These ratings are based on the new price point, which is dramatically higher than the competition, and a complete turn-around from its prior cost of use. Feature ratings do not exist in a vacuum, as charging a higher price for them reduces their value. A tool that save 100 minutes at free, saves fewer minutes if you convert the dollar amount of those minutes. Set the price high enough, and it starts to cost more than it saves. At $30, you would have to use TextExpander quite a bit for it to pay for itself. Thus the features enclosed are of less value. Set the price too high for the average consumer to justify buying it, and you enter the second stage of value reduction, effectively removing those features from the common market, reducing their value dramatically, and beyond the simple formulas based on cost versus usage.

To the fan below, of course it keeps improving. That is a rather empty statement. Most software does improve, however improvement does not exist in a vacuum either. While its absolute feature set might be increasing and further refined, since it is essentially removed from the masses, the value of this improvement drops. The addition of a prohibitive price tag represents a significant decrease rather than increase between versions. A software transitioning to a product can only maintain or increase its value if it offers a significantly expanded value and be set at a price which allows the market to ease into its adaptation. Neither of those points were satisfied in this case, and thus Textexpander represent a significant loss to the community.

To this fan, you have chosen to give it five stars across the board. Very few applications deserve that. Do you honestly, from the depths of your bowels, believe that it is perfect? If so, then what is it "improving" upon? You cannot have it both ways. If it is truly a five star application, then very little should be done with it in the future -- thus since it represents an insignificant feature departure from the free version (which would then be close to five stars in your book), there is no reason why the public should not save their free versions and continue using that until it ceases to work with their Macs.

One final point, you mention that the parent company has been generous in rewarding prior donating users with free upgrades. This neglects what the market often neglects, all of the people who contributed to the project in a non-monetarily based fashion. Something as simple as dropping a good remark in a well-known blog which gets two hundred people interested in the program, 20 of which convert sales when the application becomes a product, represent $600 incoming revenue. That is, I am sure, quite a bit more than you or any other individual ever donated. That is simply the most obvious example of a non-monetary contribution. You have people who bug-tested and requested features — all at gratis —. Quantifying their contribute is a much more interesting problem, and outside of the scope of this comment, but suffice to say the simple act of reporting a previous unknown bug is also of larger value than the average donation.

Yet where is our due compensation for this time spent? The bit that I have done myself to give Textpander visibility has gone entirely unrewarded, yet someone who donated $5 at any random point in time is walking away with a ticket. This is hardly, as you call it, very generous. It is, however, narrow minded, and entirely typical of small-time software publishers who are more concerned with making a buck off of acquired products than anything else.

And that, of course, is the largest "silent" question in all of this. We can rant and rave about the features of the software all day long, but in the end, these features mean nothing if the publisher does not value them as high as you do. What happens if TextExpander doesn't sell so well for them? What if they drop the price, but find that in making an initial offer so high, they have lost loyalty and sales continue to drop? Are they going to continue to spend money on something that makes them nothing? This is highly unlikely.

My final recommendation would be search out alternatives, and if none of them work for you (Typinator seems to be the best at this point, though Rapidowrite [sic] could evolve into a viable alternative, and is free), continue using the free version of Textpander until it falls apart. I would further recommend that you be wary of any of Peter's projects. This is the second small utility he has sold to a dubious publish who has set the price far beyond what it should have been set to. Be aware that his other neat little apps are just as vulnerable. He has proven himself to be untrustworthy with the Mac community, which is a shame since he has a nice touch at programming. He should have just started out charging as shareware.

As an interesting aside, applications which start out expensive, and remain that way have more integrity than applications such as this. Having gone from a free scale system to an over-priced scale system it has inherantly less value than if it had charged $30 all along. I am a user of several expensive software packages that I rate highly because of their integrity to the community. While the features might be "locked from the masses" as addressed in the first paragraph, since they were never available to the masses in the first place, their relative value is higher. Hope that makes sense.