Panic Releases Transmit 5 With Major Improvements, but No Mac App Store Version

My goto FTP app. Always loved Transmit.

I'm not surprised it's not on the Mac app store. Apples 30% cut on desktop software is really quite a lot for developers (of which I am one). You can take payments using Stripe easily and they will only take about 1.4%-2.9% of a sale so if you have an hour free to implement Stripe on your website you can keep the other 27.1%-28.5% that Apple would take.

Their 30% works on the iPhone because there's no way to sideload apps but on the Mac it doesn't work that way.

30% is nothing as they will get way more exposure. My GF never reads random  blogs to get to know news like this, but she always clicks that Store icon in the dock, and quite often buys stuff.

And Panic should look how the Omni group deals with AppStore. I really like their free download and in-app purchases.

The kind of people who use this sort of app are likely not going to be particularly bothered that it's not in the mac app store.

Me, I'll just continue to use the command line. While we still have one. :D

I’m kind of annoyed by the lack of upgrade pricing. I just bought Transmit 4 in May smh

From their FAQ:

Q: What if I just bought Transmit 4?
A: We’ve got you covered! If you bought from us after June 1st (or maybe even a little earlier), grab your Transmit 4 serial number and go here. ('https://panic.com/transmit/upgrade.html') If you bought from the Mac App Store in that timeframe, please send us an e-mail and we’ll help you out.

With that little bit in the parenthesis, I would reach out to them and see if they'll make an exception for you...

The only 2 things I know about this app are:
1.- They got hacked
2.- Its very expensive

Tc

1. Yes, their code was pried into. Since then, they have taken a lot of steps that it never happens again. It is quite shocking, the extent they have gone to, to ensure that any trespassers have a really hard time repeating the same, and I trust their efforts.

2. The notion of expensive is very subjective. If you need to occasionally get into a server via FTP or SSH, the tools built into Terminal will do just fine. However, the moment you want something more, and something with a GUI, Transmit begins to make sense.

Then, with the latest version 5, with its support for cloud services such as OneDrive/ OneDrive for Business, DropBox, Amazon AWS, etc., along with an already robust FTP/ SSH/ WebDAV client, the cost starts to become a no-brainer for many.

I have been their customer since version 4 and I have never had a moment where it disappointed me for anything that it promises to do. With version 5, the app has only become far more usable and necessary in my small briefcase of apps I use. The ability to fire up Transmit to transfer video files into Infuse on my iPhone or iPad, go to OneDrive and access my files, upload data to my web server, all with one app and in one click, is too good a deal at $45. It could easily have been $50, even $75, and I would have paid that price for it - simply because the app is that good.

And oh, Touch Bar support offers dynamic customisation options that really help (at least me). So, this is another huge plus in their favour. Again, at $45.

Transmit is just one of the many apps Panic offers. You might have heard of Coda, another solid, well-hailed app in the industry with a loyal following. Although, I perceive, if you have heard of Coda, you might surely have heard of Transmit, and since you have only known the hack, you surely do not know much about this longstanding company.

Do visit their website and see for yourself if they are able to change your opinion on the expensiveness quotient. :)

And I'm sure that was all the rage in the 90's. For real are you comparing free internet distribution that 99% of all software now uses to .. putting boxed copies of software at Fry's?

Tell me how do you even load the software on your Mac from such a shop? Our Macs don't even have optical drives anymore and haven't for many years now. The software sections of brick and mortar stores are barren.

And as a software developer I can tell you that internet retailers do not take 40-50%, not that we would list our software on Amazon or similar websites. The way we sell software today is on our own websites where we host the files and manage the payments. Like I said previously, Stripe exists allowing any developer to start accepting payment cards in under an hour.

30% for my business is unacceptable, we turn over a lot of money without needing the App Store and for sure we tried it and saw almost no movement because Apple doesn't advertise for you, you have to pay extra for that. So with the 30% we saved on non-existent sales we put it into advertisements that actually moved software from our own home page. Fees we incurred were about 3% of cost on average including customer acquisition costs.



Simply not true, I've lived it. The app store is so full of apps it's overwhelming and users rarely look past the top 10 lists or the first suggested app from the search bar. You need a huge marketing push to get anywhere and when Apple is already taking 30% of each sale it makes it really difficult to have money to spend on marketing. Much better to push users to your own website, we saw results doing that while we saw nothing from App Store.

Sorry that your marketing efforts didn't work out. My own experience is the opposite. Hundreds of thousands in sales through the App Store thanks to successful marketing plus the huge quantity of traffic the store offers. Far more than any single software seller is seeing on their own site alone.

Have you not been to an Apple Store? They still have software on the shelves. It is still a thing.

You may be selling just fine without the App Store. That's awesome. Go you. Keep it up. What I've seen in my own experience is that while we sell several million in software a year through out own site, the addition of the App Store means ADDITIONAL sales. More on top of what we'd see selling on our own site alone. Seems you're willing to turn away that additional revenue stream and that's fine. But many of us are seeing huge benefits from diversifying out distribution and finding additional sources of sales.

You're looking at the cut Apple takes from a funny angle. With modern software distribution it costs you nothing to give away a copy of your software. If you sell 1 copy or 100 or even 10,000 copies, the cost to you as a developer (producing that product) is the same (yes there is some additional support cost and a few others but the price is practically the same. Because of this, if you can sell additional copies through the App Store which you wouldn't have on your own site, even that reduced profit is all profit. If you get $70 instead of $100 per copy you sell through them, that's still $70 more than you would have had without them and it costs you nothing additional to sell that extra copy of your software.

It sounds like you're happy with your sales and making a stand to not use the App Store is important to you. That's great. There are however thousands of other developers out there happy to give Apple a small cut because it means sales they never would have had without being listed in the App Store and it makes them far more money.