to others, all on the fly. I've used it for everything from being a DJ in zoom calls, to setting up presentation audio, to setting up a virtual sound board that repeated audio snippets I collected in real time from the conversation, to connecting a facetime audio call from one teammate into a zoom meeting.
There's so much flexibility and setting up the workflows is a breeze. AH hurdles the bar IMO.
I'm often saddened by all the normalization of all the things people do to cheat their way through life. Why does everything need to be physically prevented just so people don't find a loophole to exploit? And then just act like it's nothing or are even proud of it? There is a trial period + you are asked to pay if you keep using it after? Well, pay up if you do. You also (hopefully) don't steal candy from the supermarket, even though it's "actually easier than just paying". Why would it be any different for software?
I know it kind of falls under "user error," but I really wish these plugins had a metered trial period. Like 8 hours of actual usage instead of starting the clock from the time of activation.
It’s a sad state of affairs.
Aren’t you used to it in all other areas of life?
> I've been buying this sort of software since it was called "shareware" and was obtained on floppies or downloaded over XMODEM from a local BBS. I made a living from it for a long time.
Sure. At the time I was a poor student so I am familiar with the concept of shareware but never paid for it back then. However, I think this concept is not as intuitive to anyone who was not in tech space at that time.
> The fact that almost nobody has done it this way should indicate it's not as good as it sounds.
Perhaps, but this is not always how it works. Often there’s friction and inertia that blinds people to better alternatives.
> The App Store may work this way in practice, but the stated terms are that you request a refund and then it might be granted, at the discretion of Apple. They also explicitly state that requests might be refused for "abuse" which is not defined, and could very well include merely getting too many refunds.
Perhaps you’re right, but then all I can say is that painless refunds should be a thing.
Can you mark your microphone's headphone jack (which is only intended to be used to listen to yourself while recording) as not a thing you want to ever use? Nope.
macOS is great. Can you have a different scroll direction between scroll wheel on a mouse and the touchpad? Of course not, don't be silly.