I really don't want to see ads, but that's preferable over selling my data for a free option. I'd still recommend you give people an ad-free trial (and please make the trial only count days you actually open the app, like Beyond Compare). I'm a free software guy at heart, so the more generous you are with your trial, the more willing I feel to turn a blind eye to opening my wallet for software. Suggestions for how I'd be willing to pay:
1) $20-40/yr for a web service. Most of the world is Windows, so if I'm on the go without my OS X laptop, my phone has died, and I want to check my email I'd have to remember my other email passwords to login to their own services after I got in the habit of using Inky... that wouldn't be good. I'd still want data security, so I'd expect any data that hits your servers to be strongly encrypted in a manner similar to SpiderOak's approach (though I'd prefer Scrypt over PBKDF2). If you open-sourced your client and just sold the service I'd pay more.
2) $50 for the app itself. Less if you want me to pay every year for upgrades.
Thanks -- this is helpful feedback. We agree that Inky will be be most useful when it's available on "all screens," and we're working towards that goal. The architecture is designed with that specific goal in mind.
Great. I gave this some more thought and what I'd actually like, along with a great universal experience, is an email provider that I can really trust. Or rather, an email provider that I don't have to trust. By that I mean that it'd be great if I could get all of my email through Inky and that I'd have the option of having you keep a strongly encrypted copy of those emails while deleting the emails you collect from external providers' servers.
I could have my email everywhere with less worry over wanton snooping over my email archives this way. That would be a very valuable service.
It might require some compromise on data security if I wanted to be able to perform search on my archive via the web service though. Perhaps for people who are willing to give up zero-knowledge you could upsell a service which allows the data to be decrypted server-side in an in-memory store while they're logged in only. I'd be happy without search when using a browser client though.
I can only say that, as a matter of company culture, we are committed to being trustworthy. That's the part of the rationale for "safe" in our "smart, simple, safe" motto. We hope to earn your trust over the coming months.
1) $20-40/yr for a web service. Most of the world is Windows, so if I'm on the go without my OS X laptop, my phone has died, and I want to check my email I'd have to remember my other email passwords to login to their own services after I got in the habit of using Inky... that wouldn't be good. I'd still want data security, so I'd expect any data that hits your servers to be strongly encrypted in a manner similar to SpiderOak's approach (though I'd prefer Scrypt over PBKDF2). If you open-sourced your client and just sold the service I'd pay more. 2) $50 for the app itself. Less if you want me to pay every year for upgrades.