MindNode 7 – Visual Tags and Business Model Changes

We are excited to announce that we are going to ship MindNode 7, our next major update, early next year. MindNode 7 will add Visual Tags - a brand new feature to bring more context to your ideas. With this release, we are also introducing a new Free Editor and customers can unlock our full feature set with our new MindNode Plus subscription. For all existing MindNode 5 and MindNode 6 customers, MindNode 7 will be a free upgrade.

We will share more information about our new tagging feature in the coming weeks. Today I’d like to focus on our motivation behind changing our business model and what it means for the future of MindNode.

What we learned from MindNode 5 and MindNode 6

Over the last two years, we released two major updates: MindNode 5 was a paid upgrade and MindNode 6 was a free upgrade. When we started working on MindNode 7 we knew that our next release would be a paid upgrade and we closely looked at our experience with the recent updates.

While MindNode 5 was a very popular release with our customers, we weren’t happy with how our new upgrade mechanism worked. As the App Store has no native support for paid upgrades, we tried to work around this limitation, by using differently priced In-App Purchases. This sounded like a great solution on paper and worked great in our tests, but we ran into many issues in real-life situations. Our discount mechanism had to launch a previous version of MindNode to check for eligibility. This did not always work as we had imagined it and resulted in a bumpy experience for some customers.

With this in mind, we knew that we didn’t want to go down the same path again. A subscription-based model showed the most promise to meet our customers’ needs as well as our own when we mind mapped our options.

The Advantages of Subscriptions

There are several reasons why we believe subscriptions are the right choice for the future of MindNode.

With subscriptions, we can deliver updates to our users much more frequently. In the past, we had to hold back completed new features for over a year until we had finished all other features that made up a major update.

Going with subscriptions also decreases the entry price for new customers. This is particularly useful for people who may only need MindNode occasionally, for example, a freelancer who is kicking off a new client project.

It also makes pricing much more predictable. New customers no longer need to wonder about the right time to purchase MindNode, since there will be no more paid upgrades that might unexpectedly surprise them.

A subscription-based model also gives us more flexibility in what we can offer to our users. MindNode can be unlocked on macOS and iOS with a single subscription (this is not possible with one-time purchases on the App Store) and we are exploring how we can offer family and business licenses in the future.

Finally, we have to take into consideration that MindNode is a constantly evolving product, which we want to continue working on. Subscriptions provide us with a stable roadmap for the future where we can continue to adopt new Apple technologies in a timely manner, work on supporting collaboration and expand into new platforms.

Free Editor

We are fully aware that a subscription might not be the best solution for all of our users. This is why we are launching a new Free Editor together with MindNode Plus. Instead of a viewer of MindNode documents, our free version now also allows basic editing operations like adding nodes, reordering and folding them. In the Free Editor, we will also continue to support all import and export formats, so your data is never locked in!

Loyal Customers

When we considered subscriptions, we also made sure we found a good solution for our existing users. As a loyal customer, you will receive MindNode 7 for free and keep access to all its features in the future, even without subscribing to MindNode Plus. Furthermore, you will continue to receive bug fixes and minor enhancements.

MindNode Plus

MindNode Plus will launch together with MindNode 7 in early 2020. We will offer a monthly and annual subscription. Initially, the monthly subscription will be priced at $2.49 and the yearly at $19.99 (local prices will vary based on taxes and currency conversion).

I understand that every adjustment in a business model can be confusing or irritating. We’ve tried our best to make this transition as smooth as possible and hope you will continue to support us in the future. We’ve prepared an extensive FAQ and if you have any more questions, please contact us.