Don't compare RWGPS to Starbucks please... The coffee isn't really worth that kind of money. But $10 is a lot in different parts of the world. For me that is more than what I pay for my mobile internet connection that works out in the nowhere.

It's for serious cyclists, for whom $10 a month is barely noticeable, considering how much you can spend on the bicycling hobby. For example, I do bicycle touring, weeks-long or months-long trips every year, and the RideWithGps route planner/navigation tools are extremely useful when riding thousands of miles by yourself in places you aren't familiar with.

I've used ridewithGPS for multiple bike tours, the longest being a full month of unsupported riding. I also use it to scout out routes when I want to create a new ride somewhere in my area on roads I don't know already. ridwithGPS has a few features that really stand out, IMO:

* excellent, almost entirely bug-free routing on mobile

* heatmap data, because maps aren't entirely up-to-date

* multiple map styles, so you can pick what works best for your workflow and the country you're in

* easy GPX file export, I use it all the time with the bike computer (every day on tours)

* collection management, especially useful when I make per-day routes for a tour

* a healthy trial period so you can actually test it out and learn it

Basically it's just an excellent app (and site) that works reliably across every supported platform, that isn't full of spammy upselling garbage, that is clearly made by a competent team of developers who care deeply about the product they make.

Every tech product should be made like this. A lot of tech products used to be like this before enshittification really took off in the last 5-10 years.

I'm more than happy to support a great product like this, as a bicycle tourist and frequent router over unfrequented trails and dirt roads in the mountains around me. For road riders in cities, it's probably a whole lot less useful. But there are a lot of bicycle riding use cases outside of 'road riders in cities' :-)

$10 per month is the minimum price that you should use for any software or digital product. People who are unwilling to pay $10 per month are also unwilling to pay $5 per month or $1 per month – regardless of how much value they get from the product. Ten dollars is the bottom.

Why should it be a subscription instead of a pay-once app? Maps have to update as the real world updates, and probably they have other features that can't be on-device.

I didn't downvote you FYI, but to answer your question, I run ridewithgps and as a result have a pretty in depth understanding of all the costs involved.

We have 14 machines in a rack at a datacenter in PDX, and have focused on low hosting costs since we have historically been bootstrapped and margin sensitive. Redundant switches, 2 firewall/load balancers, 4 compute machines, 3 database machines, 5 storage servers. Single upstream network provider, about to be two sometime next year. Rack space + power + redundant network is about $3500 a month. Machines have an average service life of about 5 years.

Database machines cost about $45k for a set of three.

Storing user data is non-trivial - GPS track files add up when you get close to a billion of them, photos are also very large. We use a self-hosted ceph object storage cluster of 5 machines, about $100k of hardware. it's cheaper than 20k a month in S3 bills.

Our rack all-in is probably about $250k of equipment. 5 year service life, probably $5k a month amortized out. So, doing things as cheap as possible (I buy nvme SSDs for storage cluster off ebay, and am about to buy a couple arista 100gbe switches from ebay as well) we are somewhere around $8500 a month on hosting.

We use both google maps as well as self-hosted OSM based map and routing services. About half our map usage goes to google, by user preference, and we pay them about $20,000 per month for that. Our self-hosted OSM map stuff require 1tb of ram, fast disks, a ton of CPU cores. We host 10 different planet scale routing profiles via graphhopper, which take 3 days to build every week with updated data. They also host a vector maps stack which is much more efficient, taking about 3 hours a week to build.

My last estimate of an AWS bill for all the above was $30k a month, assuming some discounts. We have grown since then and I'd napkin us to be > $40k a month at this point.

We strive to minimize any costs for third party platforms. We do use amplitude for analytics, that's > $30k a year at this point. We do use an external email service for easy marketing emails, but the majority of our millions of emails a month are sent from our own mail servers, using an in-house system we made a decade ago that still works well. We try to minimize vendor lockin and costs, where it makes sense.

Most expensive part of the entire company of course is salaries, with of course an eye to developer and related salaries. We run pretty bare bones where possible, with a flat management structure with minimal overhead. Our total staff size is 32, of which 6 are full-time end user support.

A bit of a ramble, sorry, but there's a large amount of overhead to run a system like ours. We don't just make a one-time use desktop application, we have to continually provide storage and compute for all users. If we stopped that, the entire service would fall apart. So yes, a subscription makes sense in a case like ours. You can't do what we do with a desktop app. Plus, the entire world has switched to mobile for this sort of consumer application, which is an entire rat race of it's own. You can't just release a single purchase app and expect it to be maintained, it's a massive effort to keep up with mobile development just to maintain features, much less build anything new.