Even without it being a decade, people happily spend $20 to get 2 drinks at a bar, go see one movie, get one game (or one third of a AAA game), eat one meal at a restaurant, pay for parking once, or on a trinket or toy that looks neat on their desk.

Acting like $20 is steep for software is, imo, part of the reason we end up in this ad-supported model in the first place. A lot of people don't attribute the actual challenge of writing software and the value they get out of it because it's so abstract to them.

The Fediverse is still a pretty big experiment. The first thing I thought when I saw that Ultra lifetime price was if Lemmy would even still be as relevant as it is today (which isn't that high of a bar, mind you) in 5.5 years—the amount of time it would take for the lifetime purchase to pay off as a better deal than the yearly subscription.

Not only that, but it truly is a front end for Lemmy; not the service itself. I get that the dev has bills to pay and I guess that this is their only hustle (?), but $100 is a bit of an unreasonable ask in my opinion. If I were rich, I'd buy it. But I'm not, so there you go.

Not that anyone should care, but personally I'm waiting to see what Boost does, as that was what I used back in Reddit.

Exactly my point :) This platform is unstable & the userbase isn't dependable, especially so in the context of 3PA customers

How do you make this project viable/sustainable? Price it appropriately. I've already completed one decade with LJ & Sync, so I'm happy to bank on this app. And if it doesn't, that's the gamble - nobody is forced to agree, but it'd be odd for anyone to argue Sync should be priced in accordance with any expectation that the platform dies in the next year or so.