AFAIK he just implemented regional pricing. The price is the same in Euro.
My point was also never that it has to be one specific price, but to raise awareness to the fact that the old prices of Sync for Reddit are not actually sustainable anymore for Lemmy.
Of course a single user is irrelevant, but in principle and if it would evolve into a larger trend: yes. At least if the dev wants to keep paying his bills. That is how business works. And with lower user counts at some point the required price per user would be too high to be competitive. Then the dev would have to abandon the project, since it would not be profitable anymore. He is a full-time developer after all.
I literally just explained why the price per person needs to be higher now. It is not about server costs. It is about the cost of app development and maintenance.
That was in response to your comparison with t-shirts.
And yes, scaling does not work in the same way for app development. A large part of the required work for app development stays the same, regardless of how many actual users there are (excluding server costs (-> Sync Ultra) and probably the amount of support tickets). But since Sync has way less users now, there has to be more income per user for it to be profitable.
The price was set many years ago and just never changed.
Also yes, less customers means less income for mostly the same amount of work. That is literally why bigger companies can offer cheaper prices. Scale.
You are comparing the old simple “Remove Ads” option to Sync Ultra features.
The new “Remove Ads” without additional features costs 14,99 €. Which, yes, is more expensive than before, but that was to be expected. The old price would have been way too cheap for today’s pricing situation, especially since he also lost most of his userbase.
It is already implemented in the newest update
One-time payment is already implemented. Update in the Play Store if you cannot see it. The “Remove Ads” button is below the settings.
I read in another article that it is just supposed to be a first test of the feature before the global rollout.